Martin Shlanger - March 4, 1983
Reminders
Let's, let's stop for a minute and let me ask you um, if you had given any thought then or since as to why you survived through all this?
I have... I survived just for no other reason but luck. I was being helped by um, Poles and Czechs, and I was being helped. I was lucky. Of course, I had a strong will to survive. Was nothing but luck.
Do, do any of the events that you remember experiencing um, haunt you? Are there memories that during the day seem to uh, appear in your mind?
More in my dreams than during the day.
What kind of dreams?
I'm back in the camp. I'm trying to escape. I'm caught again and I'm brought back to the camp again. And I wonder how come I was such a fool and let them bring me back always. This is the kind of dreams I have.
Do you have memories... ?
And quite often.
Still?
Yes, after so many years, I still have those dreams. I still have dreams about those wagons, and the bomb.
Do you have memories or dreams about things that came before, your life before? Do you ever dream about life in, in Velké before the war?
No, in Velké Kapušany... No, I have no, no dreams about it but I think about it. How nice life was in democratic Czechoslovakia. I think about it a lot.
Do you think that the experience of, of living through the war that way uh, has interfered with your life since? Has it shaped your attitudes?
Well, positively, I... Because of my partial paralysis I cannot move around like I, I used to when I was uh, uh, before the war I was... I liked uh, sports. I played soccer and ping-pong and tennis, which I no longer can do, not since 1962. Even before 1962, I still liked sports. But since I suffered that brain hemorrhage, I'm partially paralyzed, I cannot move around. I can walk um, a hundred yards and I get tired. My left foot can't take anymore. All it can take is a hundred yards.
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