Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

• Contents
• Map

Hermina Vlasopolos - April 9, 1984

Oh yeah.

...you know, golden coins from--and uh, I always, my daughter wanted very much to come. She was thirteen when they left, she was fourteen when we came here. And I don't know, she probably, she didn't tell me then but she got scared because somebody told her in Bucharest, well, you have to, you don't have to be so--of course she was very close to me because her father died when she was eight and a half years old. And they told her uh, well, let go a little bit your mother, you know, because uh, if you're going to go to Israel you have to be in a kibbutz, or I don't know, and you will not see her. And this, you know, stuck in her mind. And she didn't tell me but "Listen up, no, no, no, no, no." And while I was in Paris I, I kept on writing to Is--they didn't encourage and this was the truth too, you know. This cousin of mine who had the newspaper in Pa...he arrived in Israel and had, went on with the newspaper and he always told me you should be a journalist because ??? and so on and so forth. And he did not encourage me at all, you know, to, to come to Israel. And here my relatives kept on calling me and telling me what a wonderful opportunity it is and so on.

Yeah.

And when I came it was quite uh, quite disappointed. Uh, I'm still not very much at ease, you know, with the, with the society and I still have to go from time to time back to Europe in order to...

Mm-hm.

...to breathe a little bit of European air. I don't know. It is my fault because they said the most intelligent people adapt themselves, you know, towards a situation. But I don't. I, I didn't. It was very, very hard for me from all points of view. I mean, a single woman point of view, now for an older woman point of view. I cannot go with the senior citizen, I cannot get along with the ladies, you know. But I have a child here and I have a grandchild now and uh, whatever. I wanted to, my, if my dau...my, my friend wouldn't have been shot, I mean not shot, killed – she wasn't shot, she ran into this blasting bomb--I would have gone to, to Israel...