Ana Benkel de Vinocur describes her first impressions of the Auschwitz II-Birkenau Concentration Camp upon arrival from the Lódz Ghetto in May 1944. She remembers her reaction when the heavy doors of the deportation train opened and she saw prisoners, in striped uniforms, bald, looking like skeletons. She speaks of the seizure of all her belongings and of a selection process in which she remained with her mother, but was separated from her father and brother.
Ana Benkel de Vinocur was born on September 25, 1926, in Lódz, Poland. Ana and her family members moved to the Lódz Ghetto in 1940, where they lived under very difficult conditions until their deportation to the Auschwitz II-Birkenau Concentration Camp in 1944. She was later transferred to the Stutthoff Concentration Camp in Danzig (FC), where she remained until her transfer by ship, on the Baltic Sea, toward Germany. She was liberated in Kiel, Germany, in early May 1945.