Miriam Wattenberg • 5 maart 1944

• Miriam Wattenberg was een Joods meisje dat in 1940 in het ghetto in Warschau terechtkwam. Dankzij de Amerikaanse nationaliteit van haar moeder kon ze in 1944 naar de Verenigde Staten vertrekken, waarna ze haar naam veranderde in Mary Berg. Ze hield een dagboek bij van 1939-1944, dat na de oorlog gepubliceerd werd. Het fragment gaat over het moment dat ze de boot naar de VS neemt.

March 5, 1944
We have just crossed the Portuguese border. The uniformed Spanish police have been replaced by Portuguese secret police. We are still in the same train. Here, too, people greet us with “V” signs.
Our train is approaching Lisbon. I can see the sails of various ships. Someone in our car has just shouted the word, “Gripsholm!” This unfamiliar Swedish word means freedom to us.
I was awakened by the sound of the ship’s engine. The Gripsholm was on the open sea. I went out on deck and breathed in the endless blueness. The blood-drenched earth of Europe was far behind me. The feeling of freedom almost took my breath away.
In the last four years I have not known this feeling. Four years of the black swastika, of barbed wire, ghetto walls, executions, and, above all, terror — terror by day and terror by night. After four years of that nightmare I found it hard to enjoy my freedom at first. I constantly imagined that it was only a dream, that at any moment I would awaken in the Pawiak and once again see the aged men with gray beards, the blooming young girls and proud young men, driven like cattle to the Umschlagplatz on Stawki Street to their deaths.
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