Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Bernard Hirsch - June 29, 1982

And I walked in to mine Gen...to the guy--I had a Gentile there what he gave me. My father left me money with him and all kinds of stuff. And I walked in at night around eight o'clock or ten o'clock something. And this time when I make a--look through the window and I see there four Jewish boys sitting around the table already. But I knew it that they are there. I was--I didn't want to surprise them to go in, so I was waiting 'til somebody is going to come out. So the old man came out and he said, "You know what, they are already looking for you," the Gentile said. His name was Adam. And he said, "Come on in." So I walked in, in the house and the four guys--the Jewish guys, they said, "What did you do? You ran away. They are looking already for you. Twice already they were, today already asking that somebody didn't see you here. I think you should go away from here." You know? I was scared to stay, I shouldn't make problems for them. So the Gentile--Adam--told--walked out with me and he said like this--they called me Berko, Berko they called me there in the town. He told me, "Berko, they are not from here and they're staying here. Why you are worried? You are from the town. You know where to walk around in the woods here. You were raised here. You get up and go to sleep on the, on the attic. In the morning, get up. Here is the key, take yourself a bread and take yourself a bacon and go yourself and during the day stay in the woods. At night you come down." So I was doing like this for eight weeks. I didn't sleep in town 'til everything quiet down. I didn't want to make harm for the other boys that they should say, they should say that I'm in town and they--because I was like a soldier, I wasn't like them. I was a soldier. So a soldier's different, like a civil...I was a desert...like a deser...how they call them?

Runaway?

Deserter. So I, in case they would have caught me, they would have, like a deserter.