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Manya Auster Feldman - August 11, 1998

You also told me earlier that you live with it. Are there,are there certain words, events, sights, moments that happen on almost a dailybasis that sort of touch off a memory about the. . .

Yeah, that's sometimes the. . .

Like what, what, for example?

You know, you have to be in the, in the, in the um, circumstanceof talking about it. It's just like when you sit and tell jokes. Somebodytells a joke, so you remember a joke. I sit with some people that lived throughit, so we remember certain things. Like in the—like the scabies thatwe had or the lice that we had. We were itching from all over. I mean, it,it was a, a horrible feeling. And, and yet, we joked and we, and we sang andwe, and we danced and uh, and life was normal, so to speak, normal. Some normality.

It's easier to talk to others who were there, do you think.. .

It's much easier. You don't understand what I'm talking about.

[laughs]

[laughs] No. Thank God that you don't understand.

I do, I do. [laughs]

Yeah, well, you're a teacher. You do—so you, you are, youare in it.

No, I do thank God that I don't understand.

Yeah, you do. And I—and, and, even—you know what, my,my children, I started telling the story since they began to understand. Andthey know the story backwards and forwards, that uh, sometimes when we sitand we start reminiscing and all of a sudden they get anxious and they starttelling the st. . . My younger son, Steven, is a psychiatrist, is a childpsychiatrist in Boston. And um, he forgot about it, but many times he usedto tell me, "Mom, I have to write a book about your story. I really have to."He's very um, intrigued with the fact that the time when I lost my memory.Because, you know, he's in the business of psychiatry. He went into psychiatrybecause he wants to study the human brain. He cannot—he, he wants tostudy how I, I—it's like, like was a blackout.

This is when you had typhus?

Yeah, after the typhoid. It was like a blackout for two weeks.I mean, I wasn't, I wasn't aware of what's going on around me. And then allof a sudden, I, I, I, I came out of it, without any warning, without anything.How do you explain a thing like that? So he has—but he, he's still, he'sstill thinking about it.

Before I forget, what's your other son's name?

My son here in the—right here in uh, Farmington Hills, isBarry Auster. He's a dermatologist, a wonderful guy.

Barry Auster?

Auster, because that was my name um, before. And my Steven'sname is Steven Auster and the girls are Austers.

So you remarried, it sounds like.

I remarried. My son—my husband's name is Henry Feldman.He is from Romania.

Um, what are the granddaughter's names?

Par. . . what?

The granddaughters' names?

The granddaughters' names? One a Erica, she is twenty. She'sgoing to be a, a junior in U of M. Elana is a senior in high school, she isseventeen. And Rachel is just starting high school. She is fourteen. And myuh, other one, uh, Julia, is ten. She's in Boston, very bright. All of themare very bright, bright kids. Well, I think I accomplished something, eventhough I say that I, I, I, I live with that guilt feel—I do. I live withthe guilt that I, I survived and the rest of them didn't.

Should we stop here?

Yeah.