Zwi Steiger - March 27, 1982
Sensing Doom
What was--explain that a little bit. Did, did people generally have the feeling that, that doom was coming?
There was, there were some...
And, and what did they consider doom?
Nobody knew exactly, but as you know in, in '41, immediately after the breakout of the war between Germany and uh, and the Soviet Union, the Hungarians joined them.
Joined?
Germany. The Russian border was at that time about twenty-five, thirty miles away from our place. And in the summer or in the fall of uh, '41--if I'm not mistaken, maybe '42, but I think it was '41--there were about uh, several thousand Jews from Carpathian Ruthenia, the estimate's about ten or twelve thousand, were uh, transported to, to uh, to Galicia to Kamenets-Podolski area where they were kill. They were shot. And one of your aunts was uh, I think was killed there, and one came back from there. I don't know how she escaped, but she eventually walked her way back from there.
Is that the one ??? you went after?
Yeah, yeah. And uh, so there was some feeling that things are not going uh, uh...
Did people in Velký Berezný know about that, uh...
They had some--there were rumors. You know, there was no confirmation. There wasn't, you know, somebody said that this what happened. But, as you know, the information gathering wasn't so simple. There was no uh, there were no telephone communications. And they were just rumors. That there--maybe it was just um, an incident. This isn't the policy, you know, to exterminate people. Then as I mentioned before my mother had a brother who was married in uh, in Slovakia. And from Slovakia people were deported and he uh, he eventually disappeared. And some letters came back that uh, it was his address he is unknown. But again uh, the rumors were that they are in, in eastern Poland uh, or in the Ukraine working--that they're being used as a labor force.
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