Pauline Kleinberg - October 28, 1982
Interviewing Survivors
We started out with a small list of people from Sharit Haplaytah and all the people that they knew...
Uh huh.
...I would go and interview and I would get another name...
Yeah, yeah.
...and another name. Sometimes you'd hear it in a newspaper--you see it in the newspaper, on TV, that this person spent time in the camps...
Yeah, yeah.
...write down the name, call them up.
Yeah.
I went to my dentist's office...
Mm-hm.
...I said, "Doctor do you know anybody who was from the camps?"
Who's your doctor?
Dr. Berman on Nine Mile and Greenfield.
Yeah, he used to be my kids' doctor.
Okay. Very nice, I had him for ten years.
Yeah.
Gives me twenty names. Twenty names!
Yeah, I was going to him too.
Okay. Um, I have a friend of mine who's a plumber, he knows five other plumbers that are survivors. And on and on. There's my friends. All my friends I say, "Do you know anybody that's a survivor?"
So how did you come to discuss with Annabelle?
Annabelle and my mother, of course, are very close.
Close, yeah.
And uh, Annabelle knows--she knew me when I was little.
Oh, she knows us real well.
Yeah, and so she asked me what I was doing with my time and I said I do this and I do this and I do this and I also do the oral histories. She said, "Ah, maybe you know this"--I said, "I don't know this person but give--right away, give me the name and phone number and we'll call them." We're going to try to get six hundred tapes by the time it opens up next year.
Yeah. Detroit has quite a big...
Some people won't talk at all about it.
Husband: She don't want to...can't even watch television if they show anything from the Holocaust. She avoid.
I can't. I was hoping and praying that I'm strong. I prepared myself very much for this interview, because I do want it to be down on the record somewhere, somehow. You know, I read a book--it was from the author--I happen to know the author, you know, I Want to Live to Tell the Story--I Wanted to live to Tell, to Tell the Story.
I have this book.
Yeah, Marcus ???. His story is very sad, but it's an entirely different story than mine again. It's entirely different. His parents had survived, they lived in a village--a different lifestyle. At a time ??? and they were dealing with ??? with all the jazz and all this. He was the only one that was in a concentration camp. They were by--they, they lived through a lot, no question about it. But uh, they survived--the family. And the whole--and he had it--he had help. But it's entirely different, entirely different.
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