Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

Salvatore and Lili Katan - August 18, 1981

Relations with Germans Before the War

LK: ...in synagogue with all those Nazis who we thought were our friends, you know? We went two and a half weeks in synagogue before we went to the camps and they put us in those long...

SK: Crates.

LK: ??? and ??? we were bleeding right in the synagogue already, our own Hungarian Jews. There were trains, you know, and you couldn't open your mouth to say that it's yesterday you ate there and you had everything free in the stores.

SK: This happened to the Greeks too...

LK: Let me tell you something else, my grandfather used to...

SK: ...the Greeks, the Greeks, they, they were afraid from the Jews because we were the majority but everybody ??? as soon ??? we were taken out, Jews ??? everything over there ??? you took a boot, you took a ??? but the ???.

LK: ...sell ??? cigarettes and he didn't have special stores because he didn't buy it in the drugstore, okay? But they didn't have ??? cigarettes and cigars ??? okay? So, Shabbos, Shabbos my grandfather was ??? the store and ready to leave yet. They had a German who they hire ??? and she was like a member of the family and essentially she was in this too, okay? Now, that woman lived thirty-two years in my grandparents home, thirty-two years. My aunt had a little girl who was about eight years old and of course she lived there because my aunt lived with my grandparents. When we went to the ghetto when this was about ??? that German woman brought twice a week food and she took the little boy that he shouldn't start in the ghetto, okay? For six weeks, twice a week she risked her life and brought in food. ??? when we came back I went there and I ask her what she did with all the things what we left there because a lot of Jew's things--that we had brought to her ??? things ??? because she was German. But she was like Jewish because thirty-two years in a family...

SK: In a Jewish family she was working.

LK: ...??? ask her--she ask us what are we talking. And she saved all the things there and one of the lawyer who lived in the same block as my grandparents made her a paper that everything belongs to her--the house, the stuff. She didn't want even to open the door...

SK: She was a maid.

LK: ...to go in.


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