Lucine Horn

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By April 1942 was one of those big actions where they took away a lot of Jewish people, and out of 60,000 only 4,000 survived. We were given special passes, special like documents, like passports, and these were the 4,000 Jews that actually were working for the Germans and that the Germans decided to keep for a little bit longer. We still did not know where all the people went. Well, the state of living was just terrible, you know -- Germans were coming in, cutting off the beards of the Jewish people, they were beating them up, they were taking them out haphazardly, they were demanding things, soldiers were running around and taking advantage of women, they plundered. There was practically nothing any more because we had lived in a little tiny village outside of Lublin where they put these 4,000, 4,000 people to life; very inhumanly, in little shacks, in little homes where very poor peasants lived -- they had to be evacuated, and they were given the apartments in the city that the Jews lived in. You could see a horse and a cow on the third-floor balcony because these people took all their belongings with them. We were put in that little, little village where these people lived before. There they put barbed wire and called it a ghetto. This was a ghetto but not in the idea of a ghetto like in Warsaw. This was a ghetto, this was a settlement of Jews which was surrounded by barbed wire and constantly watched so there was no way out. The people that watched...the soldiers that watched the ghetto were mostly Lithuanians and Ukrainians. They were helping the Germans to keep order because the Germans could not be bothered with these little things like watching the Jews. They wanted them when they needed them.
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