Hermina Vlasopolos - April 9, 1984
German Occupation
Mm-hm.
And his parents were very, extremely nice and very, very good to me. And somebody came home and told them that uh, they saw me in one of these trucks, you know. So early in the morning, it, it was a curfew so you were not able, you know, to go out after...
Mm-hm.
...eight o'clock at night. So at six o'clock in the morning, I--somebody knocked, I had the--I lived on the first floor and the window was on the street. Somebody knocked on my window and I pulled, you know, the shade up and it was my future mother-in-law and I got very scared at what happened because her sister was pregnant in the last month and lived across the street. And I said, "Is anything wrong with Eva?" And she started to cry, you know, and I, I went out and I brought her in. And she said, "Get dressed and go right away home." So, I mean, your father--"He can't see you because we didn't sleep all night, somebody told us that you were in one of these trucks, I don't know who. Probably confused you with somebody else." And uh, I mean, this was the situation, if somebody was in one of those trucks...
Mm-hm.
...you know, you didn't think that you are going to see them anymore. And I remember he told me, "Once in life you gave me such a big joyous, this is all you gave me last night," you know. And uh, why, April the 5th, as I said, the ghettos started. On April the 5th we started to uh, to wear this star, I'm sorry...
Mm-hm.
...and uh, in, in, in one month everything changed. People were taken, you know, from the streets. You were not able to, to come after eight, I mean, you had to be at eight o'clock in the home. What happened was that I lived with, I mean, I had a, a little apartment uh, with a mother and her daughter. I mean, the father had died and they had a big house. So they rented a room and an entrance...
Mm-hm.
...which was completely separate, you know. Actually the bathroom was within, was in common. And uh, we, we became quite uh, quite friendly. The daughter was in love with a Gentile boy who was a policeman. The man came--and, of course, the mother was terribly against the whole, the whole thing. And he came when we had to go, I mean, when the ghetto posters appeared, he told me "You need to send some...someone, somebody, if you want to communicate something to somebody I will take it, I will do it." And the only thing what else I had a very good friend, her husband was also in the work battalion, but he was a doctor, so. He was as a doctor in the work battalion and she was a nurse, in surgery, a surgery nurse. And I just sent, look in the others on the other side of the town. And uh, sh...I, I let her know that if we have to go in the ghetto at least to try to find each other when...
Mm-hm.
...we arrive in the, in the center. We didn't know yet. And uh, when I make a diversion when they came in the Germans, I witnessed a, a very heartbreaking situation, it was when they took over the Jewish hospital. They came to the Jewish hospital and they ordered that in two hours to be evacuated. So you can imagine that all those sick people, I mean, the people were put in, in private homes and in, in, in synagogues. The people who had just surgery, you know. I mean they were not the means which you have today with all kinds of mechanic...you know...
Sure.
...mechanical chairs or beds or...
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