‘We were in a daze,’ Maria Rebhun later recalled, of the moment when the Red Army reached Lauenburg camp in Pomerania. “Barely moving, supporting the ones that were not able to make a step, and pushing the ones that were already written off in a wheelbarrow, we went to face new reality.  Our minds were like a vacuum, our hears empty of any desires.’ Maria Rebhun’s parents had perished in the Warsaw ghetto uprising, each of her brothers and sisters had been killed.  She was alone. ‘On the streets’, she recalled, ‘ecstatic Russian soldiers offered us sweets and cigarettes amidst laughter and songs, but we were mute.  Who are we? Where are we to go? Whom to turn to?’

Gilbert, Martin, The Holocaust, HarperCollins Publishers Ltd, © 1986  p. 801