Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

Sigmund Rubin - January 12, 1982

Moving

But since they took my younger brother, I'm afraid to take chances. He says, "Pack your things and you have to leave." When we left there was no room whatsoever where to go. We couldn't find a place. We know, we knew that was uh, September 1944. We heard that the Germans, that the Russians are coming closer. It was terrible to think of it, that after that what we went through, to pick ourselves up and sit down in the field and get ready for them to pick us up. So anyway, he, it got to that point that they said, listen, you know guys we have to part and each has to go on his own. So we couldn't do anything else. You see, they knew the place, they could go one night they could stay one night in one barn, the other night in the other barns. They could help themselves. But we were strange completely. If they would catch us, if anyone would catch us they'll take us to the Germans, we had no way to survive. Anyway, that little hero, I call him hero because he was a hell of a good guy. Thanks, I'll tell you, thanks, thanks to him I'm tel...I'm telling you the story now. He says, "you know Sigmund," he says, "you know, listen, there's one place where I think that I, I'll be successful. I'm going to go and leave you here with Hadassah and to make sure, to make you feel good I'm going to leave you my younger brother. You know that we'll come back." And that's what he did. They left us, when we got in, we were, we got in on a field. You know those, there are pipes over little way uh, tubes, big tubes. At night we sit, we were sitting in the field and at the daytime we got in, in those tubes laying, stretched out, two days. After three days they came back and they said, listen guys you have a place to go. That was the joyest moment in our life. We went to a place my wife knew him from before the war. He was on, on a road that was leading to a bigger city, so anyone who was passing by he used to, he used to rob them. That type of a person, but there was nothing to lose. He accepted us, he told us to come, we came to him, we stayed there. He had a, a stable. In that stable he had a partition of pigs and he filled out the attic. The attic for the pigs was a little bit lower than the attic of the, of the stable. He filled out, he made--you understand what I mean?

Mm--hm.

He filled out that roo...the, the, the wa...the, the, the floor on the attic.

So it was even.

Even, even it out and made, he made a hiding place for us. It was sort of a box.


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