Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Simon Maroko - February 19 & 26, 1986

I was going to say, in The Diary of Anne Frank there's lots of discussion about the bickering that went on within the close quarters and eight people. Was it that kind of thing?

We had some bickering there, I don't remember. There was always some bickering ??? but uh, I don't remember any, any long period of time or so...

Do you remember anything outstanding about the farmer?

The farmer himself? Um... It's hard to think about outstanding. I can tell, tell lots, lots of things about he was a Christian By the way, I uh, this was the first time in my life that I read the New Testament in Dutch translation.

While you were there.

While I was there. I had nothing else to...And it's also on the subject. Uh, the farmer's family owned a lot. His parents. And he had some sisters and some--one of his sisters uh, took out uh, books out of the library of one of the places which were not department. And the people who uh, the librarians, most had noticed, hey there are some radical change in her face. Some, the books that I remember there was funny subjects such as uh, naturography. Did you ??? about that? I got a, a group of other suggestion which I never had uh, before. All kinds of way of, anything I could read, rather than just reading and rereading the Bible.

Do you think that's because he was Christian that that's the reason that he...

I think ??? he said so. He needed the money, he was just married, the baby wasn't a year, ??? a few weeks old ???. And he was working. He, he worked his own little entity there. He worked also for others. Uh, at one time I was alone there, no other was there hiding. Either his own uh, wheat harvest or someone else's. It was brought in, in the ??? there was a cement floor and there he and I and me and maybe some others helped. Our technique was this. We had a stick which was a branch with a rather flat end. The other end we had in our hands and there was a particular motion there. We circulated this over our head and, and we beat the wheat harvest so that the kernels would be released. And this was the technique of uh, getting the, the wheat ???.