Harry Praw - June 30, 1982
Being Transferred to a Smaller Town
Mm-hm.
And then that particular town couldn't keep all of us so again they had to resettle us to a different--to smaller towns. So they--my two, two--I had two sisters that went to a different place. Me, my two brothers, father, mother, another sister, and grandfather went also to a small town...
Mm-hm.
...about five minutes--three, four or five miles away from this particular place.
Yes.
And there again, when we got to that town as funny, as funny as it may sound, with all the bad things but the Jews in that particular town didn't even know there was a war, that there were any Germans anywheres.
How, how come they were so isolated?
Ninteen forty, that was in 1940. They lived a normal life. Now we got there, we were shocked. The Jews were walking around--did you ever seen a real Chasidic Jew?
Mm-hm.
With his skull cap and tzitzits.g We couldn't, we couldn't even believe our eyes. We said, "What happened to the Germans here? Aren't there any Germans here?"
The Germans hadn't come there.
Nope.
Hm.
The Germans were there but the city was run normal in normal way. They just put out ad to provide so many Jews to work. If the Germans came in, like if there was a police station or German store where they said, "I need two Jews or two women to clean the place," so that's what we did. They paid us for it. And this was going on until 1942.
So you stayed in that small town.
Yeah, until 1942.
Did you have any news of what else was going on in the war?
No, we had no outside--we had no outside contact. As a matter of fact, the Jews there didn't even believe that there such a thing as Germans. The Jews from that little town didn't even believe that there were Germans. But this Jaslo was a bigger city than the one we went for--after that.
Mm-hm.
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