Saul Raimi - July 7, 1982
Survival
It was a routine.
It was a routine. Actually I fought every day just to stay alive. It actually it was a routine. It was one struggle to keep your stomach full and to stay alive. It's just hard even to explain the feeling when you have--when you go through something like that for years and you--but this is in the concentration camp, don't forget in the ghetto before it wasn't much better. I mean, if you can say actually that everyone who survived was six years in one big con... in a concentration that lasted six years because the minute the Germans marched into Poland, you could actually say they started--you suffered and you suffered through all the way for six long years because if you were in the ghetto, the only thing, which in the ghetto was different from the concentration camp, but the ??? was your own. You still had your ??? Even some of my, my parents were uh, in a different part of Poland at least you were ???
Yes.
In a way you weren't completely--you were locked in actually like in a big prison where you could walk but you couldn't actually go out on your own. At least you had your own, you still had some relatives, you still had some friends, you know what I mean? And uh, but if you want to describe those six years that was one--you were actually in a prison for six long unhappy miserable years. Was it in the ghetto or was it in the concentration camp, for me I believe, I, I want to say if I was to describe it, that was one long big prison sentence for six years and if you survived it--and it's actually hard to believe how anybody survived. Because in the ghetto typhus, malnutrition, starvation, beatings, hangings, shootings, it was a common occurrence almost every single day.
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