Regina Cohen - April 18, 1982
Gentiles Warn Jews of Danger
Oh, you knew you were being...
We were told that there's--evacuations going to be--we'll be evacuated. They didn't say where to, what, how, where, when, nothing.
Your mother spoke about these things then.
My mother would go uh, be sent to a store, there's, there were certain store hours Jews would keep to go to shop for certain groceries, and of course you had your ration tickets. And just so much that you could get. There were a few decent Gentiles in every area and we had a couple of pretty good friends, and they would say that, "Tell your mother that they'll be taking you away from home," and I would come home and tell my mother. It was always a little safer for a parent to send out a child on an errand, than for a grown-up to go. Because you never knew who you'll, who you'll encounter or uh, what group'll decide, well, we'll take these women, we'll take them away to work or we'll take these men. There was always a chance of a child to be uh, what do you call it? A little slippery. And I was one of the children that was amongst the oldest--well, the oldest for five. I had my three bro...brothers. One brother was gone, they had taken him to a, a labor, forced labor. My...
How old was he?
Okay, he was born in 1924.
He was fifteen.
Okay, yeah he was a little...
Nineteen thirty-nine he was about fifteen. Was he taken...
Well, he wasn't taken then, he was taken in '42.
Oh, I'm sorry, eighteen then.
Okay. Then I had two brothers above--below that one. There was one brother, Bernard, who was uh, four years older than myself and I had a brother, Morris--Moshe, who was two and a half years older than myself. And then there was Irene and there was Isabelle and there was Eva and there was Yasele, the baby. So me being, you know, just the...
The middle.
...the, the second girl after the boys, the oldest is my sister Elizabeth who was married at the time.
Oh, she was the first born.
She got--she was the first born and she got married in 1939. And, uh...
© Board of Regents University of Michigan-Dearborn