Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Luba Elbaum - January 20, 1982

So where, where did you go after you were liberated?

So, liberated in May, and in September before the--in September I came back to Lublin in September. Before Rosh Hashanah--before September before I came back to Lublin. When we came back to Lublin it was nothing. I was looking around for my uncle--they said he was in jail. They kill him. It was nothing. Over there was a shelter house and--but all the Jews came in. And my girlfriend's two brothers survive and they have like an apartment--one apartment was living a lot of Jews that were in the camps. And they let you stay. Like I mean, you came, you came. And then when I was Lublin, they said, "Like in a Saturday you're going out in, on the street over there like ??? over there maybe somebody lives, you can see them." So then I was standing over there with my friends, where they came in, and I saw across the street a bunch of soldiers are going--Polish soldiers are going. They were staying in this side and the other side, I see somebody goes across and asks me if my name is Luba Eblaum, my name--"Your name is Luba Eblaum?" Because in the ??? I was signing in Jewish "Luba Eblaum. Luba Elbaum." I said, "Yo." And that was my husband. That was Gedaliah Elbaum--he used to work with my uncle. This is the man that I saw--he used to work with my uncle and he left to Russia. So he was already Majdanek after the war. I mean, he was in the army--in the Russian army--in the Polish army. And then we were living over there, in the, the Jewish--it was already a little bit Jewish ??? and they giving us like a piece of bread, they give us ??? a piece of bread and--we already starved like to survive, to be something to do in Poland, to survive ???. So then we start to go out with him. He was still in the army. He used to come to me and said uh, he used to have some money already--take out. He was too in the army. 'Til January the 26th we marry, 1946. It's going to be thirty-six years. We are--used to go out. He have nothing, I have nothing. But the mind was we going to marry and go away in American side. I mean, I was--have a, a passport to go back to Bergen-Belsen, because all we met in Bergen-Belsen after the war, Bergen-Belsen on the American side. So we met in 1946, it'll be thirty-six years. Because I find not nobody in Lublin--I find nobody in Lublin.