Bernard & Emery Klein - May 23, 1984
Death of Cousins
E: The experience I was just about to mention was quite a most horrifying, probably, experience at those early days. Namely, our cousin and her two very, very young kids, the kids couldn't be at that time older than maybe, one six and the other one... B: No, they were my age. The oldest was my age, and the other one, so that was about fourteen and twelve.
E: Be that as it may uh, they were staying with us for several weeks uh, at, but at one point, she--the mother and the kids and us--felt that it's becoming dangerous for her to stay on, and she decided to move on to another, to the next hiding place. And we were cautious enough not take her to the railroad station, so then we don't give any clue that she is Jewish or anything like that. She went to the railroad station with her two kids by herself, but unfortunately, somebody must have recognized her, because as the train was to be pulled off, she was taken off the train with her two kids and thrown into a jail, and on this particular date, they had what we had in our town every Thursday, they were, they were picking up Jews for deportation. But here in this instance, was even worse. They gathered about 30 Jewish people, including kids, women, old and young, and they take them out to, they took them out to a forest. They made them dig a large, large hole, and they shot every one of them and buried them right there in this hole, which alas, as I say, to us, at that time, the most shocking direct experience which we experience, which we right in front of our eyes, and happening to some members of our own family. You cannot imagine how it affected us, and we stayed on for a brief period of time, and then one day, ??? the, the Hlinka Garda representative came to our home to pick us up. Go ahead, you were going to interject something.
© Board of Regents University of Michigan-Dearborn