Martin Koby - April 20, 1999
Hiding with Pigs
Six places?
Out of six places of hiding, three was among pigs, important places you know, was in--well, everyone was important. But here we are, fifty percent of the time our shield, the, the thing that you know, deflected us from...
Were pigs.
Were pigs.
Did you tell them that?
Well, yeah, that's what I--so I told them you know, the audience, that was my...
Hm.
...the beginning.
Yeah.
So they'll though where, where I was hiding ???.
Yes.
And you know, something--you know, it's such a crazy, crazy setup.
When you were there in, in the um, in the pigeon cove, among the pigs...
Yeah. The pigs were below us.
Below you, right. So you had to go through the pigs to get to the pigeon cove, is that what...
No, no. We didn't have to go through the...
But the pigs, you must have heard them...
Oh, yes! They were just down below us.
???.
Because she used to give part of our food to the pigs. The, the...
Did anyone ever--in the family ever talk about that "Here we are with pigs..."
No.
No.
Nobody ever mentioned it. ??? is hardly four and a half years younger than me, maybe he was--does not have all that, but--I thought they see us sitting in a Jewish temple or worship and thinking about pigs!
It's ironic, isn't it, yeah.
Mr. Zummer, back to Mr. Zummer's pig...uh, pigeon cove. The pigeon cove had fleas. Now, we had our--we brought our own lice there.
Hm.
Ah, that was a menace. Fleas were--they bite, they really bite you know, it hurts. And they jump. You can't catch them you know, you can't kill them. And Mr. Zummer didn't show up for several weeks. So my parents became suspicious. What about his carrying on with Germans and the women. And he'll say you know, "I got a secret for you, I got a house full of Jews in my estate." So one day they decided and they--we left. We went to Mr. Dvorjak's place you know, on Martynovka. That's why we happened to be in this haystack with the fence in it you know, in, in the cold.
And they checked it?.
On February 2nd, 1944--well, a week before that, even two weeks before it, we could hear thunder, far away thunder.
Guns.
Guns.
Artillery.
Artillery. Booming day and night, you know. Every time--every day is a little bit different. It shifted you know--well, sure, they were on the move.
Uh-huh.
So they moved uh, the artillery piece. The guns you could hear, one day it was east, the next day it was northeast, the next it was west, you know. It was--they went like around our village. You know, we'd say, "How come they don't come to our village?" Because they were defending the highway, the Kie...from Kiev. The Germans were holding the highway for retreat.
From Kiev?
From Kiev to Lwow.
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