Kestenberg Archive

EG (F), was born 1940 in Breslau, Germany. Her father was employed in the local University. When he was forced to leave for being he was Jewish, he went into business. He fled to Switzerland but when EG and her mother tried to cross the border to join him, they were caught and turned over to the Germans. EG was sickly. Her mother, using false identity, worked as a maid in a village in Pomerania. EG and her nurse, Ruth (who pretended to be her mother), were sent to Theresienstadt in 1941. Ruth was sent very soon thereafter to another concentration camp and EG stayed with a Gypsy who nursed her and treated her like her own child. She spoke Romani, a Gypsy language to EG. She starved to death in the camp around Christmas 1945. Her Gypsy mother stole food and so did EG. The Gypsy stole food from the dead. EG had a trauma of dead corpses till adulthood. She discontinued her medical studies because she was unable to dissect a corpse in anatomy class. She was once in a line of children that were to be shot. She fainted and her Gypsy mother replaced her for 3 potatoes. Her name and identity were changed to a girl who died in the shooting and thus from then on her official age was two years less than her actual age. She very much wanted to be dead after her Gypsy mother died. ; A few days after her Gypsy mother died, she was transported to Auschwitz, but never got there. They were brought back to Theresienstadt and were liberated later by the Russians. After liberation she was adopted at the age of five by an East German Jewish family whose child, Ruth, had been murdered. Her foster mother would call her Ruth when she was psychotic. Her foster mother was schizophrenic and often hospitalized. She once ran after EG with an ax, and on another occasion tried to cut her own hand with the ax. Her foster father called her Carolina. He attempted once to have sex with her, and after that she was taken out of the home and placed in an institute. From that children's institute she went to Israel with help of the German Red Cross. Somebody thought she was his daughter, which turned out to be wrong. Then she returned to her aunt in Germany where she had to deny her Jewish identity and her past in the camps. Her cousins were raised as Evangelists. She did not talk for about half a year. EG studied art, nursing, psychology and medicine and underwent psychoanalysis. She told nobody that she was Jewish to avoid problems in case of future persecution. ; EG never married and has lived with her partner, who has children from a previous marriage, for 9 years. She lost a baby of one month old. Certain rock music pieces cause her to have sadistic fantasies. She witnessed horrific brutalities by Nazis in the camp and she still has dreams and nightmares. EG believes that it is due to her Gypsy mother that she did not fall apart completely due to her life experiences. She claims that the torture victims in the project she runs, have tremendous potential for destructiveness. EG states that “Circumstances reduced us to animals”. She cannot travel by train, she once did and it depressed her terribly. She is extremely sensitive to sudden noises such as shots or fireworks.