David Burdowski - May 13, 1982
Feelings About the Germans and Poles
Yeah. How do you feel about the Germans now, today?
It's very hard to describe this, no? It's uh, and it's, it's probably hard to believe it, too. You have more hatred for the Poles than you have for the Germans.
Poles were always worse.
Well, I know that the Germans had an order and, and they did it. There's no doubt about it. They killed six million Jews, they killed my family. But uh, after the war, living in Germany, and living as a free person, I guess the hatred kind of went away from before it. But the hatred goes back deeply while I was growing up in Poland. And being maybe uh, two, three Jewish kids between sixty Polish kids in one room and that's all you can hear is, "You goddamned Jew," that kind of baked in, in me more so than, than the hatred of the, of the Germans. Uh, when the war ended in '45, I had uh, we all had chances to go back home--back, back to Poland. I never went back. I was all over Germany. I was--I went to Italy, I went to France, but I never wanted to go back to Poland. I was twenty-one, first of all, if I would go back to Poland they probably would take me into the Polish army, and that's probably the last thing I want to do is after, after years of concentration camp and suffering to go into the Polish army as a Jew. So that, that was out. I never went back and I never was back. Even when I was two years ago in Germany, I had a chance to go to Poland and uh, in fact, I almost wanted to go, my daughter didn't let me...
[interruption in interview]
...instead we went to uh, Paris. And I still have uh, at that time I had a cousin in Paris. So instead of going to Poland, we went to Paris.
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