1945
In early April, the SS organizes new transports. Thousands of prisoners spend a week in cattlecars. When the U.S. Air Force bombs a train near Bergen-Belsen, 4000 prisoners escape. The villagers of the area kill them with sticks and rakes. They murdered voluntarily. No one ordered them to do so.
Again the Nazis assemble transports with Jews, supposedly to exchange them for German prisoners of war. On 6 April Sara leaves Bergen-Belsen with such a transport. But the SS guards abandon the cars on the tracks and flee from the advancing Allied troops.
On 13 April 1945 at Farsleben, north of Magdeburg, American troops encounter the abandoned trains. Sara is freed at age 12 and weighs 17 kilos. Of her 16 brothers and sisters in the Gottdiener family, 13 and their mother survived. 60 members of her family were killed by the Nazis.
Sara: “We did not believe that we are free. We had no concept of what that is.“
