Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Hermina Vlasopolos - April 9, 1984

In this country did you talk to many people about what had happened? Did many people...?

Not too much, I mean--some people didn't want to hear. I mean, not because they, they didn't believe me, because they didn't want to, to be bothered with it. It happened in Romania too that some people didn't--some people went away--I had an acquaintance and she told me you went through it and I should be able to listen to it. In Romania it's funny that there I spoke, I mean I wrote and for a while I was uh, I was able--in the newspaper, it was The Contemporary, you know. And uh, I had a disagreement with the Russian uh, managers because it was for SovRom Film, you know. And uh, he told me to do it again because what I had, it was, I didn't translate into Hungarian. I translated from Hungarian to Romanian. I don't know Hungarian as to be able to translate, you know, into Hungarian. And uh, they had a Hungarian section and the Russian movies were translated into Hungarian...

I see.

...also, and he knew that something is with Hungarian, you know, but he didn't know it. And he accused me of a bad translation which was made into Hungarian.

Mm-hm.

So I went and I tried to explain to him that I didn't speak Russian. He had an interpreter and he didn't let her talk, because probably he didn't like me for one reason or another. And he uh, I was not on the payroll, you see, I was a permanent collaborator. At the beginning we worked this collaborated because there were few importing houses. This was before the Communists took over. So we had our clients, you know, each of us. And uh, I happened to, by my friend to be introduced to uh, a woman who was the chief executive in one of the importing. Uh, she was killed about 1979 in Israel by one of the terrorist bombs. She was the accomplished person that I have, that I have known. The, the, the most ??? person I have ever met. I really adored her. And uh, without having known me before, without having--she decided that she had, she has to help me because I came from a concentration camp and I had to start my life anew. And she gave me all the movies what they, they bought that, you know, to, to translate. And they used import all the westerns, which was very funny because uh, I don't know it was rather through, through a kind of instinct. I didn't know this kind of English at all.