Simon Goldman - June 6, 2003
Surviving
And you don't know what happened to her?
No. And my older brother, he got married there in '41 or something like that in ??? to a distant cousin. And they moved, and they moved into her place, they had a place there. So we were left just the three brothers. The younger brother and I and our, older than I. So after awhile we were working, the two of us, the older ones, we were working in a bakery and uh, we--in fact, most, a lot of times we slept in the bakery overnight. And we also organized in that uh, the family needed food, you know, so, and working in a bakery. And while you could call it, uh...
Stealing.
...stealing really...
Yeah.
...because they were putting bags of flours, illegal flour into a, into the, into the basement there, a special hiding place they were putting flour and so the Germans wouldn't know how much bread they're baking or whatever because there was rations. They couldn't give out bread to anybody more than they, they told 'em to bake.
Was this a Jewish baker?
Yeah, Jewish baker. A distant, distant relative. And my older brother and me, and I, we were working there and, and we also slept there, so at night sometimes we organized on flour and get some. We call, we call it steal...
Organized, I understand what you mean.
...and uh, we take it to the family, my brother, and, you know, supplied it, some of the stuff to the family. Until we got caught.
You got caught so there must have been a curfew.
No, no, until we got caught stealing.
Who caught you?
Uh, the owners, you know, distant cousin.
I see.
They didn't caught us stealing the flour, but they caught us baking a little bread at night. We used to take it home in, in the morning and give it to the rest of the family.
If you would organize flour at night, was there a curfew in the...
Oh, curfew was there, but we slept overnight. We, we, we slept in the, in the bakery overnight. The reason we slept in the bakery overnight because, well, my father met somebody there, and it was, I don't know what, what, you know, I was too young to know anything about stuff like that, but I guess she, she had a place of her own and he met somebody and they got married and he moved in.
So that left the three children.
Yeah, the three children at home. And sometimes we had to go home from the bakery and there was a curfew, we couldn't go home because they were shooting and beating up everybody. And uh, so we got home one night and they wouldn't let--she wouldn't let us in, the stepmother. She wouldn't let us into the house. And we were scared to death at, you know. Then that, a Jewish policeman came around and finally had them open the door, because he saw what's happening, you know, so he gave us a break and opened the door, opened up the door for us before we could ???.
Your father wouldn't let you in either?
Well, I don't know what, what happened. I guess he didn't have control of it.
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