Martin Koby - April 20, 1999
Reflections on Survival
I mean, there was a bright moon last night.
I wasn't up.
But it--but you--those things still come to you. Do--you started to tell me before we, before we sat down to this, that it doesn't seem to, to go away...
No.
...as you get older.
No, it's--not the, the hurt, the insults you know, the, the, the resentment, intense--is, is intensifying. I don't know, because I have more time to think about things like that or I'm more aware of it or I'm more conscious. I don't know, but uh, became very sensitive lately.
I...is it is a resentment towards the Germans?
I think it's more than the Germans, because if we--in our village, twenty-seven out of forty-eight survived...
Uh-huh.
...what does it mean? If it wasn't for the natives, all forty-eight could have survived. Who did they kill? They killed my two grandmothers, they killed an aunt that they--when, when this happened. You see, everybody went away. They went somewheres, to their friend or acquaintances, because you couldn't go to relatives, relatives were just dangerous Jews like you are...
Yeah.
...endangered Jews, so you couldn't go to--and who s...like myself and my f...my, my family were considered young people. But my grandma and her granddaughter, little granddaughter, Dorcha that--my cousin--a little--my cousin...
Yeah.
...and Hava, my aunt, where could they go? Mrs. uh, Adler, next door neighbor of my grandma's who needs you? Who wants to put up with an old lady? They went away and uh, a week later they came back, because people didn't want to keep them. You know, Christians I...you kn...they understood.
So they came back to the village?
They came back to my grandma's house.
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