Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

Rose Wagner - August 14, 2002

Talking About Experiences

So you talk regularly to each other and then you told your children. But you haven't wanted to talk to anybody else about it.

You know what, when we play cards we talk about it. But you know, it's getting to be already--like, if they show a movie, let's say, about the concentration, about the--I don't go anymore to see those movies. I had enough. And my husband was watching yesterday a, on the History Channel, he was watching the Germans. I said, "Please, leave me alone already." But he, he likes it. He likes to watch movies like that.

Uh...

Everybody's different.

Yeah, I guess. Does it haunt you? Do you think you're haunted by the war or the loss?

Well, we're haunted because we're Jews. Again, again we get killed. Look what's going on now in the Middle East.

I know. Or Europe.

In Europe, anti...anti-Semitism. So ??? again, again. There's no end.

Do you think it could happen again?

I hope not.

I hope not too.

It might. You think? I don't think so. I don't think so.

Um, anything else?

Should we, you know what? The young, the young Jews like in the Warsaw ghetto they were fighting.

Yeah.

See in Łódź, nobody fight anything. But how could they hide? We were the first, the first city that they came in.

In Warsaw they didn't fight until it was too late.

Right.

And, uh...

Maybe in Romania you know, and like in, the Romanian Jews didn't suffer as much as we did, I think, because in Romania they came late...

Forty-four.

you see.

But they wound up in Auschwitz.

Yeah, but listen. But we suffered a lot before.

Yeah. There were some ghettos but nothing like...

No--nothing like we had. Because we couldn't walk in the street. They stopped you.

Were you ever stopped?

They picked you up in the street, they...

Were you ever stopped?

Oh many times. Quite a few times we were stopped with my father.

Because of the curfew?

No, we just stopped because, uh...

You were wearing a star?

Right. We just stopped.

Germans. Not Jewish.

You know people with the beard. They would shave off the beards.

Did you see them do that?

Oh yeah.

What did you think then?

Crying. I remember now. I remember more than once I was crying and petrified.


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