Emerich Grinbaum - October 3, 2000 & January 8, 2001
German Invasion
Yeah.
They thought.
But what about the Germans? Did they think the Germans were civilized too?
The Germans--we didn't have too much contact with the Germans. We didn't have. Matter of fact, when they--from the ghetto they, we got out to the uh, brick factory. It was terrible. Then there was the first cruelty, real cruelty we met. Mostly by Hungarians. There were very few Germans who organized this, this whole, whole uh, uh, exodus from the, from the ghettos to the brick factory which is on the uh, uh, uh, uh, not in the city, the, the outskirts of the city.
So this is in May 1944.
May 19...
And um, and you lived, for however long you were there, you lived outside in, in the brick factory or was it inside the brick factory?
No, no. No, no. Let me start. March 20th, the German came.
Right.
In two...
Not...
...three weeks, they, two, three weeks, they organized ghettos. Ghetto meant then--there were two ghettos, two parts of the city uh, two different parts of the city, mostly by--anyhow uh, they were mostly Jews, the different parts. They closed that area. And all the other uh, all the Jews from other areas they transfer to this areas and the Gentiles had to move out. And they closed around it with walls. For instance, we have three rooms, we had three rooms, three bedrooms--we had to take three more families in our uh, uh, apartment. So we lived very...
Uh-huh....
...and we stayed there until uh, mid-May. Mid-May in the ghettos. We had some food, but they were soup kitchen, so we survived. There were no atrocities at that time in the ghettos. We didn't work. We, we children played, I--whatever we could, you know. They uh, uh, grown-ups also were thinking, the poli...they listening. No, we didn't have radios at that time. They took away all the radios.
But everybody was indoors.
And then they took out us. Pardon me?
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