Edith Roth - March 28, 1982
Life After Liberation
Uh, I just want to know a little bit about the liberation, when you, you uh, you went back home, you said.
Yeah, well this Russian Jew who got freed at home finally, okay. He, he actually arranged two trains, two cattle trains, for us to go home to Czechoslovakia to be hitched up, every, by every stop, the two train was hooked up to another train going home to Czechoslovakia.
Again in a cattle train?
Cattle train, yeah, because at that time trains were not available because everybody was going home, people were sitting on top of the trains and...
How did you feel on a cattle train again?
Uh, we felt good because otherwise, we would have stayed there a long time and...
Oh, so it wasn't like the other...
No, and he actually saved us from being raped all the time because he gave us some kinds of papers that we could show that we were, we were prisoners and we were going home.
When you got back to uh, Uzhgorod...
Uzghorod Q; Uzhgorod. What was...
Our house-Gentile people lived in our house, and, and wouldn't let us in.
Were they Hungarians? Czechs?
I guess Hungarians, I don't-there was no Czechs anymore. And um, we came, we hollered and we got together a couple of kids who were survivors and made them, we threw them out. But the Russians were occupying the whole town, the soldiers... Whatever you want. So they took part of our house, the soldiers, and they gave us one room, so there was no way to stay.
So it was you and your sisters in one room?
In one room and every night, they were knocking at the door, so we stayed. I met my husband, all the, all the young people who were survivors came to this Uzhgorod, whether you were born--my husband was born forty miles away, or whether you were born outskirts of Uzhgorod, everybody sort of came to Uzhgorod, okay, came to our city, we gathered there and we kept together, the survivors, the kids, the girls and the boys, and, there was nowhere to go, no food, no, no money, no job, so the Jewish agency sort of opened their soup kitchen and we went everyday for the soup, in line for soup, and we were fighting with each other because nobody wanted to go to stand in line for the soup.
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