Hermina Vlasopolos - April 9, 1984
Life in the Ghetto I
Yeah.
You know, I mean, some papers out. The mailman, he used to come. We were not allow...allowed to write, but we allow--people who lived there were allowed to, to receive the letters. Anyway, there was a very big fence around the ghetto, very, very high.
Mm-hm.
I don't know how they, how they succeeded in doing it so fast. The sick people were brought into one of the synagogues. There were two, there were the bigger synagogue and the smaller one. And they were, you know, up by the women...
Yeah.
...usually, you know, there were beds. Some doctors and nurses were also among, among us. And uh, that's how they lived. Well finally after this they started to take in--it was a beer factory in this, in the same area. In the beer factory they, they created their torture factory ???. So they, everybody who, I mean, they eyed out a lot of the rich people because they expected they hid...
Yeah.
...things, that they had something that they didn't declare. You had to bring everything, every single piece of gold what you had to bring it to the bank before the, before the ghetto. And uh, of course very few people, some people, you know, gave in something, but uh, I know that my in-laws, you know, buried, I don't know, a lot of silver...
Mm-hm.
...sterling silver what they had and so on. My, I mean, my fiancé's sister whose husband had this workshop, they were well off. Not very rich people because it was not a factory, you know. But she had a few pieces of jewelry that her husband had bought her and they had buried this. They had buried this in... We had wood for the winter, you know, in this wood ??? and I never did find it, he told me where to where to go. And a brother of hers survived ??? and other people who searched, you know, they found it there. Must have, still much be some buried things. People after the war, they changed the room, you know, and they cut the wall they found in the wall, you know, jewelry and so on. And uh, well, again they were started to, uh, I had uh, one of the roommates, she was a nurse--I think she was a doctor--and she went everyday to work in the hospital, improvised hospital. And she came one night and she told me, "I have to tell you something," and I don't know. I don't know if you still or not, she was very, very pretty and uh, this police, I mean, this, you know, unit which was with us in the ghetto because they were the gendarmes and so on uh, told her, "If you can escape, do it." She said, "How can I escape from here?" I mean, the fences were very, very high. They were really very much watched with dogs and gendarmes and so on. He said, "I don't know, but if you can because you don't know what, what, what you have to expect." And uh, she told me that. She said, "I don't dare to tell anybody else because he told me not to tell anybody." She said, "What could they do?" I said, "I don't know." I knew that they dug, digging a kind of canal, you know...
Mm-hm.
...underneath. But what they did it was so stupid, they got out and they, you know, like here was the ghetto and this street. This street was in the, I mean, back like this part was in the ghetto, this side was not.
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