Eva Boros - February 11, 1983
Conditions in Hiding
It was a hole. I mean, it was so small that there--only one--two beds, two beds and a big oven, which was built-in oven. Uh, it was mud. There was mud on the floor, mud floor you know, the dried mud floor.
Mm-hm.
And uh, that we, we were, we had enough wood, firewood. But the food was very bad. So we used--we ate mostly uh, beans and uh, what else was there, beans. We had a little flour. But it was bad. I mean it was, that started to be very bad because he didn't come. He came occasionally. Also you know, how much can you give somebody. I mean, the money that he took was his. He didn't tell us, he said he gave it away. So uh, it was bad and the Germans started to come through the village. And since this was the only, uh... For every peasant house you can imagine, looks say like this house and through it you have a big yard and a back yard. And it's, all of them are closed up with a gate. Because of the chicken and the barn and whatever, the thing is al...always closed with a gate. So there was our house, which was uh, only the front part was standing. The barn part and all the rest was broken. It was in ruins, actual ruin. So when they came you know, such a big--I don't know, army. How many came at once, I don't know, with their trucks and with everything. They set up their kitchen in this yard, in our--where we were hiding. We didn't have electricity, of course not. We didn't have, it was at this point so bad, I think it was in, in February '45. February '45. That we didn't have even uh, uh, candles anymore. So when it was dark, it was dark. Finished. Now at this point, the walls of this ruin were so wet. Uh, we couldn't heat too much because since it was a ruin at night we didn't want the smoke go off. We just lied in bed, like, you know, that was all we could do. And then we also, since we knew the Germans are coming and we saw what's happening, we uh, we made a hole, we dug a hole in the room under one of the beds. And when the Germans came, we just sat there in the hole. We put the bed you know, we put the bed on top of it so to cover up the hole. We did it a few times. They all--what we actually got from it, that all three of us have rheumatism. That's all we got from it. There were other things that we all have, all three of us have uh, all three of us have ulcer, stomach ulcer. We have migraine headaches. We have uh, what, we are, we are deaf, we are osteoporosis. It must be that it had to be from there. It might have been hunger or who knows what, you never know. But the--it's interesting that all three of us have more or less the same. And my brother has also a heart condition. He had two heart attacks. Uh, my sister has a--the right side of her brain is affected, the central nervous system is affected and they don't know what it is. So it doesn't matter. This is only by the way. One day we were uh, sitting in the knock on the door and that a very good looking German officer, he must have been terribly young, came in and said that uh, he didn't know that people live here, he thought it's a barn. But since we are there, he will come and sit with us in the kitchen than be in the yard. So what can you say? And we did like we don't speak German, because that would have been obvious. Although, I don't believe that he would have understood that we are Jews because it was the Wehrmacht. It was not the...
SS.
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