Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Baruch Spergel - February 4, 2008

Are there any things that um, that happen during the day that you see or hear that trigger memories of your childhood? A train, for example, uh...

ZF: Pre-childhood pre-war?

Pre- and during the war.

ZF: Hmm?

Pre- and during the war. I mean, do you have nightmares, for example. Did you have nightmares?

ZF: I had a lot of nightmares but I don't think-I can't connect them specifically to the war. Maybe it's uh, maybe it's uh, fear-sort of a fear but I can't put it down to the war-only to the war.

Would, would you-do you think that, um, the...

ZF: Have you got children?

Two.

ZF: Two. Well, just imagine taking a child at the age of six and sending him off to Norway. I mean, you don't know, you don't-anything definite-he, he just goes off without, without-with people that he doesn't know, with people-you don't know what's happened. It's, it's, it's uh, it's an experience. It's, uh...

Do you think that the dominate feeling you had in those years was fear more than anything else? I mean, it wasn't happiness.

ZF: No, happiness wasn't. I don't-there may have been happy days here and there or more happy days-this is uh, definitely a possibility but I don't...

BS: What was happiness? Contentment, a certain amount of contentment.

Contentment.

ZF: Yes.

BS: That's what-that's the best thing you can achieve. I mean happiness-may...maybe moments of happiness, yes?

But was there fear in your life?

BS: Hmm?

Was there fear?

BS: Fear, yes. Fear, there was. Fear-haunting fear, yes, yes.

Do you think?

FZ: What? Fear?

Fear when you were a child?

FZ: Definitely, definitely.

But nothing, nothings sets off-I mean, you saw someone killed.

BS: Yes.

Is there anything that touches that memory off?

BS: Well, I saw somebody killed but uh, yes, it didn't-it rea...I, I remember it, yes, and it was quite awful but I don't know. You forget things, you know, war st...st...started and there was so much bombardment in London, you can't even-1940, 1941 was terrible-'40, '40 especially, 1940-and somehow you uh, you get used to it. You get used to war. Everything you can get used to.

ZF: I had, uh...

BS: Get used to everything.