Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Esther Feldman Icikson - October 23 & 29, November 5 & 12, 2001

Your mother and you are living alone with your...

My sister...

...sister.

...my brother, my, my baby sister--she died. She died in, I think, in '41. Maybe she lived a year and a half or two years. And this is a different story. My mom had to go and bury her herself.

Tell me about that story.

This is a sad story. She was very sick and um, she just died. And my mom had to make a little coffin and take her to bury her all by herself. Because there was no one there. And uh, she put the little coffin on top of the um, um, a flat uh, um, buggy, like, you know.

A wagon.

A wagon, yes. And uh, the little coffin fell off. So my mom had to pick up the coffin, put back, and go and bury that child all by herself.

You remember this clearly?

This--I remember my sister vividly. And let me tell you that I, years later, I had a dream about her. She came in my dream and she wanted to play with me. And I'm so afraid of her and I told her, "Chaia ??? go away." I never dreamt about her again.

Chaia was her name.

Yeah, Chaia was her name.

So the dream has not come back.

Never saw her again in my dream.

Do other dreams come back?

Uh, I don't dream about Siberia or anything, no, no.

Why do you think?

Why?

Yeah.

I don't know. I don't dream about these things anymore.

But you remember them.

I remember them vividly, a lot of things uh, um. There are certain things you don't forget. I mean you know, I, I was a kid. When you're hungry you do certain things, you know. I, I had friends--people, I made acquaintance that I would go to their house and I would sing for them and you know, entertain them and they would give me something to eat.

In Siberia.

Uh-huh.

Yeah. So that's what you were doing, just trying to get food to stay alive.

Yeah, you needed to survive.

You don't dream.

I don't dream about Siberia. I don't dream about Central Asia, which was a terrible time in 1943, I mean people were dying in the street of hunger, from starvation. I don't dream about these things. Uh, I don't know whether I block it out or I'm not, you know. I'm fine.

Whatever works.

Yeah.