Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Nancy Fordonski - July 29, 1982

Do you remember your thoughts when the war broke out?

[pause] First thing we thought that it will just take days. And I was young and I thought it will be just some excitement, seeing different soldiers and people and going and coming. And to me it sounded like uh, it will be just uh like you know, we get some excitement in the city, like in the summer the circus used to come…

Uh-huh.

or whatever, I really never thought of it serious. Because uh, I remember that my mother, should rest in peace, was mentioning uh, to us sometime you know, at, how it was after the First World War, that one day, this was just the end of it. And that's--this what stuck onto my mind that uh, one day they woke up and all the ammunition, everything, was in the middle of the, of one of the streets like uh, marketplace and they ran away. The soldiers, they ran away and the war was over. All right, this was going on at that time for four years too, but uh, nobody was expecting that something like this is in store for us. So it was just oh, maybe we'll have some excitement and uh, we'll see what's going on in the world. But you know when you live in a small city, somehow there are times that you are looking for something different. But that experience, that tragedy was a little bit much too much.