Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

• Contents
• Map

Bernard & Emery Klein - May 23, 1984

Alright, now your immediate family then was still together?

B: Just the five of us.

Five of you?

B: Right.

E: With us.

And you're transferred from Humenné, and your grandmother already died, transferred from Humenné to...

E: Male Dvorany, to a Jewish farm. The owners of that farm remained on that farm, but they were, they gave us quarters to, to, to share and to live there.

Okay, this is a good place to stop for now.

Emery, tell me what you remember most after you were taken away from Humenné and deported to the, or taken to the farm.

E: We were at the farm, unfortunately, only a very short period of time because the persecution did not stop and was not limited to Humenné. It was done all over Slovakia, and while we had a little bit of, of... B: Breathing spell...

E: Brief, or breathing spell being taken there, we stayed there only a few months. B: From May to September.

E: May to September to be exact. As a matter of fact, one of our cousins with her two young children who was living at that time on Aryan papers. Her husband was already, at that time, taken away, and she with her two children was able to get uh, Aryan papers, and she was just literally going from place to place. B: Maybe we should stop here for a second to just, to comment on the papers. You see, what happened is that, as I mentioned before, in a small town like Humenné, you couldn't just disappear. People had to move into other communities once we started learning that being taken is not the, exactly what we thought it is, just a labor camp, 1941. So, it became a, quite a way of getting, hiding is by buying false birth certificates and, and in Slovakia, you could actually get from churches certificates testifying that you are either a Roman Catholic or a...

E: For money. B: Russian Orthodox, obviously. So people who decided to hide would buy those papers and go to other communities where they wouldn't be recognized. But just in case they would be stopped for, to, to present IDs, they would then be able to show that they were not Jews, particularly women, of course. Okay, I'm sorry.