Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Simon Cymerint - June 8, 1982

Now what city were you in?

Town. This was by ??? Right near the Cze...uh, about nineteen kilometers of the uh, from the Czechoslovakian border. This is Bavaria. Right by the end Bavaria where uh, Czechoslovakia uh, meets with Bavaria. Schwarzwald maybe you heard about it, Black Forest.

Black Forest.

You know now German words.

That's what I do.

You got a Polish uh, name too, so your parents came from Poland, or no? Or from Russia?

My grandparents were from Kiev.

Kiev.

Which is Poland, but then was Russia.

Yeah. And uh, and then, after I, I got out from there, was already, you know, a lot of Jewish people in the city. Everybody was no more in villages. It started a Jewish community. And, uh...

You were about what, twenty-five years old now?

Yeah. Funny. I was uh, seventeen. In five years I was, uh...

Twenty-three years old.

twenty-three years old and I was liberated, exactly. And then was, you know, a Jewish community. We belonged to the UNRRA. You know what UNRRA is?

Relief.

United...

Nation.

United Nations Re...Relief Organization, okay.

[interruption in interview]

And, uh...

You were saying that everything was coming from the JOINT distribution.

Everything, we were, you know, but--and, and that time they were already organizing a Jewish community, Jewish police. Uh, everything shouldn't be--we shouldn't be bothered by Germans whatsoever, see. We went down in the uh, military government and we took all from them papers that--no Germans, we don't want no German should have any authority over us. That's why we had our own Jewish community. They gave us uh, two buildings--the Germans--like it used to be hotels there. And all, everybody moved in, in that, in those buildings and we had our own kitchen. We uh, Friday night we all ate together and uh, it was more like haimish, you know. We started to get closer again to organize a family life.