Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

Alice Lang Rosen - August 5, 1991

Life with New Family

But when your father was ill, he recuperated...

My, my father recuperated and then they got married and then we all lived--we moved from the apartment that we lived and we all moved together into a great big mansion--literally it was a big mansion. I continued going to school. They were very strict, I remember very strict. And uh, I was a little temperamental at--I think then my temper--yeah I had been subdued for so many years I think that by the time I was about twelve, thirt...I was thirteen when they married, in fact, I was thirteen. And, um, so, if my mother reprimanded me, and one time I said something--I don't even know what I said--and she slapped me and I said something to the effect that, "If my mother were alive--you're not my mother and if my mother were alive I wouldn't have done whatever I did." And my father heard it and he came in and he--first and ever only time he had ever slapped me across the face but I flew across the room. I literally just flew over the whole room and that was the beginning of the end for me. I became passive again, never talked back, did what I was supposed to do, went to school, studied, I did make friends. I made--in fact, I have a Gentile friend that I still correspond with that I met in school after the war when I...

In Heidelberg?

In Heidelberg. And we still correspond 'til this day, we're in touch. I mean she was just as young as I was when the war started, what did she know? You know, what did they know? I was the only Jewish child in school in Heidelberg at, at the time.


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