Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

Rita Rosenzweig - March 24, 1983

Fate of Grandparents and Extended Family

To go back just a few moments um, what ever happened to your grandparents?

My grandmother--my mother's mother died um, in 1940 when we came back from France, she was heartbroken and--whether she was sick I don't know, but um, they used to say she, she died of a broken heart because she lost my cousin. She felt guilty, she wouldn't eat and she wouldn't do anything. My grandfather was arrested in '42. My uh, my father's side, my grandfather died in '39. And my grandmother was remarried and was arrested with her second husband, but she ended up in the old folks' home, I don't know how. When they arrested her, they kept her husband and she had a stiff leg, and they put her in the old folks' home and she stayed there until after the war. Uh, my father's two brothers--the younger two brothers, they ran to France and they stayed there in the underground. And my mother's uh, my father's sister was arrested while she was pregnant because they had picked up her son so she went with uh, with them. And um, my father and my--his brother, then my husband's brother were uh, arrested. And my mother had a sister in Poland, who was living there. And I guess they, with two kids, and her husband, you know, they also disappear. And my mother was just after the war, was just two brothers left. One who was very sick and stayed in his poor little house. One--two-room house, all through the war. Germans took him and released it, and they stayed there the whole war! With his wife and his son! I mean, starving, but they were there. And then this younger uncle, that was left. This was all that was left.


© Board of Regents University of Michigan-Dearborn