Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Vera Schey - June 10, 1994

And he--whether legally or illegally, I don't know, but he got her I.D.--I.D.'s and he got her birth certificate and he got her parents, because you had to, if you were stopped in the street you had to prove up to three generations that you were Gentile. So we got--both of us got these papers. My name was Susanna Troppe and my mother was Elizabeth Luttwine, which happened to be wonderful because it was her initials. So in case somehow or other a handkerchief or something with initials was on her it was the right initials. It's coincidental, but it so happened. So at this point we decided we have to go into hiding because I didn't want to go back to the factory and not knowing what will happen from there when they come and pick us up there. And I certainly wasn't going to go to the field and, and register with hundreds and thousands of other people if I had a chance out, so we tried with the false papers. Now where do we go? Our Gentile friends and we had quite a few uh, either took us if they had enough room, or recommended somebody else. My mother, for instance, worked as a housekeeper for a judge uh, which was a wonderful thing. I mean, it was pretty safe to be in a judge's house. And she was there for maybe a couple of months 'til the judge decided that he was--she was a very pretty young woman--that he wants her to warm up his bed, which at this point she was going to leave. I was--my mother's uh, millinery shop had several people working for her and one of them lived outside of Budapest in a, in a suburb and she had her own home and she took me in.