Alexander Karp - September 14, 1995
Contact with Non-Jews Before the War
Before the, the war started, did you have any contact with non-Jews? Did you have non-Jewish friends?
Oh, yes, yeah. We did. I mean it was a small town and ???? we would be playing on the fields soccer together or any kind of play. We did have, we did have, uh, surely daily contacts.
Did they come to your house? Did you go to their house?
Yes, there was definitely there was inter-mingling.
And what about anti-Semitism, did you experience anything, say in 1935 or '30, as a child?
Well, in 1935, when I was around ten years old, truly it's a faded memory to exactly to describe that which way anti-Semitism would have affected individually me as a person. However, anti-Semitism right after the war, and this came only through stories what we have been told, you know, it started shortly after the First World War. And it sort of, uh, grew on its own and it was feeding on its own. And as time went on, it just kept, uh, more and more accumulating in every facet of life. So, once I became closer to the young adult, such as fourteen, fifteen, teenage years, you know, it was more prevalent that anti-Semitism is there, even though in the earlier years, there was no physical experience as far as that goes. Now, we may have gotten into fights with, with Gentile youngsters who have also been influenced by their parents or by newspapers or radio. Of course, we didn't have television, nobody had that at that time. But, it was, it was spreading. It became like, uh, cancer. But it just kept spreading and spreading.
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