Baruch Spergel - February 4, 2008
Fate of Parents
It must have been very difficult for your mother to send you off.
ZF: Yes, it must've been. But that was-it was difficult for the parents to send off, like my mother was a very strong person.
BS: She was strong and she felt somehow-she had...
ZF: She had, she had...
BS: ...a premonition of what's going to, what's going to happen...
ZF: Yes, she had...
BS: ???
ZF: ...an unusual premonition.
BS: She knew what was going to happen. My sis...she was so urgent about it, you know so, uh...
And she survived?
ZF: She surv...no, both my parents survived. There this is the stor...they-after my mother sent me off she went illegally with a group to Poland to meet up with my father and uh, that was in-it must've been days after she sent me off because the war-when she arrived in Poland-she didn't arrive right away. They were caught on the border by the Germans. They were cau...the group was caught and she was taken to the Nazi headquarters there in ??? town ??? and uh, she was really very lucky because one of the soldiers there was our neighbors upstairs in Reichenberg. He used to teach uh, my elder brother-he helped him Latin...
BS: He was in the SS, he was in the SS.
ZF: But he...
BS: SS officer.
ZF: They, they were, they, they-these were people who would come into us and my parents would ask them-they, they did-he did babysitting for us once when I was small and they wanted to go out or something, I don't know. And he helped my eldest brother in Latin. So, we were-they were friendly, you know...
BS: They were different Germans. See, they were not, they were not Nazis yet. Well, they were actually-were influenced by the Nazis but...
ZF: He saved them.
BS: ...you know, I remember that he was-they came into our, into our house or flat-apartment and they saw our father putting on the tefillin and they didn't say anything. They took it as something natural and uh, it was really-we were friends. My brother was a friend of this man-this boy who was just a year older I think than my brother. We exchanged books and all this kind of thing and we were friends. And, and two years later he met my brother at the bor...or my mother at the border-Polish border...
ZF: One year, one year later...
BS: One year...
ZF: ...one year later at the border.
BS: He saved my mother. He let her go at night. He said, "At night you go. Go as far east as possible because we'll come after you." He already knew that they're going to-he said, "We'll come after you so you'd better go as far as possible." Well she did go to Poland, took my father-my father wanted to stay but my father always wanted to stay in one place. And she took my father to Wilna, to Wilna that is in, uh...
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