Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

Lanka Ilkow - October 12, 1991

Sister (continued)

Oh, I see.

Because uh, I went to the store and I told 'em I have to leave and I don't know what to do, we can't get an apartment nowhere. So everybody went separate, all of us separate ways. Two of 'em went to America and three of us was left. So my sister went to live with his mother. And I didn't know at that time--like I say, his mother, with her friend's mother. And uh, and uh, because he was in the military, he was a flyer. So once in awhile he got home. And the other girl, she--with a old couple she was living. And uh, they took care of her like their daughter. And I went to that aristocrat family.

So your sister fell in love with this man and...

Yeah, yeah, she fell in love and I was--she wasn't uh, twenty-one So--and I was her sponsor. So I forced her to go to America, you know. We had already the visas but I was left behind because of my husband, we got married there. So uh, I couldn't, you know. So we forced her to go to America. And she went to America in uh, in July she become twenty-one. So she was one month or two months i...in America, she came back. So I didn't accomplish nothing with that. Because the relatives, she was--they tell me she was sitting and crying and holding his picture and she didn't want to eat and nothing, she just wanted to go back. She was in love.

You had relatives in America.

She, she come to Scranton, Pennsylvania. And she didn't like it because we already lived in a big city and she--near Scranton, a little town, ???. And she says uh, the aunt wouldn't even let her flush the toilet, nothing. Because uh, she was saving water and they had a grocery store. God forbid she would take a candy or something. The uncle used to give her a candy that the aunt shouldn't see. And she make twenty-five dollars a week and the aunt says, "Well this is for food and this is for sewing, give her five dollar." So she says, "Here I lived with his mother, never took money from me I went to work and the aunt took all my money." So she resented that.


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