Did they think you were a relative of the professor's?
I don't know what they thought, they didn't think we were Jewish. That's for sure, they saw a woman with two little girls and I guess they felt sorry for us, and from time to time, they even gave us food. But, couldn't last forever, there was trouble brewing. While we were leaving the basement through the window, Momma scratched her hand and she got an infection, didn't pay attention to it, and she had a red stripe running up her arm, and one of the soldiers noticed it, and said to her, my God what happened to you, you have Blutvergiftung, you have blood poisoning. And what happened? Momma said, "I don't know, it's some kind of a boil here, and it'll probably burst open and it will be okay." He said, well, it can't wait. I'm going to open it up for you, I'm a felcher, I'm going to open it up for you and release all the pus. Okay. So he did. And he opened it up and it was okay, and she was still having that bandage on and the next day or the day after, somebody else asked her, oh, what happened to you, who helped you out? This felcher helped you out? Momma, said, yes, as a matter of fact he did, wasn't that nice of him. What's so nice, that the next day they came to pick us up and they were calling us to the station. We had no idea for what. Nobody told us, just "Kommen Sie". Come with us. So Momma went and I and Nina after. And we are positive, this is it. You know, turned out, they didn't think we were Jewish, they were calling us because of what happened with Momma's arm. They wanted to know if this man posed as a doctor, and why was he helping a civilian lady? And they stripped his epaulets, stars or whatever, and he really suffered, I think they even gave him some kind of a fine or what...but they let us go, in the meantime, we died a hundred deaths. This is ??? and then, then we had to leave this safe place altogether because they really evacuated everybody. The Russians were coming this time for good. So Momma really wanted to stay, but there was still a Polish family living in the neighborhood and they were going to a village escaping the Russians, and we couldn't say, well, we want to stay, because this would give us away. So we went with them to a village and this is where we were liberated by the Russians.
© Board of Regents University of Michigan-Dearborn