Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Harry Praw - June 30, 1982

Oh, I see. So your son was mar...so you came with a ba...a young baby here.

I came with a baby. I came with a year old baby--a year and a half old baby. And I went to New York on my own. I went by train. I got off the train ??? and I thought that must be a nut house. There were people in the streets and eating. I didn't know--I couldn't figure out what happened, why somebody was chasing him. The guy was running with the hot dog, one was running with the hamburger. And I asked the guy--I gave him a piece of paper and told him, "Give me an idea about the add...where this place is located--the address." He told me, "Go outside, there's a cab. Take a cab, it'll take you there." All right, that was all right. I was a stranger in the city like New York. When I got to the--I finally got to the place I asked my sister in law--she was already living in New York a year--I said, "How come everyone's running and eating in the streets?" She said, "That's the way they live in New York."

Uh-huh.

Excuse me, the dog--I think she wants to go out.

Oh, okay.

Want to go out? Want to go back out? Come on.

[interruption in interview]

Well when I came to New York, that really opened my eyes. We were longing for Jewish life and that's where it was. So again, I was twenty-seven years old. I figured I worked there for fifty-five cents an hour so I figured I could go to a city like New York and there a lot of Jewish population and everybody I met a lot of people from Germany, a lot of my friends already lived there and they sort of talked me into move to New York. Everybody was telling me, "You'll get a job. A young man like you? You don't have to worry about it. Twenty-seven years old, you can find a job, find an apartment." So I said, "I'll have to go home and talk it over with my wife." So, I went back to New Orleans and I stayed there another three months and we decided to move because my wife had a sister. The only survivor--two survivors of the Holocaust, so why shouldn't they live together?

Mm-hm. Where was your wife from?

Sosnowiec.