Lily Fenster - November 8 & 10, 1994
Hospitalized
You, you said that um, during the air raids you came back from the bunker and...
Then we came back and it was burned. Nothing there.
What did you do?
What did we do? What did we do, after awhile, what did we do? We got organized--well I don't know what I did. I was in the hospital with an injured hip. I mean with a piece of shrapnel, the twenty-seventh, three months they schlepped me fun me in the hospital, tzu hospital couldn't cure me. They cured me a little but they cut me, they cut me again. And it's a miracle I still walk four miles, would you believe it. Isn't that something? God wanted something. When I left the ghetto, yeah after three months, I came back and we were still in the place that got burned, but another place, another little shack you moved in, you know. It was an upstairs also. And then when they start making ghettos, take out from the--before the city, before the town like the, the people put into one place, you know. They wanted you know, they wanted just you know, where the ghettos. So they took us Gesia hunderteins, like I told you, not far from the cemetery. It was cemetery for the rich, not for the poor. The poor had to lay in a different place. In fact when my little sisters died, everyone in the ghetto everyday somebody else, I think in 1941, what made me run away, I couldn't see the ??? anymore. They all swell up. We were sitting in poverty, there was no food, nothing. Everyday another little baby, they were babies! I was thirteen, in '39, maybe I was fourteen already, '41, Masheleh was a little one laying there. Oh der leeber got you know what? For the longest time, when mine daughter was born, I thought she was my sister. Do you believe that? That she is my sister and that, that in my ears, "Daj mi kawałek chleb, give me a piece of bread and if you don't have a piece of bread, how about a carrot?" I was the oldest of four girls. And you know what, you so smart, you're getting so educated, you're getting so mature, day by day, hiding for survival. That hunger, that hunger. You didn't--you walk the streets like a zombie. You look for, for something. There was nothing to look. It was just, they just wanted, they wanted you to die. They didn't care if you have nourishing or not you know, coming back after the war, three months I was in the hospital with that hip and they couldn't do nothing for me and finally, they let me go, because the hospital started, the Germans started to come in there and they want to eliminate all the Jews you know, from that place. So, I got better, I didn't get better. I was limping a little bit and it sort of healed up, not the proper way, but it did to some degree 'til I came here in 1951 and I got a temperature and temperature, they didn't know what happened to you. It was infected, with a lot of pus accumulation. Dr. Shifrin, God bless his heart. He found a piece of shrapnel in me. A piece of metal big as a, a head of something, it's like. It was in a "L" shape, black and he says it would be a, if there wouldn't be penicillin, I would be dead and if that happened to me in Germany, I wouldn't live and I was in my twenties when I came to America.
So you were in the hospital from September...
'Til September, 'til about winter time.
And when you came back...
I came back, it was...
© Board of Regents University of Michigan-Dearborn