Freda Magnus - July 22, 1982
Searching for Survivors
After liberation did you, did you ever go back to your, to your home in Łódź?
Nope, I didn't want to, nope, mm-mm.
Maybe to see if anybody else was coming?
That's why I--yeah because I knew, you see, I had, I had family in Israel and I knew if somebody--I looked for everybody, you know--but if somebody survived I will know about that, see?
Yeah.
Because I knew that nobody would go back to Poland and everybody will try to go to Israel, see? And um, I looked for them in Israel matter of fact my alive cousins I found everybody. They did ???. One cousin went back but how could--even if you went back to Poland--I heard very bad things that the Polish people was killing the Jews that coming in, see? If a Jew came in they said, "Oh there's so many of us still survived, so many of us still survived." And, and when you went into the home and a goy lived there, he killed you.
If you tried to reclaim your house.
Reclaim your house--no, just to walk in, you know, and they saw that your still alive and you might reclaim it, see, so they killed you. And uh, it was very bad. People were afraid. I heard, you know, about from Poland and I didn't hear--if I would hear that my mother--my father was there or my brother's there I would go but I didn't hear from nobody so I said, "I'm not going back till I hear from somebody, where ever somebody is." And that's what it was. I heard from my cousin and my cousin was in, in um, America and I came to America.
© Board of Regents University of Michigan-Dearborn