Pauline Kleinberg - October 28, 1982
Being Reunited with Younger Sister
So I was there about two or three weeks in this hospital. When they released me and I got to the room, uh, yeah, she went to there, to the office, find out what room number--where I am. And she came, telling me, she says, "You know what, I got good news for you. Your sister's alive. Her name is Lola but she suffered the typhus. There was an epidemic, the typhus, you know, and so many girls died after. And she had recovered--fully recovered--but she's not in a position to travel yet, and she's got already a boyfriend. And he said, if she'd be in a position to travel, he will bring her to you." It took a few weeks, you know, and being, you know, in this camp there were--the barracks were very nice because the--it was for their armies. It was the German army's camp--it was uh, then vacant for us. Downstairs was--it was upstairs her room, downstairs was two rooms and it was the washroom downstairs, the--with the lavatory and everything else. I was there and I hear somebody's asking in Polish, uh, in Polish, "Where is your Paula Pariser?" Those people were from Litvak in, in Russias. They didn't speak in uh, Polish. And their Yiddish is also different from ours. They couldn't understand. So one calls out the other, "What does this girl want?" And then I go out and I say, "Who's asking for Paula Pariser?" She said, "Paula, don't you recognize me?" And it was my sister--the youngest one--I didn't know she was living. She's now in California. She made through uh, in a...another camp. She has her story, but she made it, she pulled it through in, and uh, in this other camp. She, she had a rich story too. She was evacuating too. But they were--for two weeks they were walking, then they were put into trains. They weren't fed, they weren't--they were evidently poisoned. They were, were given the last ration of bread and poisoned, that's why they, they had the typhus and so many died of them. But one from the bakers said he didn't have--he, he stretched it, he was very slow. He couldn't do this. He knew when the English came he said that this bread shouldn't be--should be buried because it's with poison to poison the rest of the girls. And then we met our, we met our boys and we had a double wedding in Fohrenwald, the two sisters--me and my sister. One, one night we had two, two brides and two grooms.
Would you uh, describe what it was like at the Displaced Persons camp?
[interruption in interview]
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