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"I was afraid of this thing, I thought it's sacreligious, to laugh and to smile and go to nightclubs and to coffeehouses." | |||
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Felix Horn Born 1920 Lublin, Poland 
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And one day the whole group, with the help of Beriha--I don't know if you know what Beriha is. Beriha is the Palestinian underground agency which was helping the Jews who escaped from Soviet Russia coming to Poland, want to go to Palestine. They were smuggling those people, young people, to Palestine. With their assistance, we crossed the border one cold night in November 1946. The only thing I took with me is my student papers, my books and so on, in case I ever go back to school, want to save my papers. And on their advice they took us to Vienna, where we met a lot of Jewish students already, Americans, first time I'd seen Americans, life full of music, and laughter. I didn't know what it was, I didn't know how to behave. I was afraid of this thing, I thought it's sacreligious, to laugh and to smile and go to nightclubs and to coffeehouses, I, I couldn't, couldn't cope with it, you know, I was not ready for it. But we stayed together, whole group, for about two years. Everybody went his own way, they graduate, one architect, one electric engineer, a few medical student, one boy couldn't cope with his situation, went back to Poland, Jewish boy. Don't know what happened to him. And then each one went his own way. | ||
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Madeline Deutsch Born 1930 Berehovo (Beregszasz), Czechoslovakia 
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And when I first started to date I would go with, uh, with a young man, maybe to a movie and then to a restaurant. And when we were in the restaurant, I had to excuse myself several times to go to the bathroom because I had to throw up because I had such a horribly, nervous stomach, because I was still a petrified little girl. So then finally, I think about 19...uh...57, I met this young man. And, uh, I seemed...I really liked him a lot and he seemed to like me and we started to date and by that time I was a little bit better as far as being so scared and nervous and all that. And he kept talking to me that I should go back to school. At first I wouldn't hear of it. Again because I was still seeing school like it was. But then he talked and talked and talked and he said, "I'll go with you and I'll sit with you in the classes for a while. Just try to go back." So I was working five days a week in this factory, and then I went to school. I signed up because I didn't have any papers that I went to school...high school. All those things were lost. I had nothing left from my home. So I started to go back...I went back to school. And at first he was coming with me, and then little by little I was calm enough that I was beginning to learn to the point where I did full four years of high school in two years at night. So I would get home from work about 6:30 in the evening and my mother would have dinner ready because where she worked in this nursing home and hospital, she would start at 7 o'clock so she would get home about...uh...3:30, 4 o'clock. So she did some shopping on the way home and then she cooked dinner. So I had almost a half an hour in which I was able to have dinner and grab my books, walk two blocks to the first bus stop, then take that bus to a second bus stop, and took the second bus to the school. And this was in New York, the Theodore Roosevelt evening high school, right across the street from Fordham University. | ||
| Copyright © United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C. | ||||
