Hermina Vlasopolos - April 9, 1984
Back to Oradea
Okay. Let me ask you, how long did you stay in Budapest?
Only three days or something like this.
And then where did you go from there?
I went to uh, to Oradea and hoped to find something, you know...
Yeah.
...some of my things that I did find. I mean, I didn't find anything. I knew with whom I left a few things and uh, these people ??? and it was, they never thought that we are going to come back. So uh...
How did they react to you when you did come back, were they...
They were very surprised.
Mm-hm.
Extremely surprised. And there were also committees from, from JOINT in Oradea, so they gave us some material to make a dress out of it. They gave us some money. Uh, I found, we found friends. It was very painful because in Budapest people had come from all over the country because they knew that the Jewish place where people would come with pictures of their loved ones and asking, "Did you see this person?" I mean, in camp you look so different, you know, that you couldn't even ...even if, if, if you met this person, you couldn't have known that it is the same, you know, the same person. The only person whom uh, I was able to tell something was in Bucharest, and she was the wife of one of uh, I mean, my uncle's boss who worked, who worked as a bookkeeper of uh, I don't know, importing uh, company. And she was from Paris and she had three sisters and I was in the last camp with one of her sisters. And uh, I was able to tell her that her sister is alive. But uh, no there were five sisters and a brother and only the two of them are alive. The one who was in Romania and who--and the other one lost three sisters and a brother. And the father who escaped, for he was not taken, I don't know what happened in Paris, died in an accident. Run over by a truck right after the war. And uh, she was not--I, I, I went to Paris and they stayed with a sister. I mean, they left Romania too, this couple. And they had left Romania before me. When I went to Paris, she didn't want to talk to me. She didn't want to talk to anybody about anything. She was, she was a, a, a wreck and this was in '62, almost twenty years, you know, after the war. But uh, I was never able to--I met her, she remembered that she helped me but she never talked to me.
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