Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

Peri Berki - December 9, 1983

Fooling the Gentiles

Really, can you remember anything else that comes to mind about, some incident like that?

Again, how well I fulfilled my role in this, when I lived with this spread out people in Budapest and we were eating one room and how many. And my, and I knew where my husband was and sometimes we, my son will go and, we went and visited him. I don't remember... Yeah, I remember. I can't get this together. I remember, how did he get... He got away from the labor force and he was living with the same shoemakers. He was living with the shoemaker who had me to go away. And we were seeing there a few times and one day, he, he knew where we were, one day he came up, it was very cold winter and he came out with a pair of snow boots to give it to my son because it was very cold. And the woman we lived together with, I told him that his name is uh, he's a truck driver, I said, and his name is, I said it German, that's his name, German, that's his name. And she also recommended I should marry him because he likes my son so much. See that's the second time that once they wanted to adopt my son and then she said I, I should uh, I should marry him because he, he likes my son so much. You see? Can, can, can, can you see that, how fully we adapted ourselves? How totally? And my son he was only fourteen and he never made, never made a mistake.

So there must also have been some satisfaction for you in fooling the Gentiles into...

Very...

believing that you were a Gentile.

very often. All the time. We, we said we lived like spies. Yeah, very often.

So in other words, disproving the Gentile's concept of a Jew as a different entity or a different person.

No, we couldn't prove that because...

No, I'm saying that by having this fake life as a Gentile, you were disproving the Gentile's opinion of you as Jews.

How can, they, they couldn't change their opinion because they didn't know we were Jews.

No, but inside yourselves you could say I'm...

No, I always, no, I never, never for a second felt that they, they are true in their opinion, you know.


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