Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Olga Adler - July 26, 1982

Now you said you were in the ghetto for a while. You didn't discuss when you were liberated. When were you liberated from there?

Yes, liberated. Oh, maybe in... [Asking husband] When was the ghetto liberated? In February?

Husband: I don't know, I wasn't there.

I know you weren't there. I don't know, in February or January. No, in February, I think.

What year?

In nineteen forty, forty... [Asking husband] Nineteen forty what?

Husband: 1945.

1945? Okay, 1945. That was a terrible thing when we came out of the, of the basement. You know, big windows, display windows where you had beautiful dresses. Dead people were standing there like, like these dummies here in the window with the clothes on, frozen. When you went, you had to be careful because frozen bodies were on the street all over, from the bombings and for every... from everything else. And uh, a few, the people were running opening from the ghetto to stores uh, breaking... if there was any window left—there wasn't too much left—running into stores where there food, you know. They almost killed themselves with food because when you don't eat for months and months...

That's right.

you don't eat. You very gradually, you'll kill yourself.

Many people died from that.

That's right. They were bringing big buckets of chocolate. This young man decides to tell you, but he was taking good care of me very carefully. He didn't let me touch nothing. I was standing there drooling. I couldn't touch anything. The girls went on the street breaking... They were, boys were breaking into uh, stores with circles, circles were flying out the window, I never got one. He said, not you, you're not going to go out on the street. I wasn't supposed to go out on the street. He was one of the policemen too. Because as I say, the established police, so he was... He even got this, this ticket watching. So after the war, war, you had to be, although you were liberated, but you had to be very, very carefully. You had to go very, very carefully into normal life because as normal as it was.

Yeah.