Agi Rubin - December 19, 1984
Meeting Allied POWs
What kind of officers?
These were the prisoner of war officers that were captured in 1942 in the Crete islands. They were Americans, Belgians, English, all the captured and Yugoslavians, um. What happened, they heard that there was a group of people, obviously camp people, that they only heard of very little but they never saw anything like it. And these five officers, one was the translator in the camp, the Yugoslavian, and he was the head of the I guess the in- between guy, the Wehrmacht and us and he couldn't face up, I mean a man broke down crying and he went back and came back again. And we got scared again, but yet the scare was not real because we knew they were not Germans. We didn't know who they were or what they were, but we tried to have the feeling that these people are on our side, they want to help us. They walked in and they said so, of course the language barrier was there, but they spoke German to us, we all adopted that language, we all spoke German, and he said "we are gonna take you to a hospital and we'll take care of you." And they did, there were 12 of us at that time. And they marched us in to that camp and the soldiers lined up from both ends and we walked in. Everybody was crying and we were laughing. We said what are they crying about? I mean, we are here. I mean we didn't see ourselves. We weren't aware of our looks so I couldn't tell you what we looked like. And if I live to 100 I couldn't describe the goodness of these people. And they weren't all Jews. They were soldiers, they were prisoners of war from '42 but they were treated as human beings. They were under the protection of the Red Cross and they helped us back to life again. For three months they cared for us in the hospital, and the Yugoslavian that walked in and saved us back to life is my lifelong friend who lives in Israel now. His whole family and he's the one that his name was, is Marco Rubin, as it happened, so was mine, but he lived under an assumed people, he was called Rubinovich at that time after the war he went back to Rubin.
Is he related?
No, he is Yugoslavian. Different world all together. And um, he taught an awful lot to us. He told us how to handle ourselves, now you are young girls, he just was our overseer, I cannot be grateful enough to him all my life and I am.
How old were you?
I was 15 at that time. At liberation. And also, he was the one that buried our lady so that is our only good feeling about it, that we know where she is although it's in the eastern zone of Germany that, interesting that I was always afraid to ask my girlfriend, they travel a lot but have they ever re-visited their mother's grave? They didn't even know where she is buried. They are just as bad as I am about pulling down the shade, you know. It's not gonna happen. You don't hear, I can talk to you and I don't hear you if I don't want to. I mean, it doesn't exist.
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