According to her story, Shapiro was captured with her family around September 6, 1943 and sent to Treblinka. These are the excerpts which caught my attention:
According to this story, all the Jews knew in advance that going to Treblinka would mean their deaths, but then in actual fact it wasn't. Instead she and her friends and family were shipped onward to Majdanek, and still she wasn't gassed. This is pretty incredible for an extermination camp.Shapiro: We were taken by train to Treblinka, which was not even a retaining camp, just pure and simple extermination. You were driven in, exterminated.
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Shapiro: We were going to be-- and we already knew about Treblinka, because people were coming back and telling us. So we knew there was no hope.
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Shapiro: So we're outside Treblinka in the rail car.
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Interviewer: Your parents were in the same car?
Shapiro: Yes. I joined them, with that German. And I went with them. And I managed to pass the selection. Many parents were sent off. And the train stopped in Treblinka, and the last two wagons or three wagons were detached. And these people went directly to be annihilated. But my parents passed their original inspection, and were with us young people in the same wagon.
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Shapiro: Well, at that point we said, well, let's come whatever may. And once it passed Treblinka, we started believing that we were going to work.
Interviewer: So you were in the cars that were not left there, so the train continues.
Shapiro: That's right. And at that point--
Interviewer: And your family is still together?
Shapiro: Yes.
Interviewer: Friends are still with you?
Shapiro: Yes. And we were taken to Lublin, KZ Lublin. It's known as [GERMAN].
Moreover, she claimed there had already been a selection inside the ghetto which had separated Jews destined for Treblinka into the back train cars so that they could easily be detached on arrival. She believed those cars held Jews who were then directly gassed.
That she was transited through Treblinka is the main takeaway here. Separately, her story is remarkable for a lot of other reasons, so I will share some of them here.
On the day that she was captured and put on a train with her family, she was part of a ghetto uprising. Her neighbors were actively shooting at the occupiers. Her own role in the uprising was to grenade a tank, but a German soldier politely took the grenade from her and told her to "behave". The Germans "were wearing kid gloves with us all along". The Germans told them explicitly that the trains were to take them to be put to work.
While aboard the train: she could see fields of bones, they sang The Internationale, they were shot at by an unspecified party, she herself was grazed by a bullet, and a man in her cattle car was somehow shot in the process of jumping out of the car. Apparently the doors were left unlocked, and the prisoners were only kept aboard by the threat of armed guards shooting them.
At Majdanek she "realized that they annihilated people in the way they said, because I saw cans of Zyklon B gas." Like many Holocaust survivors, she didn't even know what delousing was.
We also see that, as with other stories from that time, she confused steam with gas.
Her description doesn't allow me to definitely identify the location, but since she couldn't tell the bathhouse from the gas chamber, they were probably both or all bathhouses. Steam would not "come out from" a homicidal gas chamber.And my father and my uncle came out of-- you never knew what it was. Steam was coming out from both. Sometimes the steam meant that there was steam coming down as well, the hot water coming for a wash-up.
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I saw the steaming houses. I was sure this was a gas chamber, and no escape.
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And I turned around to the others. So I said, let's stop being stupid. If they wanted to exterminate us, why do they bring us here, not there? I was partially right, because they did have a selection right there. And I was able to push my mother with me, and we went to the bath instead of the gas chamber. We got out. The others never did. And we were taken to Majdanek [...]
