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3-Life in the Ghetto

Can you describe, when you and your family moved to the ghetto, can you describe what life was like living in the ghetto?

I have to tell you, the ghetto Sighet was very different from the ghettos we know—like the Polish and the Polish ghettos—because it lasted a very short time. I do remember when they told us that "Tomorrow morning, you go to the ghetto." I don't know exactly the date of that. And they say everybody can take a suitcase of belongings, and put in their push cart. Well, when we arrived at the ghetto entrance, one of the gendarmes—guards, policemen—came to show us where to live.

It was a small street, and they stopped in front of a small house, and they took us in and they went into a small room and they said "This is where you put here your belongings." By then we were only—when I entered the ghetto it was only with my parents, and one brother, Yancu, because Moishi had been drafted. He came back during the ghetto time, so he did not go into the ghetto. So we were only four people. When we got to that, when we put down our belongings, there was already there a family in that room. The whole house had two rooms, a porch, a kitchen, and an outhouse. And at that place, within one week, ten families were moved. So my mother had to do some cooking, always had to stay in line until she got to use the kitchen. That outhouse was overflowing, and we had to stay always in line with the ten families there.

I have this image when I was in the ghetto, its funny how my son, it became obsession with him. I said, "It was summer, it was May." And my father, who was always writing, but he wrote more during the Hungarian occupation because there was no more job. He was on life insurance since nobody would do insurance anymore. So he wrote a lot. So here in the ghetto there was this little table outside in the sun, and he was writing his memoirs, and his manuscripts. It was a great deal of hardship because there were no stores in the ghetto. I don't think that we had even a soup kitchen, I heard many ghettos had, we didn't have a soup kitchen. We had only the dry food with us, that started to dwindle. We met with my friends in the evening to talk "What should we do? Should we run away?" Well, who would run away and leave the parents there?

But then one day, many many young men who had been drafted, had returned from the front and my brother Moishi was among them. I did—for us it meant: Oh if they bring back the young, the young men, it means that they are going to take us to a place where we have to work. We got a little more optimistic when the young men joined us. Probably, we will go to some place where they need work. I said, "Ok, I can work, even if my parents cannot." But Moishi had a toothache and it was very hard to find medicine for him, I remember at the end of the two weeks when we were taken away, how he suffered with a toothache.

I also volunteered to work in the infirmary. They made an infirmary in the temple, because the Jewish patients were discharged from the big hospital. People couldn't take them home, there was no room. They were very very sick, some were almost dying. So they made the little infirmary in the synagogue, and I went to volunteer and it was a very sad place where people suffered. There was no medicine, there were no doctors, there were no dressings. I just remember how we had to take the dirty dressings, full with puss, wash them, boil them, iron them, roll them up all over again. We had to go and ask who had some medicines, pain killers or whatever.

Also, somehow we heard that they might take us to a place where they were going to cut our hair. I remember how girls came to me to cut their hair short, so everybody is to have short hair because we heard something, rumors about cutting hair, not about shaving. We were all very worried because we didn't know what would happen. They had raids in the house, at least two-three times they came and they ransacked our belongings. We brought with us the best stuff from home. I do remember well that my mother always prepared a dowry for me. I was the only girl, ... special interests yes. Mother was doing handiwork, I remember she was crocheting a beautiful drape, this was before my daughter Dodi come and she gets married. This is how I had a few things in my...lots of her tablecloths, but also, a beautiful fabric. A paisley fabric. I liked the fabric, I wanted very much to make myself a dress. My mother kept it for my dowry. That was left in the ghetto, obviously it got lost. When they did the raids in the houses, they took all the good stuff. So there was a great deal of apprehension and speculation.

Were there any specific raids that you remember when you were in the ghetto? The police raids?

I told you, there were two or three times that they came to the house and they ransacked the belongings. Sure, they took jewelry. There were various levels of what they took and when they took. Jewelry was taken in the ghetto, and jewelry was taken in the temple.

Transcribed by: Talia C (2010)
Proofed by: Logan L

Do you remember seeing that? Can you tell us what you witnessed? What you saw?

I just remember them ran-sacking and something that made them very, very sad was that Moishe who had been working during Hungarian occupation had a very good job, and he was very handsome, and he was courting the girls, [and he] has made himself three new suits during that time. And we brought them in the ghetto because they were new and very good and by the time they took away those three suits it hurt me because it was the only good stuff we had. Moishe was so sick with a toothache that he really didn't care for it.

In the ghetto your father wrote a lot of manuscripts, did you ever read what he wrote?

I do have the manuscript story. Howard, should I tell them? Because I think I talked about this. I don't recall this, do you?

No.

Ok, so my father wrote and wrote and wrote, before we went to the ghetto he had drawers of manuscripts, and I don't know how much he took with him. And in the ghetto he was writing and he had this half sheets, right? narrow, this is how his manuscripts were gestures with hands. So, he wrote and wrote. After the war, when I came back, I went  to the ghetto to see what was left. I went to all the hiding places where my mother put my dowry, all of these types of things. Sure, there was nothing there. In the backyard there was a heap of garbage and I saw leaves, loose leaves of father's manuscripts, after a year. And I went and I gathered all the loose leaves. And I could gather them back, in a small package and put them one on top of the other, I have no idea what they were. And I made a package. This was all that I could retrieve in the ghetto. That one, I kept and I kept years while we lived in Romania we lived there about sixteen years. Once I find someone who can read them, and can make sense out of it, are they of the book that you already published?

And then, in 1961, when I got a passport to leave Romania, this was communist Romania by then. I was thinking what to do with these manuscripts? I cannot take them with me, I cannot send them because you couldn't send other lettering in Romania’s so we decided that my husband would go to Bukares for the visas. We go to the Israeli embassy, and we drop them the package with manuscripts. And he put them in a little bag and he went to Bukares and we walked on that street to the embassy he had a feeling he was being followed. And he was quite scared that if they follow they can arrest him, they can take away our passports, our visas, so he did not enter the Israeli embassy he came back with them. What to do with it? And we had a friend, who was Jewish married to a Romanian woman and he did not apply to live because the wife was not Jewish, and we gave them the manuscripts for keep. And many years later I went back to Hunedwara? to see where we lived. They had forgotten about it, they didn't know what happened to us. I was very, very upset about those manuscripts, which got lost this way. 

Were you close with other families who lived in the ghetto at the time?

Yeah. Just across the street in the ghetto was my boyfriend’s family. And he was by then in jail and his brother was in a working detachment and he had a sister who became a very, very good friend and we went together all over. So his family lived there, his mother, his little sister who was seventeen, his older sister who had a baby Yurts, and his grandmother, sure we met all the time and I went there and I helped out because they were old, the grandmother was very sick. At a certain point during the ghetto, they decided that the it's too much for us to have the whole street. They decided that all the other side should be given back to their gentile people. So they evicted all those who lived there to come live on this side of the street. They locked, they bolted the windows, the gentile families moved back there and this is how they came to live on our side of the street. And it was very hard to move them again, and I remember how much time I spent with the old lady and her mother and we went together. In the train, we were in the same train together, and obviously Guji who was the little sister of seventeen was the only one of the five to get into the camp as I was the only one of my five people to get into the camp. And I was with Guji for the following six weeks when other things happened.

How long were you in the ghetto?

It must have been less than three weeks. It was a very short little ghetto we didn't have food anymore and they let me out of the ghetto for a time because I was working at the movie house and they wanted me to make posters. But when I got to the city, I was the only person with the yellow star and people stared at me and the movie manager didn't want me to come anymore. But, apparently some friends came and gave me some food. I knew of it but I don't remember it.

Did you think that the place you were going after the ghetto would be better? Were you optimistic?

Well, what we thought, I don't know. But I had a few very good friends and we met every evening. One of the friends later on married a guy-it turned out that that guy who married her much later ran away from the ghetto. Actually two people ran away because they were good hikers and they knew the Carpathians and they thought that they would be safe until-and it turned out that peasants found them and notified the police. They called them and brought them back to the ghetto. That made them feel that something which is happening to the ghetto is worse than putting them in jail, prison. So, this is also an answer to those who ask, "Why didn't you run away?" there was nowhere to run away. There was no help. Even if you could run away, who would have helped you there in the mountains? 

In the ghetto, did you ever have nightmares?

No, I don't remember that. The point is that we never figured out in Auschwitz, in the ghetto. We knew hardship. They tried to tell us that we would be taken to Hungary, to working camps beyond the Danube and somehow we believed it, until we were in the trains, right? And we realized the trains are not going to Hungary, but are going north to Poland.