Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

Bernard Hirsch - June 29, 1982

Pretending to be Gentile

So again we split--we run away. One went here, one went there. And I had a friend--I don't know what is his name--about forty miles from where I was hiding. And he said, "Go there to this town and you're going to have there a job a farmer." So I went there for three months I was staying there by this farmer, for three months. One...

What was the town?

Uh, ???. They didn't know that I'm Jewish because I was working there, I--through my work they couldn't recognize that I'm not a, that I'm not a Gentile. I knew anything what they wanted on a farm to do it. And I was young and strong. I wasn't afraid for nobody. In town even I came there. In this town we were fighting and I wasn't afraid for nobody. Except in the three months what I was there, I went myself to the notary public to get uh, li...uh, papers, different papers, because everybody had to have a picture. So I made pictures and I walked in like a Gentile and they gave me papers, in a different town. One day I got, I, I got drunk--never forget this--and it looked to me like they were saying I have a girlfriend. And I was so drunk that they were another two, two guys, Jewish guys, the same they like I was. And when I got drunk and I was afraid that I didn't talk something from drunkness. I picked up myself and I ran away. I came back from there. I run from where I was hiding in the woods from my town. The story what I'm saying is much, much bigger. You cannot--when you would like to say everything what happened for, in this, in this three years--about two and a half years that I was in those woods. It's impossible. I went--it's impossible even to remember that what happened the, the daytime that I was sitting--after this already I was sitting--he was the, the mayor of the town and I was sitting where the--in, in the town they're having where the wood--the cho...the chopping wood for the oven, you know.


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