Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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David Burdowski - May 13, 1982

So, you told me about your feet and now you're telling me about your wife's back surgery, it seems like you have a lot of physical ailments.

Oh there's no doubt about it. There's not--there is not a night that uh, hardly goes by that uh, you don't dream about it, that you don't have nightmares that you're being uh, uh, chased by, by Germans--chased by the SS and uh, very bad nightmares. Sometimes you wake up in the middle of the night screaming or, or wake up in the morning right uh, from beating that I received from many, many uh, places from the Germans and the SS. And today I've got--my ears are very bad and the doctor did say that that comes from the beating that I had. And uh, we have to live with it. We just live with it. It's just as bad uh, living with it now that almost was in, in, in camps. Sure you established a family, you established a home and everything else, but whatever happened and it's, it's--you can never, we can never forget. It's very, very bad to live without parents, without brothers, without sisters. It's very bad. I'll never forget when the first time my, my daughter, my oldest daughter and we were living in Flint and we were living in the neighborhood with uh, a lot of young couples our age and one time she comes home and she says, "How come my girlfriends have grandparents and I don't?"

So, what did you say?

What can you say? At that time she was too young to uh, understand.

Can I ask you about...

But as she got older I tried to tell her.