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90 Paul Salz's Reminiscences of Lottie (Wallerstein) Salz: 1948 - 1953 I -House was Lottie's home. She had no other. She had no other. Lottie's family perished in the German concentration camps, and she herself lived through several concentration camps. It is all in the manuscript of hers. The memoir is not published, but it is in Washington, D.C. at the Holocaust Museum. I had it translated, and as my little spiel in the front says, I didn't know about its existence until I found it in Lottie's papers. She never told me about this manuscript. It was written in German, and it was obviously written on a Scandinavian typewriter. It must have been written shortly after she had been in the death march. There was a death march when the Russians were approaching, and the Germans took everybody out of the camp and started to walk them towards Germany. Four girls escaped; they just dropped into the snow and lay there. Some other people were shot, but they were not, and they just lay there. Eventually, they got up and hid in a nearby farmhouse. This was near Danzig. There was a ferry service, which was completely full of Germans trying to escape. Then one ferry was bombed and sunk, so the next one was empty, so the girls got into it and escaped from Germany to Denmark. When they arrived in Denmark, the war was at an end, and Denmark interned everyone who looked German and was part of the flood of German refugees. At first, the girls wondered how they could prove their real status and be released. Then they realized they held the most wonderful passport on themselves. They unwrapped the bandages from their arms and showed their concentration camp numbers. Then the Danish government sent a car for them, and they got in and were driven away. They were free! The others couldn't figure out why they were being let go. The girls got help from the government after that. They were helped by one of the leading families, the Holmans. I know because I visited them later – and stayed in a castle. From Denmark, Lottie went back to Prague, where she found one of her distant relatives still alive. She went to the consulate to find out if her American Friendship Scholarship was still in existence – and it was. You see, Lottie had been given a scholarship to study in America before the war, but since she didn't want to leave her parents, she went to Auschwitz instead. "Yes," they said, "it's yours when you want it." The scholarship waited for her through the war. So she went through the rigmarole of the formalities, and she finally got the visa for America. She went to France to get on a ship that took American soldiers to America. As she boarded the ship, a rather humorous incident occurred. She was just up the gangplank when she was stopped by a very serious young American officer and questioned: "Do you have any intention to overthrow the American government by force?" You must realize, Lottie was an emaciated young girl at that time, and America seemed like heaven full of angels to any of the refugees. She looked at the officer

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