Erna Blitzer Gorman - July 12, 1989
Typhoid
And that was during the period that you kept going into hiding and into this cavity somewhere between...
No, that was a different place already.
It was a different place?
Yeah.
Afterwards?
Afterwards, that was afterwards. I remember, you know, did I tell you about, another a camp everybody was very sick, I don't know if I told you about that and there was typhoid. I assume it was typhoid because they all had, like I remember looking in my father's throat. It had black spots and it showed and they were all very feverish and there was this room, everybody was laying around terribly, terribly ill, and uh, my mother and I we were sponging everybody. I don't know if I told you that but, there was this tremendous outbreak and I know we thought my father was dying and I see my mother crying, I don't see her face but I see the tears falling down her face. Again, which of the ghettos, I don't remember. I know my father was taken away once and remember feeling that we thought that he was being shot or and my mother was in a panic and I think that he was taken away and when he came back, that's when he had his head shaven when he came back, and he said he was burying people in a mass grave.
He told you that?
I remember him saying that. And he knew some of the people that he had -- I remember, I remember my father and mother standing close to each other and crying. I don't know, maybe they saw their parents. I don't know.
So he was taken to do some forced labor. They shaved his head then?
Yes, that I never realized but now I do. That's when he came back with a shaved head [whispered].
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