Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Bert Dan - November 17, 1982

And then in January and February more and more and more people started coming in and we were already organized. We had a Jewish Community Center and we had a home and we were very happy we were back, back together again. And even those Gentiles who were very, very mean people that find out during the, the part and period when, when they took all the Jews in May of 1944--they were very, very rude to the Jews. After we came home--now I don't know because they were afraid or whatever reason there was--but they were really trying to make up, you know, for whatever they did wrong. And they were very nice to us. They gave us food and stuff like that. We didn't want to accept it because at that point we really didn't need it anymore. We--the Romanian border was a few miles away from us and very, you know, at this point there was no border anymore. You could walk and you could go, you could do anything you wanted to and uh, we had plenty of food and everything else. As a matter of fact a lot of Romanian Jews who lived in the other side, you know, and they were not imported. They moved into Koloszvar and they come over there and they opened a little business here and there, restaurants and stuff like that. And it was already nearing, you know, and it was getting to be easier and easier as we go--went along. And then in uh, I'm trying to concentrate, you know, it's not possible, you know, to think back of dates. Uh, I would say it must have been sometime in March where--in all the larger cities they were organized the same way, like we had our own committee. Like Nagyvárad, which I mentioned to you already, had already organized big committee. And they had a larger community and larger population. Uh, more people came home for that, that city than to ours. And somehow they made contact with the Romanian government. Now this here was no...nobody's land naturally, Transylvania. At that time it was still Hungary, but it was Romania, it was Hungary--so it didn't belong anywhere. But the Romanians took it for granted that it belongs to them again the same way like it was before the war.