Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Anna Greenberger - August 24, 1982

And uh, I told the people that it's not a good idea that I'm sitting there. They will see that it something fishy going on and probably they saw I was dressed differently, but I was uh, wearing my mother's dark dress. See then the older people didn't dress so flashy like here. And I--she gave me her uh, wedding band. They weren't so much after married women like after girls who were not married. And uh, we were pretty. All four of us. Real--I had real blonde hair, even lighter like you. Maybe like you a little, uh...

Mm-hm.

...like ??? and uh, wavy hair and uh. So I wasn't afraid so much that they will recognize me that I am Jewish because I was blonde and another sister was blonde, who is in Toronto. The two younger were darker. They were afraid to go out on the street. Uh, we had to wear yellow star. So they recognized anyhow--anyways. And uh, I was with that uh, family for a couple days. So I told them that uh, I wanna help something around the house because they will see that I am a stranger there and they will send so, so we went--they had a small farm and I went to help the girl, her name was Magda. And we were talking and I was a little stupid, you know. I was young and uh, I understood German, I spoke German we took in uh, high school. In school it was uh, you had to take a foreign language.

You went to a public school?

Public school. And then I went to junior high here. And uh, that was a must, we had--it was a bigger town and from all the--it's like uh, uh, Lansing, the whole--from all the tow...small towns all the kids came to our town. We had uh, four classes. It's like junior high; the fourth class was fourth year already like high school, uh.

Mm-hm.

So I was there. We didn't go to school anymore because uh, they put out the Jews from school and they didn't ac...accept to college Jews. Uh, so uh, I went to help her in the back yard to feed the cows and uh, German noticed that I am different. It was a young German soldier and he said to me, "Why aren't you..." So you know how frightened I got. And uh, the girl said, "No--" she couldn't speak German--but she said, "No, no, she's not a Jew. She's Catholic, Catholic," you know, she started--she says, "Her husband's ???" and she was showing him. But I was afraid to stay there already because uh, I wasn't sure already and uh, I didn't want to eat--it was Passover.