Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Esther Posner - March 11, 1986

Then toward the very end while we were still living in Amsterdam, there was a knock on our door at night and uh, it was the middle of the night and it was uh, they were very, very, very severe, very strict, very nasty. They woke us up and...

These are Germans?

Yeah, Germans. And we had to come right away. They gave, they gave us five minutes and we came out and went--were put on a truck and were driven on this truck to an area--it was like a house, not far from where we lived. It was like the very border of that, that uh, the uh, Jewish um, ghetto. And we just--we waited there 'til more and more people came and we must have been there a whole day. And my father kept going up to whoever was in charge and saying, you know, "We have to be released because uh, we've been released before," and uh, they wouldn't pay any attention to us. And finally at night we went on a bigger truck. All the people who were in the house had to go on one truck and we drove caravan style to the uh, Schouwburg where we were going to pick up more trucks and more people. And that's where the trucks stopped very briefly and somebody came to the back of the truck and this was a man we knew who had worked for the ???. and said uh, "He's on the truck," you know, like in a stage whisper. And my father said his name, Fri...Fritz ???. And this man said, "Hurry up, jump down, nobody can see you," and my mother and father and I jumped down and uh, we ran across the street. It was pitch--it was dark, it was night, but that we could do that, I mean, I still don't understand how we got away with it--how we just got out of there. We went across the street and the place that we went to was this home that the nuns ran, which--where they took care of the children. And from there we went back to--I don't remember if we went back to our house, but we must have gone back to our house. We had no place else to go. After there we immediately tried to--made arrangements to go into hiding.