People around us, like we all were, very nervous - talking about food, all the time -...

Self - Westerbork Prisoner Aug: People around us, like we all were, very nervous - talking about food, all the time - talking about clothes, that we didn't have any, practically no clothes, only striped clothes is all we had - and the food was just a piece of bread, what they give you. It was really bad. So, Mr. Frank and I, we knew each other from Westerbrook, and he said, "Well, we should get away from those people, because if you start talking about, all the time, about food and everything - your brain is gonna go." And we said, we understand physically we maybe will not survive this.
[starts to break down, regains his compsure]
Self - Westerbork Prisoner Aug: So, we should try to do - survive mentally and try to talk about things that have nothing to do with the camp, like, let's say, "Do you remember the melody from the ninth symphony from Beethoven?" And then we start singing to each other. Just to get away from this fear. Just to get our brain thinking about other things. We talked about Van Gogh, Rembrandt. "Did you ever go to the Van Gogh Museum?" "Did you ever go to the Rijksmuseum?" And all those things just not to - to get out of our - are meant to get out of this here. And, it really helped, I think