Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

Malka Sternberg - January 31, 2008

Presenting Winton with a Gift

She's my technical advisor.

That's good. It's a very important job.

So, you took the box...

I took this thing and I took it with me and he wouldn't take it but I insisted on it. I said, "It's just a thank you, it's just a small thing. I especially picked something small that you can put in your pocket." I used it, I used it for putting pills in it when I was invited somewhere. I had a box for the pills inside and this was the box. In the end he took it but what I didn't know that afterwards they valued it and it was a very valuable thing. It was two hundred and fifty years old. It might have been something of the man who did the Fa...Fa...Faberge eg...eggs, you know. It was that style. It might have been in the, the czarina of that time--she was crazy about these things. She had a big collections of these things and so I don't know, somehow it got away into their shop--antique shop and my mother-in-law--small things she liked to keep in her pocket like it. It got to me and it got to Winton and when it was valuable I was so happy that it was something worth, you know, it wasn't just a little token--I was so happy about it and since then when he made the party two years ago--nearly three years ago where, where they interviewed me, there was nothing to do with that in the interview, they picked me just like that. Somebody recommended me and uh, when the, the ??? said I'm coming--asked him to come here he said, "If Malka Sternberg is going to be there, I'm coming." I was flabbergasted. What, I didn't know why, didn't they tell you about any other children? Probably about dozens. "No, you're the only one." And he came on Pesach and they couldn't find me. We were in Arad on Pesach with a group. They couldn't find me so they phoned this ??? among other things and she told him she knew that I was in Arad because I phoned to say ???, to wish her a happy Pesach. So, she says, "She's somewhere in Arad I don't know where," and they phoned all the hotels--there are several hotels there and the phone call came to us at ten o'clock at night that we should be downstairs at nine o'clock the next morning and there's a taxi going to be to take us there and back. Tel Aviv was the, was the-- Arad is the middle of the wilderness so they brought us to Tel Aviv. We were at the party and then they brought us back and, and my interview was, was a few days before. I heard it for the first time there.

You--my--he's got such a great sense of humor from what I understand.

Oh, he is marvelous, he is marvelous.


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