Eva Ackermann - December 6, 1982
Life Under Occupation
When you had curfews and you were only allowed out on the street at certain hours...
Yes?
What--were there only two hours a day?
There was, there was at the--I think at the uh, uh, later date, I think it was about two hours. Yeah.
So what did you do during the day?
Well uh, just what we did during the day? Uh, played cards with the neighbor's kids.
Just stayed in the house?
There was not--there was nothing uh, nothing else to be done.
How did you--what did you think about all that?
Uh, it was very interesting uh, it was a very selfish uh, way of thinking. I don't know if it was selfish or it was, I keep coming up with the word ignorant really, because that's all, now with hindsight. I think we were just uh, very worried about everybody else and uh, content in a certain way that we were--we thought that we were spared. I'm talking about the Jews in Budapest. Because uh, the theory was that they used up all the uh, cattle cars for transporting the rest of the country--the Jews from the rest of the country, because we found out that they were transported uh, in cattle cars and uh, the way we understood that there were no more cattle cars but, I don't know if you know it, they um, solved the problem. I walked, I walked from Budapest to Zurndorf, that's uh, that's on the border of uh, see that's what I'm saying, it's a little bit different if you came from, have you...
You walked, you walked out?
Yeah, I was uh, everybody was posted by the caretaker of the building. It was posted uh, that on October twenty-third, eight o'clock, I believe, everybody had to be with a knapsack and uh, suppose, I suppose whatever you wanted to, uh...
To take...
...to put in, whatever you uh, I didn't know what the notice was for what, just to be in a certain uh, place, which was a big stadium and that was for the ages, like I said from eighteen to forty and I just got in, like I was nineteen and my Mom was over forty, so it was me and it was mostly women, because the men were in uh, labor camps. That age group was in labor camps, so uh, that's the last thing I saw of my Mom and uh, I don't even know that uh, the good-bye was the way it should have been. I mean, it wasn't a good-bye like I'll never see you again. It was uh, I really don't know what it was. I don't know how--what she felt. I was afraid, I, I suppose. But, we all went to that uh, I don't know how many thousands of people on that big stadium.
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