Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Nathan Roth - February 4, 1983

This was in 1944?

This is '44, in February or so.

So you went back home...

Went back home...

...and then what happened?

When I got back home, let's see, quarantine was already on. Jews cannot leave the house. Never mind that you do not have food or anything, Jews can not leave the house any more. I got home within probably within a week before we were rounded up. One night when I--I kind of sensed what was happening. One night, I walked out the back yard, we had a big house, we had a big--a huge house, it was a L-shaped house, I would say uh, the front of it was hundred feet--eighty to 100 feet and the L going back was the same way and it had a veranda running across the inside, the other side of the house. And it was a big yard, big garden, big field, up to a creek and then up the mountains. And I heard there was some partisans, guerillas, you know, in the mountains already. So I went out one night and I made it all the way up to the mountains, nobody stopped me, although the orders were Jews do not leave the house. The loud speakers going all the way up and the, but I made it, I made it up in the mountains. Way up, walked for almost four hours. And why I decided to come back, I don't know, but I came back before, before daylight. Made it way up, almost to, to a mountain, that uh, I heard that's where they were around, but I came back. And then we were rounded up, it was on, on the Shabbos. We had to leave the house. We were standing in front of the house, until everybody else was in front of the house, before they said "Okay, start marching." And uh, we were taken to this, to the big shul, that was the first step, already detention center. The one that was the--I think it might have been Ashkenazi. Yeah, the other two were Sephardic, but this one was Ashkenazi. But interestingly enough, all three shuls only had one rabbi. There was only one rabbi for the whole--he did the swing--he came here, there, there. There was only one rabbi, one ??? other. One rabbi of the, of the--who was legally the power to uh, to, to what they call pasken shalos to uh, resolve disputes of kashrut.