Esfir Lupyan - December 17, 2007
German Occupation 2
But then what a ??? You know what is ??? You don't know. ??? is when uh, suddenly without announcement uh, police and Germans...
An Aktion.
Yeah, they run in houses, suddenly real quick and kill each, each, each, each.
In the house?
In the house. So, when, when somebody, somebody shout ??? and ??? goes around, you know, everybody goes to, to houses and say ??? Everybody jump, jump in basement and basement in these houses it's not like in American basement. Terrible places. It's, you know, not, not, uh--let's see--it's not comfortable. It's ground, it's wet, it's drip, you know, it smell terrible. It...
It's a cellar. It's called a cellar
Cellar?
Yeah.
Yeah. So, everybody try to jump, jump down in basement and hide, hide. Who has a ladder is good, but if was no ladder it's very good, you jump. It's old people and it's young people and uh, you know, mothers... That, and we, we hide in this basement and we know that they come. And one time, one time, I knew this girl. She was younger than me, she was four or four or... Um, we did not have time enough to jump and we stay in house, in our house, and up a side it was small house. Up a side our house was bed with... And in bed lay uh, very, very old man. Maybe not very old, I don't know ??? and he was sick. So, police, two police, it's not German. It was Wehrmacht German, it was uh, Belorussia, Belorussian uh, they speak same language. And they start with that uh, and he was ??? this uh, with uh, uh, with their weapons.
Machine gun.
Machine gun, yes. Machine guns and they killed him. And we, we sit on the bed and we look, we were numb with shock--small, two children--they don't pay attention to us. They kill him. Why, why they kill him? No, no make sense. And after that, one time I hear the ??? People, people uh, shout signal, it was signal ??? and I hear like small boy, small boy was crying, "Don't... Please don't kill me. Don't kill me. I'm, I'm still small, I'm young, I'm only ??? ten years," something like that and they killed him. That I remember very well and I remember when police came in--in our house--and they say, "Anybody should go, go to plaza. One of them from each house should go on plaza." So, my, my grandfather said, "Okay, I will go." And my grandmom says, "No, we will go together." And they went together and they never come back. They were killed. All the people on the plaza when they collect them, they gathered them, without any reason, they kill ‘em. So, that... That was, you know, step-by-step, they kill every day people. This way or this way, different ways, they kill. But, but ghetto still exists.
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