Zoltan Rubin - January 12, 1983
Fate of Family
Let me ask you one...Your brother um, the one who was married with a child...
Yeah.
Was he...
In Banská Bystrica uh, yes, we were all together. My nephew from Budapest came back to Czechoslovakia because Czechoslovakia when there was the uprising, the Slovakia was already free, they felt. So, he came back from Budapest uh, and we were there in Banská Bystrica. We were somehow separated and we started with, and we pushed off in the mountains, so I says to my brother, "I think we shouldn't go together because I'm going to go with the partisans and I think you should go separately. If somebody will remain, at least somebody will remain. If we'll go together, will we get caught together, then we will be eliminated." And we separated ourselves. I was caught and he was caught. He was caught within the civilians. So, they lined up in the same evening, they lined them up and the first five people were killed and the balance was released. And the first five people, they were...My, my nephew was the third one, no, my nephew was the fourth one, and my brother was the fifth one, and my sister-in-law, the one with the child in her hands, she was the sixth one. And the Germans eliminated the first five and she was begging...she's still alive. She was begging that they should kill her too, they wouldn't kill her. And two weeks later or three weeks later, she got a letter from the German Wehrmacht that her husband was killed by mistake, because her husband was not Jewish. Because she had the German, the, the papers.
She had false papers too?
Yes, false papers too, but uh, too late so...so, so after the war we brought them down, he's buried near Banská Bystrica, he's buried with and my nephew too. So uh, that's about my life story. A lot of things, what I can...what we could talk days and nights.
Why, why...A couple of things now. While you were in the camps, the uh, prisoner of war camps, did, did you ever wonder about the rest of your family, did you ever think that they were still alive?
We knew, we knew what's happening over there. We didn't, we didn't think about it. We didn't think that they were alive. I, I...as a matter of fact, once I had, at night, I had, once I had a dream that I see my older brothers, especially this, this older brother who went voluntarily, he was...we were not like brothers, we were so close to each other, we were, we were, we were one, one, one, friends and buddies, so it came to my uh, dream that I see him how he's being, how they hang him, I seen it. So, we really didn't think that anybody will remain because we knew what's going, what's happening in the camps.
What happened to your brother?
He, he never came back.
He was killed?
He, he...Yeah, somebody came back. A friend of his, he lived in Toronto, and he says that he died under work, he died at work, outside, that he wasn't uh, he died by working on a field.
Around the same time that you had your dream?
It was the same time, it was not the same time, it must, it must have been the same time, I feel because uh, because otherwise why did I dream exactly about him? I feel, is...So, I don't know but, yes, after the war, not after war, it's still when we are in March when they started to evacuate us from one camp to the other camp, so while I was in camp, did I tell you the thing with uh, with uh, with, uh...when we're working in a uh, tunnel?
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