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Emerich Grinbaum - January 8, 2001

Is that basically what you think the attitude was in the...

Basically, yes. That was the basically the attitude. You know,some exception. Uh, there was some other things you know, other things. Somepeople even stole the, the piece of bread from each other you know, whichis terrible. Now that, that was condemned by the majority, not to take. Butthey do. The-I'll tell you something. This is interesting to be on it fromthe uh, uh, more cheerful side. Uh, we had a lot of Greeks. They were fromSalonika. These guys couldn't speak Yiddish because we communicated with otherJews there in Yiddish. Polish Jews and some other Jews. With them we couldn'tcommunicate. Me and my brother we could because they spoke Hebrew. They spokeHebrew. Real Hebrew. They-

Ladino and, and everybody spoke Hebrew. I could communicate withthem. And they were young people, strong people, they were mostly workersbecause you know, majority of these they're working on uh, uh, workers. Therewas the biggest...

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you know. And they could survive better because they were stronger,young, twenty, in their twenties. That's the best. Uh, and these guys wereterrible. They, they could steal. They, they survived that way, that theysteal, during the night. What happened. They gave us a piece of bread in theevening. The majority of the people ate it, not a, not a big piece, ate immediately.They give us some soup or something together. And the whole day we stayedwith practically without food, they give us soup in the uh, uh, for lunchalso, but it's a kind of you know, soup. But no bread. And me-and includingin my bro...we tried to leave a piece of bread for next morning at least tohave a piece of bread. But it was very dangerous because we were together,somebody might have steal. We put under our head you know, but very oftenthey stole. So uh, later on we ate the whole thing up in the evening. AndI remember there was among us, a young guy, Yankiel from, from Munkacs. Iremember him as now. He was a smart guy. He got acquainted uh, with a Greek,one of the Greek guy. And he wanted to leave a piece of bread for the morning,you know. Not, not much. So what he did, he gave the, the Greek guy to keepit, hold it and give me back. And he did.

And the Greek did.

Did. Yeah! You know, they denied that they are stoling. Theyare not going to tell that they stole. But we knew that they stole. Not onlyGreek, some other probably, but we knew that they were the fastest. So Yankielhad an idea, that was just, just an anecdote you know, an idea he gave them.Then after awhile he gave them a piece of bread, additionally so. That wasevery, every uh, bite counted. They were you know, they, they were gentlemenin that sense, you know. They gave them back. And the Greek didn't steal fromea...each other, you know. They s...stole from somebody else. Just, okay.