Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Bernard & Emery Klein - May 23, 1984

At what point did you find out about your mother and your sister and your aunt?

E: Obviously, there were people in Birkenau who were there already for a long time who came from the 1942 transport... B: Ya, that was the amazing part, that we run into a couple of young fellows.

E: From our town. B: Young boys who were taken, from our town, who were taken in 1941, yet. They happened to survive and wound up to various camps, they wound up in Birkenau. Unfortunately, the, we didn't have contact. I remember, we were separated by a fence, by one of those electric wire fences between two camps, but we once were able to talk to them through the wires, and we had little other contact. We, for some reason, we never saw them again, and uh, they, of course, told us to some extent as to what's going on...

E: They told us, when you see the chimneys burning, this is where, this is where... B: People are exterminated.

E: People are being exterminated, and from day number one, our concern was, was our mother and our sister among us, among those which were exterminated, and again learning about the procedures from these fellows that the mothers which wanted to go with their children really ended up in the gas chamber. We knew we have, as much as we wanted to believe that our mother, at least, if not our sister, will survive, we knew that the chances really were very slim for it, because we knew how our mother felt and how close she was to us and to our sister, and we could, realistically, hardly believe that she would have, say, that she will separate from our sister.