Hugo Marom - February 8, 2008
Assistance from Non-Jewish Friends
??? had the, I don't know, the initiative, the...because it was well known that they were coming up...that they were picking up Jews. He took a truck and cleared a five-room apartment of furniture, clothing, jewelry, everything that was in it and took it by truck to the villa outside of town. They built together with his sister and his brother a big hole in the ground the size of this room and put everything in there, lined it with line...with tar paper, built a concrete slab on top of it with a slit so that he could put documents and somethings...letters that came in afterwards. When we came back in 1945 we dug up everything that was there. Everything was in perfect condition, money, coi...paper money from the time, bills, receipts, jewelry, clothing, furniture. My father had bought from the palace as a wedding present to my mother, he bought a bedroom suite from ??? from the Kaiser, from Kaiser Josef's palace, which was very, very valuable. It was so valuable that when my brother Rudy went to America it enabled me to fit him out for the trip, to buy him a sea ticket to go to the United States and give him enough money for the trip by selling this bedroom suite which was a double bed, posted and so forth with, with a makeup table and the small table where we used to learn Hebrew, special chairs and a very large armoire or cupboard and so forth. Um, how did I get to this?
I asked if you had any non-Jewish friends.
Yes. So this family...this, this wasn't everything that he did. During the war we...he...we had sent letters to our original address, which Germans moved into where we lived...into the apartment. Letters we sent...which I still have copies of...from...which came through Hungary and through Yugoslavia and Sweden...friends that my father had from, from years in the army and so forth, some of them were Czech friends and some of them were, were maybe business friends or...
[interruption in interview]
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