Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

Charlotte Firestone - March 11, 1982

Paris

What year was this?

That was the 1948, '49, 1949. No it was '48 because the boys were born in '48. It wasn't '48. We arrived, not a soul, we didn't speak the language. German, nobody wanted to talk. It was stewardess, it was a man by the counter, nobody wanted to talk. I had lunch and he had a packages again for the children you know, diapers, clothing. My husband had one on his arm. I had one, I wasn't sitting and watching. Eva was three years old. No, no they are three years old. Finally, there was, there was um, stewardess who s...Czech. Nobody spoke, you know, that's not an international language. Hungarian, nobody spoke. So, finally, the stewardess made a reservation for us, for a hotel at the ??? and we paid--that time for a room--it was 1948--fifty dollars for the night. Fifty dollars was a lot of money. So, we were one night there and then next day my husband went out and he found that old friend And they, they were renting two rooms not far from the Eiffel Tower, I don't remember the street. And we lived there, it was very expensive, for a little while. And then we moved to the outskirts, ??? And there I lived until I got the papers. We had already the papers in Prague we had to register and we got a number. Then we went to Paris, then we carried that number. But the number was very high so we--the number was very high, so we were waiting in Paris. In the meantime, we had money in Prague and my husband send out money to America, you know, when we were in Paris. It cost us in Prague to send out money to America and it cost us in Paris to bring back money to Paris. Then we came to the United States. I came here in 1950.


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