Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

• Contents
• Map

Larry Wayne - 2005

So there was no...

So that's why even though I, as guilty as I feel about it, kinda, we were going like sheep, slaughtered sheep, like, without resistance. And I tried to excuse it, said that we didn't know about it, we didn't know about. And that's, the truth is that we did not know about it. The only thing I cannot understand is--I can and I cannot is when they used to, when the Jews used to, used to uh, uh, dig their--a grave, and then they still stood in front of the grave and they let them shoot them and on top of the heap--why at that time at least they could attack and kill one or two Germans or something. And then that still goes into my mind. But that was a different character of the Jews, I guess.

Well circumstances.

Well, I try to excuse it, it's not easy for me to excuse it, and now I'm a survivor, you know. The only thing is, okay, the Warsaw Ghetto. Fine, the Warsaw--how many Warsaw Ghettoes were there? There were not that many resistance movements. Well, then I'll try again, say well, we didn't get help from anybody. The Poles were not trying, not there to help us in any way.

No gendarmes.

No gendarmes, even with gendarmes there's nobody tried to help us to organize something. Even, uh... And, and then there, there's one thing, you know, that the minute uh, they caught you, an enemy, there was no trial and they killed you, that's it. It's not like even now, they catch a terrorist or anybody else, oh they, you hear all this outbreak about uh, uh, Guantanamo over there, and, and Cuba and, and about this jail what they did over there. And you hear all these things and, and you think to yourself, oh boy, oh boy look how bad makes us look. You know, this was...was not. This is a paradise. The Germans, they were no such thing. They, they did something that you didn't do... They, uh, they killed this guy uh, ???, the German, one of the Germans leaders, SS.

SS major, yeah.

They wiped out a whole city of ???. Obliterated. Completely obliterated.

[speaking with wife] And so, you know, they didn't care who, they wiped out a whole city. And we here--the do--good doers in the United States, we hear a little thing over there that happened, you know. You know, the people are not in there can't, can't criticize. When you're in that war and they see the Iraqi trying to kill you, you don't care what you do to them. And I know it sounds very inhuman.

Well, you've seen enough of it.

Yeah, I, you know, I...