Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Larry Wayne - 2005

And you had just gotten over typhoid as well, right?

Well, that's a long time after. When I say long time... When I got typhoid... I was liberated April 11.

And United States... April 13, I was already in the hospital with typhoid fever, you know.

Okay, and when did they find you?

That was, like, in uh, August, September.

So did you think you were going to die, or?

I'd like to see you read that manuscript, really.

Yeah, I would love to see it.

I, I--you can have it.

So when you had typhoid, did you think after all this time...

I said I'm going to die and I didn't want to die at that time. Although I didn't mind so much because I saw the Germans go down. But it's funny you mentioned it because uh, as a child I used to watch the peasants in Poland to, to feed their geese. They used to take food, put them in the, down their throats. They fattening them up actually. And I did the same thing with myself. I couldn't eat at 106 degree temperature from that uh, from that typhoid fever, so I used to take food and push it down my throat, you know. And I survived. Not only did I survive, once, once I was recovering... There was another you might have known, the, the two guy. One is still alive, they're two brothers, one died. They were in the, in the meat business. ???.

Don't know them.

Anyway, maybe you would. But anyway, so, so this one brother, one brother also got typhoid fever and he was, like... So his brother used to bring me food, and he used to be down on the house, he said, ???, which means, eat as much as you want without bringing you over here, but give some to my brother. And he survived, you know. Lived in Detroit. The one with hepatitis, he was still alive. The other one died, Romack.

When you were lying there recuperating or sick, you had no idea that anybody had survived.

No, not at all, no.

Did you think that everybody in the family...

Everybody's dead. There was no chance. I didn't think, you know, the way I looked at, you know, it's a miracle I survived. And uh, like I said, afterwards when I went with the American Army, the fir... 95th Medical Battalion then I had a nice life with them. I was, looked like one of them, I got an American uniform. Not only that... And then I had, you know, I became so Americanized actually though, because of the knowledge of English that I had, some degree. That doesn't mean I was fluent, but it was enough that I was able to talk with, with people. Uh, that's a whole story by itself. And then when I wound up in Bad Nauheim, I had a pretty good religious background and uh, I was a good singer on top of that too. And I became an assistant to the chaplain in Bad Nauheim.