Ruth Muschkies Webber - February 2, 1987
Reunited with Mother
What was that like?
That was anticlimactic because my sister was not the warm person that I had remembered or fantasized about you know, as I had wanted her to be. And now I realize that it was a very hard situation for her because here my mother and I had this very unusual relationship, this closeness. I survived really because of her and even if I didn't realize it at the time, I felt it probably and my mother was very close to me too because she was with me. You know when you're with somebody you develop a certain relationship. And things for us naturally were 100 percent better than they were for the last three years. My sister on the other hand, had a very good life the last three years and she was taken out of there because the people that she was with, the lady was half German, so she had to leave before the Russians came into town, so they left for Germany and left my sister with certain people that my father had arranged. My mother came and picked her up and put her in a situation where everything was chaotic. It just, nothing was going right. There was still a lot of anti-Semitism around. My sister felt very comfortable being Gentile and here she was thrown back into being Jewish. My mother wanted to do so many things for me because she knew what I had gone through the last three years and she was concerned I guess about my well being and my sister. I guess, did not fit in. And it must have been very hard for her.
Do you remember when you saw your mother? Was she tired looking?
Yeah, she came into the building. She came into the building and it was like seeing a ghost but I had known that she is alive because people that were with her, preceded her, and they had told me that she's alive. But then, now that I look back at it, there is so many people that said that certain people are alive, they said the same thing about my father, and he did not survive. So, uh, it was just unbelievable and then she left me in the children's home and had to go and kind of try to straighten things out and see how she can reconstruct the future and see who else survived from the family. And I was very upset with her. I gave her a very hard time every time she came to visit me in the orphanage and left me because she knew that there I had school, I had food, I was taken care of. But I didn't want to be there, I wanted to be with her and I was very upset with her. I gave her a very hard time because I wanted to be with her. It was very, it was I guess impossible. In fact, my mother was in Ostrowiec during the time when the Kielce Pogrom was on and Ostrowiec is very close to Kielce. She was in the apartment that she stayed in with other women, with other people for I think a week or two weeks they were not allowed to go out because they were afraid of another pogrom in our city after the war.
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