Benjamin Fisk - November 8, 1982
Meeting His Future Wife
How much--how many people came back to your community after the war? How large was the Jewish community after the war?
There were quite a few, you know, quite a few. People were coming and going, you know, but there was the building by the Jewish community center, you know. But they didn't have nothing. They couldn't give no help to no one. They didn't have any--you just put your name down, you know, and you were on your own. They couldn't give you nothing, you know. Maybe they could give you a little soup; I remember that they had a kitchen over there.
Do you have any idea, though, how many Jews survived from Sosnowiec from the beginning?
Hard to tell, you know.
Wife: Probably not very many.
They were coming and going, you know.
Wife: Not many from Sosnowiec. They most already survived from ?ód?. Mostly.
Well some of them survived you know, not too many. The older people, you know, not too many, most of the younger people you know survived.
You met your wife in June? How did you meet?
Hmm?
How did you meet your wife in Sosnowiec?
Well, like I told you we were living in a kibbutz. You know what a kibbutz is? You know, I was like a father over there and I took care for the girls behaved themselves, you know. And then she came, you know, she was with the girls in the camp together and ??? to her mother, you know, she came with a German boy--German-Jewish boy--couldn't speak any Polish, you know, and uh, he was castrated. Little boy was castrated, you know, he didn't know, you know, but later when he got married--they married him off to a friend of ours--we find out that he couldn't do nothing, so he got divorced, you know, and he married this friend of ours. He was a millionaire, lived in New York City. He got a factory that make table and chairs.
Wife: ???
Yeah, she divorced him, you know. He was a German-Jew. He lived in Auschwitz, wasn't he? He was in Auschwitz?
Wife: No...
No?
Wife: ...Buchenwald.
Buchenwald? He was castrated over there he couldn't, he couldn't live with a woman. He was a nice guy, you know. We went all over with him in Poland later, you know, he had some relatives in Poland--because the German Jews, you know, they send them out to Poland if they came from Poland, you know, if they originated in Poland they send them back. We were looking for some relatives of his and some relatives of hers, you know. We were--I had, you know, some people from concentration we didn't--we were driving on flat cars and trains--flat, you know, there was nothing--it was just a flat thing but they let us go for nothing...
Wife: When I came into ???
Open, open flat car.
Wife: ??? five days on the train, on the train, on the train that carried coal. I was ???
She was black like a ???. There were no lights, no lights in the building, you know, the Germans when they left they tore everything out.
Wife: No water, nothing. You couldn't wash ???
I don't remember we didn't have water in them days, didn't have water. They had to go down...downstairs, you know, they had a spigot, you know, we had to pick up water from there.
How did the other Polish people--the Christian Poles treat you when you came back to Sosnowiec?
Well, good. The, you know, the guy that took care of the building--the Polish guy--he said, "You still alive?" you know, first thing. Later on he used to come and I used to give him something to eat when he come to my sister-in-law's store. I knew he was hungry, you know... [interruption in interview]
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