Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

• Contents
• Map

Eva Boros - February 11, 1983

Those people that came meanwhile from Czechoslovakia, they could have given me uh, accommodations, but they didn't. [laughs] Also there were all kinds of other things, dirty things which I don't think it's necessary to mention. It was very difficult for us. The shop that my father received back, that they had, they gave us back after the war was more or less empty of goods. My uncle took over. And he said that since he's only starting and came back from concentration camp, he doesn't have money. I'm back in Czechoslovakia yet, before I left to Israel. And uh, he will give us money when--once he starts making money from the store. So we said fine, okay I never saw a penny from this money ever, because there was a devaluation and uh, there were--that's what I was told. I never really saw anything. He said that he did pay money for the store to another aunt, but the devaluation actually, the whole value of the money was gone. There was not a penny. And meanwhile, here we were struggling, we didn't have anything. Whatever we did money-wise working or however we could, that's what we had. Or what we, we received from the kibbutz uh, schmatas, I mean real rags. It was really bad. You know, it is very difficult today or in an American environment to even imagine how we had to make do. That, one doesn't have money and you don't have anything and you just... That's how it is. Everybody more or less was in the same boat, so you didn't feel that you are poor, that you have to be sorry for yourself. Also I must say that I really cannot tell where from that energy or the will to survive uh, was kept in me. I don't know, until this day I really... It was terribly difficult. Also the pangs of pain that the parents didn't come back. The month and years of dreaming that the reality's a dream and the dream's a reality they were real bad.