Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Eugene Feldman - July 15, 1991

Let me ask you, how many people were there in your family altogether, extended family?

Extended family?

Brother, sisters, uncles, aunts, cousins.

Oh God, I--well, I wouldn't know. Let's see, my, oh God...

Or your immediate family. You said you had three sisters.

I had three sisters that died. I got a sister now and a brother from the second marriage. You know, from the mother that just... But, of course, she was my mother because she, I was only five years old when my mother died. I don't even remember my real mother.

So you had your parents, your three sisters. Grandparents?

Oh sure. We had grandparents, I had two, two or three uncles and three aunts. The families are very--were very large.

Can you estimate...

We all, that's...

how many survived and how many were killed?

That's one there, my cousin, he's in Israel now. He's the one that came over to me and said, "Let's go upstairs." Because dad said, there's no room for you in here. He's the one that came over and he said, let's go upstairs. Now there was one more with us. He was uh, what was he--related, a, a cousin too. He, we sur...he survived but he wound up in the Russian--oh. He, he survived differently. He went--they caught him. They caught him. And they took 'em all, he says--that's how we knew how it, how it happened--they, said it was a large ditch, they lined all the people up and they were shooting 'em and they would drop right into the ditch. Just like you see in the movies, that's what it was. Anyway, he saw that ditch and he saw the bodies and he panicked and he started running. He w...he was shot in the leg, but he managed to get away. That's when he came to us. So he wound up in the army, after the war in the Russian Army and he got killed in the army. After all that going through, he got killed in the army.

So how many do you think were killed in your family?

From my family? There's nobody survived it really, except my dad and mom survived and my cousin Osher survived.

So your stepmother...

She survived, yeah.

also survived.

My stepmother, well, I call her mother.

Yeah.

Because my mother died, like I said, before the war, way before the war. So.

So how--give me a rough guess.

How many in my family?

Twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, seventy?

The immediate f...uncles and relatives uh, probably about forty immediate family.

And of those, what, four survived, your parents?

The only ones that survived is uh, oh, that--he, come to think of it, he survived too, my cousin's father. The one that didn't go back to the ghetto, that he stayed in the village down there. He survived and he was with the partisans after we met, we were down there. He got a, he got TB and he died from TB. I had TB too but I survived, I guess because I was younger, I don't know. He didn't make it. He was a little bit older.