Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

Fred Ferber - September 11 & 25, 2001

Liberation

Did, did anybody believe you? I mean, when they...

It, it was a calm, extreme quiet and a celebration after they left. A quiet celebration. Happy, people were touching each other, uh. Extremely happy moments. And there were some, once again, mostly Hungarians, maybe some Polish people too, but. They'd run, they, they decided immediately, it was already getting dark, and they said they're going down to, to eh, to the village to, to grab some chickens or whatever, you know. They, they were--but I thought to myself I remember very well I said, I survive all the war, I survive so many days. I'm not going to go and take a chance. I'll be one more night here. I don't want anything else. However I did go down to the camp, to, you know, where the kitchen was. Because a lot of people were going for bread, for, for whatever. They were running down there. So I was going over there with my friend also.

To the storehouses you mean?

To the storehouses. Storehouses with the food. Once again, the people who were coming out with the bread already under their arms and eating whatever. The people who were going to the storehouses, and, and, and they attack these people, they're trying to take a piece of bread away. And before you know, you'll seen pile of people one on top of the other, everyone digging down trying to find where the bread is to--so I, I was fortunate that I didn't go for the bread. I, I didn't fight it. I, I, I was too weak for all that. Uh, and going back already, back to the top, realizing that I'm not going to get anything here, it's, it's, it's too dangerous. But there was fee...feeling of freedom. There was a feeling of war being over. Eh, then we going, as we go up we see at one clearing over there eh, Hungarians. What they have is a circle, something like gypsies. Big circle and inside this circle they had all kinds of things already. Bread, butter, they had motorcycles, which they took probably from the, you know, they took the motorcycles. Organized, some of them had the motorcycles nearby already, eh.

Did anybody get sick from eating right away?

Most people who ate right away I'm talking about our people not only right away, even the day after didn't survive.

They died of...

They died of eh, their stomach couldn't take it. Malnutrition, call it what it is. Uh, they could not, they could not uh, they did not survive. The Hungarians maybe would because see they were in different shape than we were, okay, uh. We, we slept over on that hill that night.

On the hilltop.

On the hilltop.

The Americans had not yet...

Amer...no one came. We didn't know, we just knew that the war was over as far as we're concerned. We heard a lot of gun fight, gun, guns, cannons and all this. But we did not know, it was night and it is forest and you don't know where you are. Eh, eh, some people did go and did come back with chicken, some people made fire eh, fire, f.... And they were cooking the chicken, or not cooking but burning it, eh. But not, not too many of our people, some, I would say.


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