“In Auschwitz, I never cried, and people around me never cried.”

“In Auschwitz, I never cried, and people around me never cried.”

Irene Weiss was just a teenager when she learned to turn off her feelings in order to survive.

When a Nazi officer selected Irene to perform forced labor at Auschwitz-Birkenau, it gave her a chance to survive that was denied to her mother and younger siblings, who were murdered upon arrival. She was assigned to a unit responsible for sorting through the stolen personal belongings of Jews. The storage barracks where she worked were next to one of Auschwitz's gas chambers. Irene often saw the faces of those unknowingly headed toward their deaths. Sometimes they would stop and talk to her. Other times, she heard their screams.

“When we worked night shifts … this place was close enough to the train platform that you could hear in the night the whistle of the train and then you would hear the humming noise of large crowds. You could hear people in the distance. Within a few minutes or so the large column of young women, mothers, children would be appearing in front of our barracks heading for the gas chambers and the crematoriums."

“We saw this over and over and tears did not come. … We even spoke about it. ‘Why are we not crying?’”

After liberation, Irene returned to her family home from before the war. All traces of her family had been erased. Only then did she cry.

Historical photo: USHMM, courtesy of Irene Fogel Weiss

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