Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Manya Auster Feldman - August 11, 1998

You had gone back to Dombrovitsa?

I went back to Dombrovitsa, yes. And I found--that's where I found my cousin. I found some other Jewish people that survived in Russia. And I, and I vowed that my foot will never step in there anymore. I never went back. That was the last, the last time I was there. Now, I have--I keep having a desire to go to the grave of where my mother is buried. But it's, it's, it's hard.

Where is she buried?

She's buried in Sarny, where 15,000 Jews are buried.

She's in a mass grave?

Yeah.

Yeah...

In a mass grave, with my two sisters.

This means that the last time you saw your father and your sister, you were ill?

Right.

Is that the last time?

That's it.

Through a, through a haze?

No, it--it's like a silhouette I see. I don't have a picture of my father. I look at my uncle, what I show them and he reminds me of my father. But I don't remember his face vividly. I don't remember. I remember my sister. But don't--you know, I'm--I'm 75 years old. My sister was twenty-one. I was eighteen. I remember them as, as young people. My father was young. My father was forty-two.

Of course, you didn't know it was farewell at that point?

No.

No...

We didn't know what's going to happen tomorrow. My father sort of like had a fatalistic outlook. He, he always was saying that, I'm not going to live through it. And if you lived with--I didn't, I didn't--should I say that I lived with hope? No. I didn't live with hope. I, I, I just lived and I pushed through every day. What's going to happen tomorrow, I don't know. What's going to happen the next hour, I don't know.

What brought you to leave Dombrovitsa? I mean, how--what steps did you take leave there?

Well, what steps did I take? I lived in Pinsk actually. I came to Dombrovitsa to visit.

Okay.

And when I saw--and there were some--some gentiles they said, "How come you survived?" That were the questions. How can I live among them? "All the Jews were killed and you survived? How did that happen?"

What did you say?

What do you say? You sit there--I stay there--what, should I start arguing with them? There was nothing to say. I said, "You are the same murderers as the Germans." And they knew it. They knew it.