Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Ilya Martha Kessler - November 1, 1982

When you left the ghetto for Auschwitz uh, did you go on a train, transport on a train?

??? yeah. And they took... And they said if we have go... uh, gold. We didn't had already gold because they took already away everything, the Hungarian soldiers and in the school they found it. Yeah they took, so we didn't have. Just they make it, they, anything you had to take it off and ??? They look at you, they look at all over the mouth if we had something, the German. And they looked shoes and they... Oy, what they did they threw them out, they threw them in, the, the men. And terrible what he tell you, everybody. So, and after when the train start to gro... go, and they start to shoot in the, in the train where we was. You know, they... Sometime they shoot somebody, sometime they let him to be afraid. Or for them to be tough. And they start to shoot there, you know, they knew the people. And my mother said, "Please, do something or I going to be crazy." She couldn't stand it, this. So ??? people, no bathroom. So many kids, so many people was in the... in one train. You couldn't... You, you were sitting this way like you, you couldn't stand up because you are afraid you are going to hit the other one. And crying with the kids and the old people daven and asking God to help us, davening. I never want to go to shul. I came to America, here I didn't and my husband ask me to go to shul and I said no. I won't go. Lots of years went by, still I am saying this, what I am doing here? I say I, I never going to be what I was before, never what my parents were. My, my son has a religious feeling. He's sitting in the shul, Yom Kippur. He's sitting shul. All day long, he's there, my son. And when he was young he said, "Ma, today I am not going to shu... to school. I go to shul." I said, "No, you don't have to go to shul. It's no God." So, my husband was so mad. He said, "Let him to believe in God. If you don't believe it, let him to do it." So then, later I uh, he used to... My husband take him to shul, so they went together. So later, he said, "Come with us. It's nicer to go together." So, we went the whole ??? with my parents and always together. So I, I am going.