Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

• Contents

Bert Dan - November 17, 1982

But very fortunately, after two days a major looked in--a Russian major came in and he wanted to know whether there are any Jewish people arrived here and naturally we all ran over and we told him, "Yes we are Jewish." And he started talking in Jewish--in a very fluent Jewish. He spoke to us and he told us that uh, he is going to see to it that we should be free and we can go home. And he came back--sure enough it didn't take him longer than about an hour or so. He came back and he said "Now it is up to you guys because I don't know who's Jewish, who is not Jewish. You are--you have to select because I want strictly the Jews, I don't want Nazis, see." And the rest of our number, you know, tried to select them, you know. And those four soldiers that were with us, we took them in as Jewish, you know, because they were very, very, very nice to us, you know, and--so we were--they opened the gate and they let us out. And we were walking all the way, I was about two hundred miles here from my hometown, or two--I don't know, maybe more than two hundred miles. And that two hundred miles was, again, very, very difficult because we had to walk barefoot eventually, you know, we had no shoes and something like that. And there were no roads built like, like here, you know. There were just grav...dirt roads and we were actually bleeding here, you know. But we were free.