Esther Posner - March 11, 1986
Introduction
The following is an interview with Mrs. Esther Posner conducted at the United Hebrew Schools in Southfield, Michigan on the afternoon of March 11, 1986. The interviewer is Sidney Bolkosky.
Could you tell me your name please, and where you were born?
Ok, my name is Esther Posner and I was born in Amsterdam, Holland, May 11th, 1937.
Um, tell me what you remember about life uh, the few years that you had before the war started.
Well uh, the German invasion was when I was just about three years old and uh, I really don't remember it. I, I, you know, people talk about it but I don't remember the actual invasion. What I, I, because I was three years old by the time the Germans invaded Holland. Uh, I have some very sporadic memories of, of my early childhood where we moved around Amsterdam uh, I know that uh, my parents both worked in, in my father's butcher store. And uh, my grandparents came from Germany and took care of me in the house. That, that was about what I remember.
Where in Germany?
Were they from?
Yeah.
Uh, both my parents were from very small towns and uh, my father met my mother because he went to uh, become an apprentice to a butcher in the small town that my mother lived in. And that's when they met when they were like uh, fourteen or fifteen years old in Germany. My father left in 1933 because that's when all the uh, uh, the economic sanctions came and he could no longer--couldn't open a business of his own. He, he had finished his apprenticeship and uh, then he came to Holland to open a business and my mother came in 1936 and that's when they were married in Holland.
What, what was your maiden name?
Rose, R-o-s-e, which is not a German name. But my, my father says that his family had lived there for generations as far as he knows.
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