This is the first hiding place?
That's all we had.
J...just the one right near your town? By the forest?
Yeah this little one right here. Here we were in the building--house I helped build. I gave 'em some money and before I said they build a new house because this--they have another one. We were on the barns around there behind, behind that barn what you see here, there was a bunker to go into the forest. We will, we will see it here. That's where they live now, you see this where I was hidden. The forest was over there.
Uh-huh.
You see, so we had from that barn over here, we had a b...we had a, a like, a like a bunker going to probably I don't know--three--four-hundred meters. Dug just, just like you couldn't we--when anything was happening we were jumping in there. This were the barns are. Before, it was nice, but now it's falling apart. But this is, this is the field. This is already Warsaw, this is 1940 to 1943. This is in the, in the ghetto.
Warsaw Ghetto? And these are Auschwitz pictures? Next picture?
This, this is Au...this is Warsaw. This is a monument in Warsaw. This here--this is Auschwitz pictures. There was the trains and this was the gas chamber. Again we didn't put it together. We put it there didn't understand this is--this would be people that we were--you know. This is a gas chamber and this--these are the crematoria and this is the blocks in uh, Auschwitz but each block has uh, has a name. And this is all the gas chambers, I mean all the, uh...
The barracks.
The barracks, gas chamber.
Did your--was your--tell me again, was your father paying these people who were hiding you?
Yes.
He wasn't paying Meyer but he was paying...
No. Meyer never took from us any money. Meyer--look we did just give him--had ourselves to go exchange if we have a piece of gold, we didn't want to show the goyim any gold, so he sold it for us.
Now, who are these people?
These are the people we were hidden...
The same people?
The same people. He had this sort of--this is the B...the Baron's--I remember the Baron's son--the, the nobleman's son was living here in this house. This is--take a look, the way it looks. It's a shame what they did, you know? And this is the barn, the size of the barn from the other side. This is the barn, we had a double wall in the back, double wall some straw in the back and whenever we come outta here we--if we hear something is happening in the area we jumped in and we had another bunker right there, see under the barn. Were--inside were the cows. We had a few cows--the cows and horses. Like I say so the ??? was dripping on us but there we were in the double-wall, here in the double-wall. This is the--and this is the house where they were...
They were very poor.
They poorer than--I'm telling you, it's hard to believe. Poor. This is just now eh, eh, eh, they lived one-hundred percent better than they live now. And I ask them, I mean, "How the heck did you let everythings go?" Oh, they didn't have this and it's not cool because we were sending them two--three-hundred dollars uh, five-hundred dollars a year. A thousand dollars a year, you know? I don't know what those people do, who knows?
Is this the sister? With the blanket on...
Yeah.
© Board of Regents University of Michigan-Dearborn