Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Lily Fenster - November 8 & 10, 1994

Let, let me take you back for a second. They took your mother away and you knew what happened. You said you had sixteen aunts and uncles, is that right?

Oh, I had--I don't remember sixteen. I had a lot of them. My mother had eleven, I think uh, siblings was with her. None of them survived.

Your father had five.

Yeah, from both sides. They all disappeared. Warsaw, a ghetto, was the worse fire you can imagine.

They were all in Warsaw.

For ???, yeah, the--only one was in Brześć, but also, he didn't survive.

And the cousins didn't survive.

I was checking--I was looking, each of them had--we had five kids. My other auntie, I had so many cousins. I just think, Rabboni Shel oylam, where did it all go? God, God, such a family. So, like I ask my question to tsi bin ich fun a shtayn geboren, was I born from a stone, did I ever had parents? This loneliness you know, after the war, wherever I've seen a, a older lady, I'd just think. Adopt me. I called her Ma, that word Ma meant so much me. There's a couple older ladies which I called Ma, Esther a ma, they called them and Ida uh, uh, Weiner, she's a mother, too. She's in her nineties. I call her Ma, also. They survived in the woods and everything. I know their stories, you know. Oh, do we have stories, Sidney.