Vera Schey - June 10, 1994
Winter
...and she looked what we call Rose of ???. The real Jewish nose, the real curly hair. I mean, there was no question. But she had--her parents were taken away and this cousin took her in. And at that point there was very little food. This was going already into December.
In the winter now.
Wait, I skipped again. I skipped a part. This was--I will come back to this. This was on the very end. In the meantime, since we could not find anybody to take us, and it was very dangerous, and, and some of our Gentile friends said--these are very small apartment or lived in such a community that it was impossible to take somebody in. So uh, there was another way which I figured out. I was very daring and I had a lot of chutzpah. I did not look particularly Jewish. I spoke fluently German, so I wasn't quite as afraid of, of ever being stopped as maybe most people were. And there was such a thing as uh, applying for the apartments the Jews were taken out of. Like, for instance, our apartment. Where naturally I couldn't do it because everybody knew me. But there were streets and there were sections of Budapest which--very nice apartment houses, very nice apartments, where the Jews had to move out because it was, these are not a designated house. Or by that time were taken away. So these apartments were all listed. And the government, if you came and said that you were fleeing the Russian Army, the advancing Russian Army from the northern par...northern part of uh, Hungary, you needed a place to stay, they would uh, give you a permit to stay in one of these apartments.
Hm.
They also would give you a permit to get food stamps. And I went and I stood in line and I made up the story where I came from, I was fleeing the uh, the Russians. And my, me and my friend, both of us, and we need an apartment.
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