Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

Joseph Klaiman - May 4, 1982

A Day in the Ghetto II

Tell me what the rest of the day was like. You said sometimes you worked four hours, sometimes eight hours, and then there was a group that you would study with. What other things did you do? Were there other activities that people organized? Was there other cultural activities? What else um, do you remember?

What I remember, I remember uh, around the school I went to--after, after, after the war, we always went a group about twenty, thirty boys together--boys and girls together and we read about socialism, about the books what I--and I believe that this is the one thing what maybe it's going to help once if, if socialism is going to come in the world that this is the one that was going to make even the whole world. Now I am older and I see that's everything in the paper not on the--what's in the book is nothing. I changed. I changed a lot in uh, in this cause because I don't want to say, was a leftie ???, I mean. I was a little boy, I was thirteen years old. I, I uh, and...

What do you remember eating? Do you remember...

Eating? You eat just a piece of bread in the morning and that's all. Sometimes you didn't have nothing because they give you a ration for a, for a week, they give you a bread. And if you--sometime you was hungry you eat up in one day the whole, whole piece of bread and then you was hungry a whole, a whole week, you didn't have to eat. And then in the night, we came to...together a lot of friends and the, the neighbors and we was talking. That's all. We was sitting and, and talking about maybe one day it's going to be after the war, we was talking everyday. And always talked about politics. I was a little kid, I always like to hear--to listen what the people was talking. And...


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