Michael Opas - [n.d.]
Reflection on Experience
Mm-hm. Is there anything else you'd like to add? Any kind of thought or feeling about...
No.
...this experience in and of itself...
Oh experience...
...what do you think of this experience of talking?
It was very bitter experience. Experience--I, I would never thought of it--that it could happen. Like, like many people claim it, it--they couldn't believe that it's happened. I couldn't believe it either if--if I wouldn't live it through I wouldn't believe it myself. It was, it was--this is hard to describe it and it's hard to--it is hard to, to tell it how it is. Believe me, it cost me now--it--I got too excited when I told you this. It is really--I don't know how to describe it, it's--only people who lived it through could understand this. I know you, you are a--you heard stories--plenty of it--and you try to, to, to visualize it, but you cannot be a hundred percent...
Mm-hm.
...in, in, in that situation. Because you co...you co...nobody could believe it. I couldn't tell you not even one percent what I lived through. I just roughly describe you the life--the, the camp. But this was a daily routine for so many years. People were dying of starvation in the ghetto--in the Warsaw ghetto. It was--this was the awfulest thing I ever saw in my life ever. When I was going to work in the morning, I counted. Some...one day I remember I counted forty-five bodies on the way, on the way to work only. Probably another place it were more bodies. Forty-five, I counted forty-five bodies. I had to, I had to go by it covered with, with newspapers. The funeral home, the funeral home, funeral home--funeral wagon was busy from early morning to late at night taking the body--they moving the body from the streets. Yeah. I was--the only time I was at the cemetery was when my, my first wife's mother died. She died natural causes in, in my apart...she lived--she came from a small, she came from a small town--from Kutno. She came to live with us. And all, all her family were--was dead already--she lived alone. So she finally got out from the ghetto there and she came to Warsaw. She stayed with us. After a few months she passed away. And this was the only, the only time I, I had a chance to go to the cemetery to bury her. Yeah. We used, we used the best linen that she had prepared for youngest daughter wedding, wedding things--I mean, for her wedding. She was pre...she was getting married here, you know, but she was killed. So we used her things to bury her.
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