Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

Agi Rubin - December 19, 1984

Adopted Mother Ill

What do you mean by dismissed?

Well, just left to die. We had no medication. That was maybe they let you stay there for a couple of days and then send you back to work, just to rest it off once in a while, but there was no help for you. There was no medication. So people kept it as a secret. Even today, when you tell a survivor "hospital", nobody is going to go to the hospital even just to have babies. Hospital is not a place of help. It's a place of fear. Cause you just denied being sick, you are strong, you know. So after this place I called the lice place, we were again sent by foot again and the last place was inside of a forest which at that point it was, we didn't know it but it was the end of the war, the planes came as low as maybe seven feet high, I mean we could see the pilot, that's how low they circling, to see, and they didn't bomb. They surveyed the area to see who the group was. At that point the Germans soldiers wore civilian clothing over their military clothes, they were ready for defeat, they obviously knew that was the end of the war. At that place, and still, people would go in the forest to find a little leaf and a little wood, they would start the fire and boil the water that was in the creek so you could take the water and boil the grass and that was a sin too. They shot people for doing that. In the civilian clothes, they wanted to save their lives and still they crippled people. Came night again and they gathered the whole group to go on because they, I guess they just have to evacuate. And as they were evacuating themselves they dragged us along. And that afternoon my lady didn't speak any more and we had to go. Now, knowing that if you stayed behind that means you are shot to death. If you can't walk, you are finished. And we had a conference with my family, I said "what are we gonna do, we can't leave her here? And we are not going if she is not going"... and I was going to running around the whole camp, "can you give me a little wagon please," to the German soldiers, "please give me a little wagon, so I can carry my mother," so they just shunned me, they said what is she talking about, a little wagon, I just felt that if I had a little toy wagon, I could pull her that was my symbol, the wagon, to pull her to life. But I couldn't find a little wagon and there was no way we could transport her. So that transport was leaving and as they are leaving people are screaming, "are you crazy, you made it so far now you want to be killed? Come on out, that's enough already, come with us"... Oh those bad people, can't they see that I cannot leave my, how can I leave my family, how can I go? So my girlfriend and I, we said goodbye to the world, I apologized to my father, I always had a feeling that he was alive, subconsciously because he was a symbol of life to me and I asked for his forgiveness that I cannot come back to him, but I cannot leave my lady behind. And we sat down and we were waiting, and, to our biggest sur..., we found about ten other people, the crippled ones that could not walk, and to our biggest amazement, a truck arrived, an open truck with a German soldier dressed in civilian clothes and shoved us onto this truck and we were sitting and the transport is walking, we bypass the transport, and we arrived again to this place which we didn't know what it was and they said we had to get out and then we had to get out my lady was, my girlfriend spoke to me says, "mother is not speaking," I said "let her sleep, let... she is resting." And she just rested and we arrived and I looked at her she was dead in my arms and we had to remove her from the truck and leave her on the sidewalk on the trench. And we were taken away again and the next morning, and we slept again, there was heat, was again a room full of air and it was wonderful. And at that point I says you don't want to think, let me just sleep. Sleep was the best, not medicine, it was just something that things are not gonna happen, you don't know what's going on. The next morning a group of beautifully dressed officers walked in and they looked at us and they turned around and then they were crying.


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