Zwi Steiger - March 27, 1982
Being Beaten Up
Explain that one incident when you were beaten up.
That...
Or was there more than one?
The one that uh, that I was on the street walking and some--and the Hungarian...Hungarians occupied our area. There were some Hungarians from the mainland--from Hungary itself.
Soldiers you're talking about?
No, it was civilians that came up.
They transported, uh...
No, they, they moved up to our area to take over businesses and uh, to run some of the offices. And uh, they were living off the, the Jews, most of them. They were uh, so called ???, they were managing their businesses. They, they were usually uh, taking whatever they felt like taking. And uh, I remember two brothers uh, ??? and somebody else with them walking down the street and they saw me, so they thought that they will take me on. So they, they hit me a few times--they beat me. And I tried to give them the same. In the beginning I remember the local population there were one or two people who came to our house and uh, expressed their, their, uh...
Sympathy?
...sympathy and, that such an instance happened and so forth. But uh, it--life was, was uh, you could uh, feel restless under the surface because there was a local--there was a military outpost there that they built. And whenever they were passing by uh, you never knew what's going to happen when they were passing on the street. And condition you had to even--that was before I was drafted into the labor camp--they had once a week you had to go and do some public work. And they were usually unpleasant uh, always threatening and always uh, demeaning and degrading.
© Board of Regents University of Michigan-Dearborn