Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

• Contents
• Map

Pauline Kleinberg - October 28, 1982

So he picked himself up, by himself, and came. And when he told me there are people, they are Jewish, you can talk Polish and I have a job and I make sixty dollars a week and that I'm going to build--join the union in a month, I'm going to get a raise. Yeah, so we were with one more couple, I said four. So I come into those uh, we lived next door. You know, in a bungalow together. Whatever happened there every breathe I--we--I, I, I could hear and they could hear me too. So I said, look, "Avrum is writing a letter, it's so beautiful." Because there they took me to work for fifty cents, it was there that, that those, uh...

Husband: Segregation.

The segregation was still very strong in 1950.

Husband: Black men worked for fifty, for fifty cents and white women get seventy-five cents.

And there you walk into a bus, it was black to the back, and all this, you know this. You go to a show, blacks and dogs are not allowed, you know. And they treated the newcomer, you know, another animal, the same. So uh, so, but he made thirty dollars and a penny. When he wrote me--the other men--the, the other couple that came, he made same--the same uh, money. When he said he's working in a factory and he makes sixty dollars and he said if he's going to join a union he's going to make more. Boy, I tell you we were happy. But then later I hear that he says, ??? if this is true, I'm going to get uh, golden uh, uh, hair growing out here. He didn't know that I was hearing this because when we got here everything, it was a bungalow. Then I got sad again and I write a letter to him. And I asked him, I said, "My husband is a very sincere man. He has never lied to me. Then, maybe, maybe he wants to make me happy, and do a little lying now." So I wrote, I said, "How can you prove that you make sixty dollars a week?" He said, "I can send you the stub," and he sent me a stub. When I showed him this he--so the other man said, "When can I go to Detroit too?" And you know what, they're--he's here, he's here.

Husband: A ??? was here..

So, you know, when I came...

Husband: ...Paula stay with me.

...after that, there are a few more families came. It was like a chain. They said Christopher Columbus discovered America and Avrum Kleinberg discovered Detroit and we all came to Detroit.