Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

Esther Posner - March 11, 1986

Nearly Being Discovered

And my parents were taken--all of a sudden I woke up one morning, my parents were there. The underground had taken them to the house where I was. And again, it was a wonderful relationship with--between my parents and uh, this family.

Which family was it?

Uh, I keep getting a block on their name. The principal and his wife, who had...

Talsma.

...six children.

Mm-hm.

Not ???, that was the widow. Talsma.

Talsma.

Yeah, okay, Talsma. And um, somehow we were feeling freer. The, the uh, the Allies were coming closer to us. We had gone through that--they call it Dolle dinsdag, that Tuesday when everyone thought they were--that we were going to be liberated. We had gone through that at the Kleinjan's where we were all in hiding and we had all taken out our shoes and tried them on and, and sat there waiting to be liberated, but nothing happened that day. But this time we knew that um, seeing as if um, we were going to be liberated. You know it, we could see the end coming. And one day I went sledding with, with the daughter on a hill--it was a couple of minutes walking--and my mother went to the hospital to visit my uncle who was sick. This, this uncle--remember I said to you--I told you three of my father's sisters were in hiding, one of them was married? Her husband--my uncle Carl--was in the hospital and uh, my mother had gone to visit him. And my father was sitting--my father looked very Jewish, he had dark hair, dark eyes--and he was sitting looking out the window, but, you know, behind the curtain and all of a sudden, uh, the ??? pulls up in front of the door and he ran upstairs. This house--by the way, all the homes that we stayed in had hiding places.


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