Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Eugene Feldman - July 15, 1991

Into the woods.

We went into that--the marshes there or whatever. Because it's easy to obtain water. All you had to do is really press it down and the water comes up. It was clean enough to drink it. That's what we drank.

When you got into the marshes, where did you hide there? Did you know...

It's easy. It's easier to hide in a marsh than in a woods, because the woods are not real thick o...where we were. Trees are not that--they're more sparse. They're spread out, so you can see. If you, if you're going to build a, a little shack, they'll see it. In the marsh you cannot see it. The only way we were really discovered afterward, that, that's why the rumor was around, that's why those--my friends, school friends were looking for me that, in the village when they--the hay season, they cut the hay down and they stack 'em up about fifty feet high, thirty feet high. I don't know if you ever saw haystacks in the villages. That's for the whole winter for the cattle. So I was told, we were told that when one of the guys was on top of the haystack, they could see through the marshes. That's how they noticed us. But it's not easy to find it. Just because you see something you know, you sort of have an idea what direction, but it's so thick. That's where those kids--my school, the school kids were looking for us. Because oh that guy he told 'em that there, he saw Jewish--Jews there. Because they couldn't find us, it was so thick. They came close. But we were ready for them anyway. I don't know, we, we would not. We had spears. We were ready for those kids. I don't know what they had. 'Cause most of 'em did not have guns. So they probably had axes and uh, spears, whatever you want to call it.

So you made spears?

It's not really spears. You know, pitchforks, pitchfork. Okay, we had pitchforks naturally in our house, I mean in our farm we had pitchforks. So we took a pitchfork and we cut off and left only one prong. So it's like a spear. So there's no way they would have taken us. No way.

So you built a...

Nobody would ever take us except the German, somebody with guns because we were pretty well set up for them.