Bernard & Emery Klein - May 23, 1984
Return Home
B: Border. And we ended up coming home on a Czechoslovakian Army truck. Which had gained through luck, we run into a Jewish boy who was an officer in the Czechoslovakian army and who assigned a truck for us to take us back home to Humenné. And this was quite an experience coming back and, an...
E: It was February 8, 1945. I recall the day. And we went immediately...we slept over at a cousin's of ours the first night who was home. She was a pharmacist. B: She was in hiding.
E: She was in hiding in the forest, so she came home. She was already home because Humenné, at that time, was already liberated. The war was still on. But Humenné was liberated by the Russians, so she was home. And next morning, we went to examine our home and we found that there some poor servants were still living in the house and a... B: They deserved the house...
E: And we immediately moved back in to our home, and, uh...
Were they pleased to see you?
E: Yes, yes. I would have to say that they were. B: Yeah, at that point, I'm sure they were because, uh...
E: And we were such novelty in town. We were the first to, first returnees. B: We may have been the very first ones to return from actually Birkenau, Auschwitz, from those types of concentration camps.
E: We certainly were the first ones in that part of the country. B: Because it was early February, it was, as a matter of fact, most people in Humenné that survived the war were not back home, it was only a handful of young people who were in the woods with the Partisans...
E: Jewish people. B: Jewish, yeah, that's what I'm talking, the Jewish people. There were very few young ones, maybe a dozen that were at that point back home. So we definitely were, if not the first, one of the very first families to come back from Auschwitz, or from Birkenau. And naturally, the stories were endless in those days.
Did you expect to find your mother?
E: There was always, always a secret hope. B: Secret hope constantly.
E: Always. For a long period of time. B: The fact that she did not survive, nor did our sister and many of the other families was slowly sinking in, of course.
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