Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Simon Maroko - February 19 & 26, 1986

I didn't know whether I might need it. He agreed upon the price. And he said, "Tomorrow I'll do something so that you can escape." That night we slept there and next to me there was, I would say a remote acquaintance, an eighteen-year-old or so, almost my age, boy. And I told him that I intend the following day to escape. I said, "Do you want to join me?" He agreed. Um, the following morning, the certain time that we had agreed upon, I gave him the money. He gave me a door handle, which at the end had a square metal piece, which could fit in a door where a door handle had been removed. And he said, "You have to come with me now." The other guy who was going to escape together with me said, "We have first to go back and uh, pick up our uh, belongings. My coat, which had cost me precious coupons also was there." I told him, "Either you come with me now or never." I say, "You do it now and you forget about material possessions, we do it either now or never." And I forced him to come with me, or I gave him that choice. The bo...uh, we went with the boy, he ga...brought us to a, the higher levels of the prison. We got in a space which was close to the uh, space above the... Let's say the highest level. And he showed us the door. I opened the door. From there I could walk--we could walk through the uh, space above the stage and from there we could walk a little bit further and there were windows which were easily opened to get on the roof. From that roof it was a relatively short distance to the house on the right side again next to it. That house had been empty. There was a skylight there, which was easily lifted. And we got in there and we could see below the skylight there was a bench about this high, let's say uh, one, one and a half feet high. So other people had preceded us on that same route. We jumped on that, it broke the fall. And from there we got to the first floor, through that empty house and there we took our David star off and we left the house, first looking very carefully in both directions that no German would be there. And we went to my house.