Holocaust survivors offered DNA tests to help find family
In an exclusive interview with this newspaper, a survivor described her journey back to Germany.
BY ANDREA MARCHARTZ
October 3 2007 12:00 AM ET
My family was one of the last to be evicted from our apartment in Berlin; our furniture was stolen on the first morning of the occupation of the city with us in the house, my mother, father, brother and me.
Our only possessions were the books we had in the house, and those books were looted and destroyed with the rest. We had to move from our apartment to a tiny room in a basement of the building where we were billeted to a family who gave us a bed in an underground room, and the tiny kitchen space in which we cooked on a little gas stove.
My mother and father had to move us there, so they could work as teachers. My father had a teaching job because I was a year old. He taught in the small city of Prenzlau. He left us there, until we were evicted. We had to find a new home.
My mother, sister and brother stayed with us for a few months, but then my father took a job in Görlitz, and my mother returned to her family. My parents couldn’t stay in our apartment because there were too many people living there. So my mother moved us to her aunt and uncle.
Our new, tiny home became a prison. We were not allowed to leave, and if we did we were taken somewhere else.
We were separated from our relatives and made to live apart. My father tried to buy food from the local grocery stores, but everyone knew that was impossible. We were not allowed to go there. The store owners told my father that he could find work picking potatoes. They gave him a few potatoes.
Our only possessions were the books we had in the house, and those books were looted and destroyed with the rest. We had to move from our apartment to a tiny room in a basement of the building where we were billeted to a family who gave us a bed in an underground room, and the tiny kitchen space in which we cooked on a little gas stove.
