Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

Lanka Ilkow - October 12, 1991

Reminders (Continued)

Um, this attitude about dead people, it's connected to your experience during the war.

Yes, I slept with dead people all the time, you know. And, and so scary what I saw, they threw it there in uh, in, in Bergen-Belsen. So it's like a house with dead people. And they threw us together, together, those people hanging.

Hi. [addresses husband]

Hey Martin.

Husband: ???

So uh, you know. So I, I had all these bad dreams and I uh, I used to scream. Even now, I have--don't I scream sometime in, in my sleep?

Husband: You scream too much. You know all those. You know, actually I would say, all the people who was in Europe--I mean the Jews--everybody should get some money from Germany. Everybody's affected. I didn't, I wasn't affected that much because I wasn't there. But I was also affected by it, not in the same sense that she is. I mean, I don't scream about it. But, I...

I have bad dreams.

Husband: I have dreams also about it even, I wasn't there.

Yeah, he tells me too sometime.

Husband: I'm dreaming I'm flying and running away from the Nazis. Because I heard the stories from my wife and ???. And I--a Gentile would be not affected because he didn't hear it.

And I can't stand it, he watches sometimes those movies uh, the Germans you know, the war. And I scream at him, I say, "I don't want to the, the heard, the German, and I don't want the music and I don't want nothing." Ringing in my ear all the time and I just don't want to hear it. And I don't know, sometime he doesn't wanna understand it.

Husband: I understand it. A friend of mine told me about it. So I, I understand it.

But uh...

What about holidays? How, how would holidays affect you?

Holidays affect me a lot because the way we're--the two of us only, we have here that one daughter. She comes. But holidays I remember from home, even we didn't have these kind of foods we have here. But still it was so happy, the holidays. My Zeidee and, and my father used to sing beside the table. And, like I would see him, he was sitting in the corner and singing, my Zeidee and I looked up to him, you know. And, and I wanted my children to do the same, but it didn't happen here with the children. They give--come tonight do me a favor, they coming for dinner.

Have you told your daughters about your Zeidee and...

Yeah.


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