Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

Bernard & Emery Klein - May 23, 1984

Memories of Experience

Let me, let's talk a little about your feelings now about the...

E: Now if I may stop you for a minute, as long as we have the pictures, here, so...

Oh, you have your families.

B: Ya, right. To bring a little bit up to date. As I mentioned, I married in Montreal but moved here and the, our son, Ronnie, was born in 1958, and our daughter, Susan, was born in 1963, and from all of the pictures there, you'll see she is graduating Cranbrook High School. Ronnie, in the meantime, graduate law school, and he now lives in Chicago, and here we are, and this is my wife, Agnes, and that makes up the family.

Are there other pictures?

E: The other pictures. This is a picture of my family. I was lucky to find the very fine young lady and a native of Detroit, Diane Yura, who is now Diane Klein, and I am fortunate to have two fine kids; my son, Jeff, who is now 15, and my daughter, Barbie, who is 14. This happens to be a picture which was taken in, I think, 1980, when I was sharing Bar-Ilan dinner. These are the pictures of my son, Jeff, and my daughter, Barbie, their school pictures.

I want to, I'd like to come back to talk about them in just a moment, but, what were and are some of your feelings about the years from 1940, say, to 1945?

B: Well, it's a reality that we cannot forget. It's where, for a while, it was uh, quite difficult to talk about it. From the beginning, we used to be asked all kinds of questions, but I could see that some of it just went above the heads of the people who asked, and it was...I reached a point where I just stopped talking about it when my kids were growing up. My son, in particular, became very engulfed through watching television, the Nazi war movies. He became interested in my past and to some extent, I...in fact, I remember we used to take weekend trips, go out of town for short trips, and we used to spend the time driving back and forth answering his questions as to my, our war years. But, subsequently, we have not talked too much about it, and it became just too difficult. In fact, until this interview, I wasn't sure that I will be able to really go and talk about it. It's not because we want to forget or because we did forget. It's just something that uh, is uh, a very, very sad part of our lives.


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