Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

Martin Koby - April 20, 1999

Hiding Again

On floors?

Yeah, wooden you know, like, uh...

Like in a house?

No, in a fa...in a house you have fine polished floors, right? Nicely sanded you know, smooth. This was just p...plank--big planks of wood, maybe uh, three, four inches thick. And they put them there you know, so a nice foundation--on foundation of logs so they were even. Number one, it's healthy for the pig. It's easy to clean. The--and the, the pig doesn't wallow in all that dirt. And they had troughs for them you know, with a little trap door you know, to--you know, a door to let the pig out and a door which went right to the trough. You know, you lifted up a lid, put the, the, the, the, the pigs' food in there and that's it. But he dug--he took one of these sections, one of these pigsties--each pig was separated from each other you know, they had--the pigs did not run around like a herd. Each pig had its own room. He took one of the rooms and he dug all the dirt out. Uh, I would say uh, about seven feet long and about six feet down. And about uh, about six, seven feet wide. So it was like a square box, okay? Then he put the floor back on top of this, so it--the floor was even with the other pigs...sties. One corner was like a little trap door and this wooden floor. It made a, a uh, a door to be interconnected with the other two room--pigsties you know, pig sections.

Yeah.

And our floor was only straw on top of the floor. So if you looked in there you say, oh, you got a pig missing there, right? Because the other were occupied by pigs and this one, ours was not occupied by pigs, just straw. And that's where we spent the last three months or three and a half months before February 2nd, 1945--'44.


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