Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

Bella Camhi - November 18, 1999

Resistance (Continued)

So when people, so when people left to go into the mountains or to go fight the Germans...

Yeah.

What did you--did you...

It's like dropping a, a drop in the bucket. Empty.

Did anybody in your family do that?

No. Not that I uh, you see, most of the family uh, I, uh, it's an excuse to be illiterate you know, not to learn how to read or write. Because it's been since creation of uh, day, like they say. The world was built for us to learn. And most of the family uh, in my family, the kids my age, nobody knew how to read and write. They never went to school. So with my mom uh, it was the opposite. Uh...

She...

you're going to go to school if it's over my dead body. And she will take us--we start school there four years old. It was take us you know, by the hand and uh, she always wanted--and I happened to be very, very smart as a, a little girl. I didn't have the, the chance to, to improve myself, you know. But after the German, nothing is--was left.

After the, after the war, you mean.

Right. Then you get marry, you start having kids, you know. This is not what you planned when you are twenty years old. So life wasn't easy. When people uh, uh, whatever you hear about being a parent.

Uh.

Not easy.

Do you remember a day in--it must have been 1942 in the summer, when, um...

1942 I was in concentration camp.

Already you were in concen...I thought 194...

Oh no, no.


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