Simon Goldman - June 6, 2003
Being detained after the war
So where in Germany did you go?
...I mean, so anyway, I got across there. I didn't know where I was going. I didn't know anything, really. So I got across there, so I went to the, to the ticket master. And uh, if you speak Polish in Pra...in Czechoslovakia ??? so I asked them how I get to Linz because I found out that my cousin, my first cousin, she's in Linz. So I said, I got to go to Linz, to Linz, to Austria. She says, well you get--you buy a ticket and you hop the next train that's going to Linz. So I hopped the next train and I don't go more than uh, maybe forty-five minutes and it's a border going back into, to the Russian zone. And they take me off the train. Because papers I didn't have. Just a slip of paper with my name on it, you know. So they take me off the train and uh, they put me to jail with a, with a bunch of Russian convict, you know. And I--they stuck me in jail for, I was there for a whole week. So after a week I finally got uh, got to see a--he was a major, general or some...some...something. High ranking officer. And uh, we were sitting talking and he says, "Where are you going?" I says, "I'm going to Austria." I told him, "My name is Goldman," and I said, "I'm going to Austria. I was born in Austria." "What are you going to Austria for?" you know. "I was born in Austria." So he says--and we talk in German, you know, you already picked up quite a bit back, you know. So we talked and it was mostly in Yiddish and German, you know. So he says to me, "Your German isn't that good." I said, "Well I speak the same German you do." Because I already realized that he was uh, Jewish.
He was Jewish.
Yeah. So anyway I got out of jail and they started a DP camp, a deportation came where they take, bring all the Polacks from, from Germany, they sending them back to Poland and that was a, a holding camp. So they stuck me in there and I was there for what, about three to four weeks, three weeks, yeah about three weeks. But they treated me very well. They, they, they knew according my name I was Jewish. The Czechs treated me very well in that camp. They didn't decide to send me back to Poland. I wouldn't have gone anyway. And uh, so they, they told me in uh, in the camp, they said, you have to go see the German Consulate. If you want to go back to Ger...uh, to Austria, you know--I mean, the Austrian Consulate. So I said, fine. So after about two weeks I went down to the see the Consulate and finally got to see him and we talking. He, he knew right away when I talked to him that I'm not German, you know, or Austrian. But some German with language, you know. So he said, yeah, you must have seen uh, uh, Linz from the, from the air, you know. But anyway, he gave me some papers, I had papers, I already had a paper form from that, from that uh, deportation camp to go to see him, you know. And it said that I was born in Ru...in uh, on the paper that I was born in Austria, you know, and so on, so on. But I gave him that paper and they gave me that paper back because it didn't, didn't do any good. So with that paper, the Americans came back with a, with a load of--oh--of Polacks to--should I say Polacks or Polish people?
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