Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Erna Blitzer Gorman - July 12, 1989

Your parents had made the decision to go to your mother's family.

Right to try and save ourselves.

What do you remember about there? Did you have grandparents there?

Yes.

What do you remember about them?

Them I remember...It must have been at least a year later because I remember them much more clearly, that grandfather he was much more religious than the other I think, um, I also think I remember him as being a very soft and sort of pudgy person with a beard, a grayish beard and he wore dark clothing too, brownish rather than black and he was very mushy and he would hold me on his lap and he would play with me. I remember him playing with me. I remember also my grandmother, she was a small person, very, very thin and with a sheenya on her head she had her hair pulled back very tight like and she would bake. There was this one wall that had a huge oven in it and she would stand there and bake bread, I remember that, baking bread at that oven, I also remember in this household there was an uncle, a brother of my mother's and two sisters, yes, they were live in this little apartment. I remember that going to the synagogue with my grandfather, he was holding me by his hand, I remember seeing a lot of coats and black pants, I was small, I was standing probably next to him, and all I could see, I remember seeing people praying sachris, I remember going to the schvitz, the steam bath, with my mother and my grandmother, I remember a lot of heavy set women in this steamhouse and women beating each other with short brooms made out of leaves, they were hitting each other and I remember climbing the stair in the steamhouse and a woman, this must have been strictly for Jewish women, because there, I definitely knew that there was a Polish woman standing near the coals and activating the steam there, and I knew that she was a Polish woman, while all of us were Jews, I remember all of this flesh all around me.

It sounds like fairly fond memories?

Yes.