Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Simon Maroko - February 19 & 26, 1986

Some of the students that we talk to when ??? um, who ask about the possibility of Jewish resistance in all this.

Mm-hm.

How would you respond to those questions?

Um, the closest I came to ??? I needed to ??? collect the weapons that had been dropped. I said, "I won't be long here ???." That's the closest that I came in practice. Outside of that I didn't know anything about weapons.

It was a general case with...

This was the probably the case with most... There may have been some parts of the, uh, Dutch Jews that knew, let's say, boxing or some ??? or some ???, anything about self defense. But I didn't know a thing.

So there was really no possibility.

There was no--I was sixteen, seventeen, eighteen years old at that time. Eighteen was very young. And before I was in hiding I was sixteen, seventeen. What did I know about organizing anything. I was still very much a boy.

One, one other question about earlier, a much earlier event. Did your, your family register when the Jewish....?

We regi...we registered like everyone else.

Everyone else registered as well. Were there any of you, do you know if there were anybody, people who refused to registered, who decided that it would be better not to register?

At that time I didn't know. Later on I found out there were some, and those were the people who ??? much earlier than I.

Were any of them caught when they registered?

I never heard.

Why is...

But we knew that uh, it was very clear the experience of Jews that had been at the ??? in Germany ??? experience. Also ??? We knew our lives would be alone. ???

But do you think it would have been wiser for people not to register?

??? I have a complete different opinion now. Uh, I think that that the only lesson that can be learned from that is that Jews like any other group has to be prepared for the worst. If necessary you know how to organize in self defense.

And not register.

Not register, yes definitely, that's the first appropriate--the first noncompliance.

I don't remember if I asked you about the general strike. I think I did.

You asked something about this. I knew it was, I heard some uh, something sounded like machine guns far away. I had no idea. Events were going over my head. I was a seventeen-year-old then who uh, who was not very world wise.

The trams stopped moving and...

I don't really ???