Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

Olga Adler - July 26, 1982

Bombing in Budapest

May I ask, did you ever have a son?

No.

Okay.

Uh, what happened after that. Well, after that we just lived our lives. There were bombings constantly. We went down in the basement and we came up and one day... The rumors came always that somebody... They, somehow they knew that they are going to come to this house, the Nazis, and they are going to take all the Jews from this house, and then under, that address, that house. So, one day it came that they are coming, coming to our house. So, this lady who had a, a friend who had a beautiful uh, who had a corset salon in the city. You know, in Europe if you have, live in the inner city, that's the most expensive part of the city. The closer you live in the inner city uh, that's the better neighborhoods they are. So, right in the city she had, and it was open because she wasn't Jewish so she said... She loved me dearly, she... If, if my mother could have been with me, she wouldn't be, couldn't have been better to me than this lady was. She never had a daughter, she never had any children. She didn't let me wash dishes because I ruin my hands. She was just, she just adored me and I too. So, she said, we, we are, I won't let them take you away. Let's go there at night to that salon and we will deal with night there and by the time we will come back, we'll try to find another place. So, we went down there. But you had to wait uh, there was a certain, as I said, just from eleven to one o'clock you could go out on the streets, you couldn't go later on, so there was always everyday bombing. So I, the bombing and the sirens we didn't live far from that place, so when, when they were bombing we ran over to that place and we were there overnight. And uh, we saw the police every minute lighting with a lighter into, with a...

Flashlight.

flashlight into the store. And it was a most miserable night I can remember. It was just something terrible. And she opened the gas constantly. She wanted to kill herself and me. Opened the gas because she knew that there's no way out. She opened the gas and I was young and I closed the gas. And she opened the gas and I closed the gas.

This, this woman was a Gentile, wasn't she?

No, she was a Jewish woman,

She was Jewish.

her husband was Gentile. Yeah, so.


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