Adele Sandel - [n.d.]
Reflections II
Do you remember the name of the priest by any chance?
No, but I didn't tell you that my sister also got married in that Kaschau--in that uh, city in Czechoslovakia and they came here to this country. She married a lovely man. He was a pharmacist and they had two beautiful children and they were living here in Detroit. That's why we came here. And she became ill. She got cancer and she died seventeen years ago of cancer. She was forty-two-years-old.
Sorry to hear that.
That was our biggest tragedy.
But she has two children now that probably have more children, right?
One lives in, in, um, California, near San Francisco, has two boys and one lives here who isn't married yet. They were nine and eighteen when she died.
Oh.
So, what should, how should I tell you, what should I tell you? Just thinking of that last night I couldn't sleep. I tried to erase this from my mind as much as possible, but as long as I--not only me but my son lives with the hatred for the Nazis, for the Polish, for the Russian people who did all that unjustice for us Jews who were so innocent like that child who is born knowing the Sinai Hospital. You know very well and everybody who is intelligent and smart knows that there is absolutely no reason. It just the, the, the hatred what they have for this, for the Jews what, what we suffer. So, so he hates them also and he said that if, if God forbid, something would--and he also says things that if he would have been there he would have fought back and he would--you couldn't
That's the typical response. That's why I wanted to hear from you.
You could. How old are you?
I'm twenty-four.
Twenty-four. You couldn't--you would just go just like the rest of us went. You wouldn't.
It's easier said than done. It's very easy to say it now in this kitchen that I would fight back, but if I was there it would be a lot different so we...
We didn't have it. What, with nothing--we didn't have a gun, we didn't have a uh, we didn't have what I'm talking about.
Also, you weren't eating for several months.
You mean in the bunkers over there?
Wherever. Yeah.
We were fighting for survival there. We weren't--we were less than animals. We were...
Muselmann.
We envied, we envied the, the snakes. The snakes, they were crawling on the ground. They were more than we were so what could we do? We were less than the dust on the ground. Are you kidding? That's what he wanted to do that, that maniac, that Hitler, to demolish that every human being, every Jewish, you know, I don't have to tell you what he wanted to do.
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