00:00:00Patty O'Connor: Interview with Rosalia Katz-Kaplan on September 10th, 2006, at the Virginia Holocaust Museum in Richmond, Virginia, conducted by Patty O'Connor. Could you please state your name and place of birth?
00:00:11Rosalia Katz-Kaplan: My name is Rosalia Katz-Kaplan. I was born in Holland, in The Hague.
Patty: How old are you?
Rosalia: I'm 72 years old. I was born in December 22nd, 1933.
Patty: What languages do you speak?
Rosalia: I speak Dutch. I used to speak fluent German, but now I just can understand it. I haven't spoken it for a long time. I speak English. I used to speak broken French, but I don't do that no more either, since it's been 50 years since I spoke those languages. I still speak fluent Dutch and then English, of course.
00:01:02Patty: Where were you living before the Holocaust began?
Rosalia: I was living in a city called Scheveningen. That's the outside of The Hague. It's like a seaport. It's the beach, but it was still part of The Hague.
Patty: Could you describe your life before the Holocaust began?
Rosalia: My mother had a large family, and so we used to get together a lot. My father just had his sister and my grandmother, who lived down the street. My father was an architect, and my mother stayed home. We had a very nice life. My father would go to work in Rotterdam and sometimes in Amsterdam. He always went by train. When he came home, we used to pick him up from the train, and he would carry me on his shoulder. We used to have just a wonderful family unit there.
00:02:16Patty: What kind of education did you have before the Holocaust?
Rosalia: Being very young, the war broke out in May of '45. I was only six and a half years old, so I only had first grade. That was interrupted because on the end of the year when the Germans came, they made all the Jewish kids go to one school, and we couldn't go to regular school anymore. All I had was just finished first grade, and then I had to go in hiding.
00:02:56Patty: What was the predominant religion in your area?
Rosalia: Dutch, Reformed Christian, I think it was. Then there were pockets of streets and areas that was all Jewish, but they didn't speak Yiddish like they do in this country. They spoke Jewish, but it was different. I guess it was more Hebrew than the Jewish language that they had because I didn't learn any Yiddish.
Patty: Before the war, did being a Jew have a religious significance or a cultural significance to you?
Rosalia: Oh, it had a religious because my grandparents on my father's side were religious, but not real orthodox. On my mother's side, they were. It was my grandfather who really was the one that made sure that he would go to temple every Friday night and observe everything from the Jewish religion.
Patty: Did you have non-Jewish friends before the war?
Rosalia: Oh, yes, but they were just mostly Jewish, and none of them survived. Because of that, it was the area where we lived in, there was a lot of Jewish people. My mother only had Jewish friends, and I played with their children. I had some Christian friends in the neighborhood that went to school, but they were mostly Jewish.
Patty: Did you experience any anti-Semitism before the war?
Rosalia: No, I think it is because I was too young to know what it is. My parents might have, but I never did because I didn't even know probably what the word meant, because I remember I was just such a young child still. I remember playing with my friends and running out and doing things when my parents told me I wasn't allowed to, or something like all children do, but I don't remember doing that.
00:05:30Patty: Where were you living when the Nazis invaded your country?
Rosalia: I was living in the hay. The way we found out was one morning, we saw all the planes in the air going past us to Rotterdam, and they bombed Rotterdam. Rotterdam was the seaport, and that's where the Navy was and all that. They flattened the Rotterdam. There was hardly anything left, and that's where my father worked. He couldn't. He had to go to work in Amsterdam. They found out that on the border of Holland and Germany, the border patrol were just playing cards, and then four o'clock in the morning, I think they told me, they said, "We're going to invade you." That's how they found out. They didn't even know that they were going to be invaded, but I think they must have had an inkling. Of course, I was too young to know because Germany had invaded already Poland and other countries, and they didn't come to Holland until 1940. Holland was a neutral country, but that didn't make no difference. It was such a little country that it was easy overrun.
Patty: What do you remember about what happened when the soldiers first entered your city?
Rosalia: Well, the things that I remember is the buses that they came in with and the bells that rang, ding, dong, ding, dong, ding, dong, and making you aware that they were there. Then we had the thing after they came in that we all had to wear stars. As a child, you play so you don't take no notice of the things that is going on around you other than play, but when things have to happen and that you don't want to happen. They had to wear a star, and we had to go to special schools. We weren't allowed to go on the buses anymore to go to school or anywhere else. We had to walk because we weren't allowed to go there. We weren't allowed to go in the grocery stores. We have special grocery stores that were for us to go to, where just Jewish people went to, rather than to the regular grocery stores. Then the frequent bombing of the neighborhoods and everything else, and we used to have to go to my grandmother. My grandmother had a cellar, and then she had the bomb shelter in the backyard. We stayed with her a lot. My father tried to do it at home first. He put the table in the middle of the house and put a lot of mattresses on top of it, and he thought he could save us underneath the table, but it wasn't safe. We had to go to my grandmother and stay at her house, and go in the bomb shelter and stay in her cellar.
00:09:13Patty: How did you respond to having to wear a star on your clothing?
Rosalia: I didn't respond very good. I didn't want to wear it, and some of my friends didn't want to wear it, but they were better about it than I am. I remember one time I wouldn't wear my star because my mother had just made me a new dress, and I wanted to show it to my grandmother. She lived down the street. I ran out of the house, and of course somebody recognized me, and so the Germans picked me up and made me in the house that they had that was not too far from us, they made me clean bicycles for three days, and I wasn't allowed to go home. My father first didn't find out where I was, and then when he found out where I was, he wanted to do the bicycles, but I wouldn't let him. They told him that it was a good lesson for me to learn that I was supposed to have the star on and that I wasn't to walk out without it. Of course, I was only at that point, I think, seven years old and very rebellious. [laughs]
00:10:26Patty: Were you aware of any other more major types of resistance or sabotage?
Rosalia: My parents were trying to talk and tell us, but it's very hard, I think, for a child to comprehend. I have a brother, or had a brother, and he was four years older than me. For him, it was easier, but with me, it just, I don't think, really went through until later, until I had to go into hiding. Well, it was earlier than that. My mother had a sister that she was very close with, and the Germans, they picked up my uncle, and the Germans stole my aunt, and she had, let me see, three, four, two, five children, and they told them that if she would go on the train, then they would go and all be together in Germany because they had a place for them in there, and my uncle was already gone, and so my aunt wanted to be with my uncle.
They told her to go to Germany, and so she packed up herself and the children, and they all went to Germany. Well, you know what went on. They didn't send her to, she never even saw him. They went to a camp, a concentration camp right away, and so she never did get to see it. I think my mother had dawned on her that is what's going to happen to us. She went into the hospital to have her appendix out, and there was nothing wrong with her appendix. That was a big deal in those days, but she had it down just so that they could find, through the resistance, a place for us to live. My father, my brother, and I were picked up anyway, and we were brought to this house where they put everybody, it was a school, really. They brought every Jewish family there to go and to be deported to one camp or the other, and a lot of our friends went with us. Well, when we got there, they found out my mother was in the hospital, so they gave my father a week to get her out of the hospital. That week was enough time to try to find a place for us to go into hiding.
00:13:39You asked me how did I find out. Well, they put my brother in a place, my father in another place, and me in another place. When I got there, I didn't want to stay. I'm not supposed to stay in the house. I didn't know what was going on, and these people had put me in the attic. They said I was never to come down, and I had to stay in the attic. While I wasn't going to go and stay in no attic, I wanted to go to my mommy and daddy. I ran out, and these people said they couldn't keep me because I wouldn't stay put.
00:14:34They told me that I couldn't see my mommy and daddy. I didn't want to hear of that, and I cried and cried. I had to come out of that hiding place.
When my mother got out of the hospital, she went to another place, but I couldn't be with her or my father. Meanwhile, my grandparents on my mother's side had gone into hiding, but my grandmother came out so that she could be with me. Because she came out and had me to try to find another place and try to explain what happened. I had an uncle, a man that I called uncle. He was Christian, and he was going to take me to another place. He tried to explain it to me. The Germans came, and my grandmother pushed me out of the back door while they took her out of the front door.
Both my grandparents on my father's side were right away picked up. On my mother's side, because my aunt had left, my grandfather had already died, so my grandmother went with them and, of course, never came back, too. All my mother's and brother's, her sisters, died during the war. This is how I first got to this part of my life.
00:16:27Patty: Where did you go when your grandmother told you to run out of the house?
Rosalia: I went to one of the neighbors, and she hid me in her closet first. Then I had to go and run out and hide somewhere because the Germans were still looking in the neighborhood to see where I was, so I couldn't stay with her. Then my uncle found me, and he took me away to a whole different state. My mother was in The Hague with my brother. My father was in Amsterdam, but I was all the way in Friesland in a whole different state. He took me there to live with a lady, that one of my aunts had a cleaning lady, and she was from Friesland. When the war broke out, she went back home to Friesland and got married. She knew me, so they took me there.
I stayed with her for quite a while. Then I had moved to so many different places. If you'd like me to tell you about some of the places, do you have any questions for me first?
Patty: Continue.
Rosalia: Okay. I lived with them, but they had a small house. The house consisted of a kitchen, a living room, and an attic. In the living room, they had closets. In the closets, they had made beds. They slept in the bed, in the closet, and in the living room. I lived in the attic over there, but the house was small. He was a milkman, so there was only limited income. It was very hard to keep a child in such a small area by itself. As I say, I was seven, eight, and nine in the wartime, so I was a very young child.
I lived with them for a while. Then she had a brother who had a houseboat. I was moved from that house for a while in the houseboat because there was a lot of rivers in Holland. There was high grass and all that, and it was easy to hide in that kind of atmosphere. I lived with him for a while, but then, as I say, the Germans were always close by, so you couldn't stay in one place for so long. If you were a grown-up, an older person, you are quiet. You're sitting in a place. My mother was in an attic, but she had everything there, and she was able to make it a living room kind of thing. She didn't go out. She knew she got her food there and all of that. As a child, you want to come down and be with with people, and you don't want to hide like that. In wartime, it's very hard to save a child. People don't realize, but all these people that helped me, and there were quite a bit of them, quite a few, they put their life on the line. They themselves and their family and whoever else is there. If the Germans found them, they just took the whole family with them because those people would be taken too. Then I was moved into the country. First, I was moved with the family, and the man took care of the bridge that opens and closes for ships to go through. I stayed with them and they were lovely people.
The Germans found out that I was living there. What they did was during the day I was in the house, but at night I slept in a little rowboat between high grass. Then, when it was safe, they would bring me back into the house. At nighttime, it usually was the hardest because they had a lot of people coming to the houses because they think everybody is safe, and that's the time that they find you. They couldn't find me in that house and they burned the house down. They thought if they burned it down, I would run out. I stayed in that rowboat by myself for a couple of weeks. I ate duck eggs. I punched a hole in the egg, and the ducks, they put their eggs in little baskets. They had baskets in the high grass, and that's where the ducks were laying their eggs. That's how I ate.
Then somebody thought it was safe enough to get me. I moved with a family, who in their basement had a press. The BBC used to send the messages where the Americans were and where the Allies were, where they had invaded Italy, France, and Belgium, Holland. When the BBC, at nighttime, had their program, they would go and put it on paper. They had a small press, and they put it on paper. I helped them put it around the neighborhood because I was little and it was easy because at nighttime you weren't allowed to go out. At nighttime, nobody was allowed to go out.
I was able to get some of the papers around. I helped them with that. That lasted only a few months because they had to stop. I don't remember how many months it was, six, eight months, and then I had to be moved again. Then I was moved with a family. When I was moved from this place, it was a young man that moved me. He was going to move me to another family in another city. When we were running away, I usually got moved in the middle of the night, but the Germans saw us, and they went after us. I was in the country, so there was a lot of ditches. This young man says to me, "Lay down, go in the ditch." He had his arms around me.
The Germans were shooting in the air. They didn't know exactly where we were, but the bullet hit the young man. When I didn't hear the noise anymore, I told him to wake up, to go, "Come on, we can go." He was gone. As far as I know, he was gone. I didn't know what to do. I ran to the field to a farmer's house. I told him what happened. He happened to be a good one because he didn't know. Some of them, they were working with the Germans. He hit me in the haystack. The Germans found the young man, and they were looking for the second person. They didn't know who it was, but they were looking for a second person.
They went to the different farms looking, and they went in the haystacks because next to the houses, they kept the hay for the cows. They took the forks and started going in there, but they didn't hit me. I was far enough, deep enough in there. When they were gone, I had to come out because there was no air in there. They didn't find me. This farmer, I stayed with for a little while. Then the Resistance. The Resistance was an organization that was so well-run in Holland, it was absolutely wonderful. They found me another place to live. I lived in the other place between walls. They had made false walls, and they had used mattresses so that if the Germans came in your house and started knocking on the walls, they couldn't find that it was hollow because they knew there were hollow places in there where people were hidden. They were really wise to that. I stayed there with that family for a while. Then the Germans found out that there were some people in hiding in that little city. A brother of the family that I lived with came at two o'clock in the morning to take me from his brother's house to move me to another place. The Germans came to his brother's house and didn't find me. He shot them to death because they couldn't find me.
The most wonderful thing happened to me about six years ago, seven years ago. This brother had looked for me for 50 years, trying to find me to see how I was doing. He lived in Canada. He got in touch with me and he said, "I'm the one that took you from my brother's house at two o'clock in the morning on the bicycle to another place." He said, "I've always wondered what happened to you." Somehow, he found me through, it seems that I am registered in Israel. He found me through some Jewish organization in Israel, my address. It's unbelievable how it went. With any will not to stray away, it was just amazing that this man found me.
He was the one that got me from his brother's house and moved me to another family. Again, most of the families I lived with was in the middle of the countryside, so that it was not as many soldiers. The SS was the one that was the busiest. I was eventually moved to another city where this man had a store, and he sold paint and all that kind of stuff. I lived with that family the longest until the Germans came.
They found me at that time. The Germans picked them up and me and put us in jail. Patty: How old were you at that time? Rosalia: By that time, well, it was in the end of '44, so I was 11 years old, going on 12.
Patty: How long were you in hiding altogether?
Rosalia: I was altogether in hiding from 1944 until I was picked up and was put in jail.
Patty: About how many different places or different families did you?
Rosalia: They told me that I had lived in something like 20 different places. I have to tell you the truth. I remember a lot of it when I was younger, but I am now 72 years old and a lot of the real details of a lot of the things that happened and a lot of-- as I say, I lived in attics, I lived in basements, I lived in the stall between the cows that they had made a room there so that they thought the Germans wouldn't look in there.
I lived between walls. I lived wherever you in a boat. I lived in so many different places, wherever they could hide. As I say, people didn't realize it is much harder to keep a child. Some children might be very quiet children and so, but I have always been one that wanted to go and explore and see. It was harder, I think, to contain me. I think I was a good child because I've heard that that was no problem, but it still is very hard to keep a child. Then these people were on rations, so they only had so much food.
They were on clothing rations, so I didn't have much clothing, and so whatever they outgrew or what they didn't have for themselves, they made smaller to get me clothes, but near the end when I was picked up, I only had the dress on my back, and I had a pair of shoes that I had that were too small because I had it for years, but they couldn't go out and buy me shoes because shoes they couldn't hand down, and they couldn't buy it because then they knew that they somebody was there, and they couldn't use their ration card for my shoes when they needed a shoe.
Of course, there were a lot of people who got false ration cards. The Underground had a lot of false ration cards, so that helped a lot. I don't know where. They were printed by the Underground, but they were always there when they needed it, and in the middle of the night, they were always somebody that took me from one place to the other, but it was always done in the middle of the night.
Patty: What were you thinking and feeling in all those different places where you were hiding?
Rosalia: I became very distrustful of people. People were very good to me where I lived, but I knew I wasn't going to stay there very long. It's like children here that go from foster place to foster place. After a while, they don't know where they belong. I didn't know where I belonged because I didn't belong with any of the families. They were all strangers. You came, and they say, "Hello, go up in the attic," Or, "Hello, come on, you need to be in their basement." Here you see a child that has a bed made up, and usually what they had was boards, just four boards with a mattress in it. It wasn't like a regular bed. You slept on the floor, but you had the bed on top of the floor.
There were four boards made because they didn't have extra beds where you were. That's all I had. Then that little bit of clothes, it wasn't much. Then you had to stay there, and you got your food there, so you never really got to know the people because they had a live upstairs while you sat there by yourself downstairs.
Sometimes with some people, I had some toys that I could play with, but then when I left, I had to leave those there because I went to bed and do the next one. I traveled with nothing for them to be easy to take me from one place to another. You didn't have a suitcase with you because it was hard on the back of a bicycle to put you and your suitcase.
When I left my house and went to the First People, I had a suitcase and all kinds of clothes and everything that was still from my parents. My grandparents, I have a few pictures, and they were saved by my grandparents in the backyard. They had made a hole and had put a blanket and some other stuff and wrapped it around some pictures. The Germans never got that. After the war, my mother went back. She came out of the war, and she went back and got the pictures. I don't know what else she got because she never wanted to share with me what she had, but she had these pictures, and I knew that they were in the house.
00:36:10Patty: Did you always have enough food to eat?
Rosalia: No. As a matter of fact, now people say that it's good. We used dandelions, tulip bulbs to eat. One time, I did get out of the house, and there was a school where they were cooking peas, and I stuck my hand in the burning water to get the peas. I was so hungry, I didn't even feel it. My skin came off, and it wasn't very bad for a long time. I bandaged my hand, because I was so hungry. You do anything to get food. Some people I lived with had the food, and other people weren't. When you grew vegetables or something, or even when I lived with the milkman, he couldn't keep the milk. The Germans confiscated it for their soldiers. There was only given a very little bit for own use, and the rest had to go to the German soldiers. They plundered everybody, especially the farmers. There wasn't a whole lot to go around. There was always bread. Somehow there was always bread. They baked it fresh themselves in the morning. We had bread with the vegetables or something. There was very little meat. I went hungry, but there was so much else going on that you forgot that you were hungry sometimes, or sometimes the hunger pains are so much that you forgot that you were even where you were, especially for a young child. I still have after problems with it because I never developed properly. When you are a child, especially when you're 7, 8, 9, 10 years old, your body starts developing. I needed iron and vitamins for your bones. My insights, the doctor says, was like an eight-year-old. I never developed properly. Then after the war, I had been so sick that I was in and out of the hospital for seven years from 1945 to '52, and a lot of operations. As a matter of fact, I was in the hospital a couple of months ago. Well, it was not a couple of months. It's been a year now. It was last August. The doctor, when he went inside, he said he had to go like a maze to get through my gallbladder to take that out. He says because I had so much scar tissue in my body from all the operations that I had. He says, "What happened to you?" I said, "I was a Holocaust survivor." He said now he understood because he couldn't understand anybody with that much scar tissue in his stomach. I said, "Well, because I've had nothing but operations since I was young. I was 13."
00:39:50Patty: How were you captured? Did someone-
Rosalia: Somebody told on us. It was a family member of the people I lived with, and they told him that I was in that particular house. The Germans just came in, and we had no inkling that they came. It was a surprise. The man and the wife were already elderly people. They picked them up, and I was upstairs in the attic, and they went through the house and they found me. Matter of fact, I ran away. I ran out of the house, and I zigzagged. This is how a mind worked. I was only little, 11 years old, and they started shooting at me. They couldn't hit me because I went zigzagging through the street.
In the end, somebody came from the other side, and they got me. I don't know what makes you think about doing that. You would walk straight, but I didn't run straight. I ran, and I ran zigzagging, trying to not hit it. Then they got me, and they put me in a car with SS because it was the SS that found. They put me in a different car from the other people, and they took me right to a jail in their city.
Patty: What happened in the jail?
Rosalia: I lived there. Meanwhile, I didn't have any shoes. They were quite a lot of people in one cell because they didn't have enough cells. The jail wasn't made for having people there. They didn't just have Jewish people there. They had people who wouldn't go to Germany, young men, young men who wouldn't go into the service. They had other people that were from the resistance in there. There was a whole group of different people in the jail besides felons.
I was the only child. The head of the jail was an SS, but he was not one that, as some of the other ones were, who were just raping and doing all kinds of stuff. I had been to-- They used me too. He tried to get food to me because there was not much food. He gave me a pair of his slippers to wear because I didn't have any shoes on. He would tell me he had in Germany a child my age, and he thought what happened to his child, that's what is happening to me and what is still going to happen to me because they were waiting for me to be transferred to camp.
He just couldn't. He was telling me, but he had to go into the service because I don't know why he went into the SS. He says if he didn't get into becoming a soldier, then he would be shot because it was mandatory that every man and child in Germany was going to go and be into some kind of service. I've been asked so many times, how come I don't hate? I always said they were good and bad. If you hate, you only hate yourself because nobody else cares, and you are going to be the one that's going to be eaten up by it.
I learned that young. As I say, I was in so many foster homes that it took me a long time to trust people. After the war, for a whole year, I wouldn't talk hardly to anybody.
I didn't trust nobody because my mother came back. The Red Cross found my mother after the war, but I didn't recognize her. I didn't know who she was. I hadn't seen her in all those years, so I didn't know how this woman was. I thought this was just another woman who's saying, you called me mommy.
00:44:51Anyway, out of the jail, I was put in one camp. I was in there for a little while and then transferred to another camp. It's very hard for me to talk about it because the doctors tell me I have put it in the back of my mind. It's something that sits there and it gets triggered off. I know how I lived and had no food and was used for experiments. That's why I was so sick after the war. The thing of it is, is when I talk about it, if I see something happening on television, it triggers off and I get nightmares.
It's less now than it used to be. I used to have it that when something happens on television, I see the bodies with my children's heads on it. It's like they were in that war. Now I just get sometimes nightmares that I'm still in the middle of it and I can't get out of the barrack. I lay on that straw and I'm clawing for food, but I can't find my piece of bread and I don't know where it is. These are the things that are still happening. I'm staying in my story mostly to schools. I go to schools. I used to.
I went to one last year, but I don't do that much anymore because it still takes a lot out of you. Talk about the good these people did. I want people to know that here were people that had a child that was a little child and could have lost their lives with them, as one man did, or as a young boy, 22-year-old boy, 22, I think they told me he was, that happened. That they have to learn that it wasn't all camp and German soldiers, but it was good in life.
Maybe that's what made me stronger as a human being because I realized when I got older that people did that to me. As a child, you think you go from one foster parent to another and you don't belong and you don't trust anybody and all that. Then when you become older, you realize, God, these people did that for you. They put their life on the line for you. That is something that I want to talk about, to remember that, because I don't think it has been told too often.
00:48:10Patty: Do you remember the names of the camps where you were?
Rosalia: Well, the first one was called Vught. That was just something that you went through. The other one, but you see, this was all near the end of the war. I don't even remember a whole lot about it. I remember going on the train to Auschwitz and being bombed and having to lay under the train and stuff like that. That is the most that I remember. I did have a number on my arm. That number was taken out by the doctors. They took something from my thigh and put it back in the arm. It's just a little scar now because I used to look at it all the time.
That's why they thought I wouldn't talk to anybody. Then after that, I talked to doctors a lot and they got me going, back going, because now they can't stop me.
00:49:30Anyway, I talked to schools because I wanted to tell the children that I moved from so many different places and had to rely on myself, on my own wit, food-wise, getting along with the people and make sure that I lived from one day to the other, but you can make it. After the war, I went to school during the daytime and went to the hospital first in the mornings, then went to school, and then went to night school sometimes. Also, I worked since there was not much money. We came out of the war. We didn't have nothing, my mother and I. My father had come out of the war, but he and my mother, since they hadn't been together for all those years, didn't want to be together anymore, so my father stayed in Amsterdam, my mother stayed in Dehey. I stayed with my mother, but she really didn't want me, but she used to say, "I keep you because I don't want your father to have you." I know that they fought in court about it, but she was the one that was very bitter.
She lost all her family, and she was so bitter that she used to say, "How come you came out of it and they didn't?" She kept me, but that was the only thing. She was hardly ever at home. I was by myself. She had a boyfriend, and she stayed over her boyfriend's house while I stayed at the house by myself, cooked for myself, did for myself. Usually, she locked me up in the house because she didn't want me to be outside unless I had to go to school. I did a lot of things trying to get money. I worked in an apartment store sewing so I could make some money.
When that was over with, I went to art school and went to a place that you paint Dutch scenes of cups and saucers and stuff. In the seconds that they had that they couldn't sell, I used to buy and then sold it in the neighborhood so I could get some money. This is all as a teenager trying to get myself going to get extra money and stuff. I tell the kids, you don't have to go, and you can always find something to do with yourself. Then they ask me, how come you're not bitter?
I always tell them that if you are bitter or if you feel like they owe you things, it's only in your mind and your heart. You can become so obsessed with it that you don't know how you can harm yourself. Tolerance is, to me, the most-is a word that needs to be used. You have to have tolerance. Tolerance for kids, if they're different in color or creed or from somewhere else that you don't know anything about, learn about it.
If you don't like somebody, don't say, I hate him, just walk away from them. Nobody says you have to go and be friends with them. There are so many different ways. They tell me, yes, I had a bad childhood. I had been beaten, took a lot of doctors to put me together. I had been raped. I had to go on with that. I had a lot of obstacles in my life and no help other than some of the doctors. I left home when I was 17 and immigrated first to New Zealand before I came here. You can make it on your own if you have to. That's what I feel like. If you can't find it in the city, work your way out of it and try to find it somewhere else.
00:54:45Patty: Do you remember being liberated from the camp?
Rosalia: Yes, because the thing that was most noticeable, there were no Germans anymore. Nobody believed that they were gone. We didn't know what was going on until we saw the fences were open. They had gone, and this is how we knew that we were liberated. One thing always was on my mind and I never could understand. The villagers used to come and look and saw us there. How come they didn't know we were there? They said they didn't know we were there. That is something that I never understood.
That is something that in my own mind I had to come to grips with. I guess they were afraid, just like everybody else, to fight the Germans because if they would do something, they probably would have been killed themselves. Maybe that's why they didn't want to know.
Patty: When did you come to America?
00:56:05Rosalia: I came to the United States in October. No, August. I think it was August of '56. I met my husband right after I came here. I came here because I was sponsored. I was in New Zealand and I was put on a list either to go to Israel or to the United States. My mother was on the same list to come to the United States. We went on numbers. You had to quote a number that you had to have in those days to get to the country. Our number came up. My mother called me and she said she couldn't come to the United States by herself because I was on the quota number, whether it was a joint thing. In '56, they were scared of Russia in Holland. My mother threatened me and she said, "If you don't come to Holland and bring me to the United States and Russia comes into Holland, it's going to be your fault." That was really an eye opener. I didn't want to go and do that. That's how I left New Zealand. I was very happy there. I had a good job. I left New Zealand and came to Holland to bring my mother here. We had a sponsor here in Norfolk. It was a Snyder's department store. There was a lady, her name was Justine Nussbaum, who made sure that we had an apartment and everything in the apartment. My mother came here, was here six months, didn't like it and went back to Holland. Meanwhile, I was still here. I had met my husband here. In March of '57, well, before then, he said, don't go back. I was going to go to California. I thought maybe it was something. Everybody wanted to go to California.
My husband says, "Don't go to California. Stay here." In March of '57, we got married.
Patty: How did you adjust to the change?
Rosalia: Couldn't adjust. Had a hard time. Couldn't adjust in the beginning to being married. The thing of it was, I was so used to taking care of myself, I had nobody else to take care of myself. I came here to the United States, and a week later, I was already working. I had to work. I had to make money trying to pay for the apartment. They helped us, but I wasn't going to have any help. I was going to do it on my own. When I first got married, I used to climb out of the bedroom window at night and roamed around the neighborhood because I wasn't used to having another person close to me, it was very hard. My husband was very good.
He never complained about it. He laughs about it, never complained about it because it was very hard to me that I had to share my life now that I was so used to doing it on my own. If I wanted to do something, I just did it. Now I had to ask somebody, can I do it or shall we do it? It was an adjustment, but I got used to it real quick and with patience from him. My in-laws were just absolutely wonderful people. We've been married 50 years now.
Patty: Were there survivors in his family?
Rosalia: None. His parents were from Lithuania. They came here right at the turn of the century. He was born here in Portsmouth in 1926. My mother-in-law's family, she had one brother that she came here with who lived in Chicago. That's how she came to the United States. The rest of her family were still in Lithuania and all died over there. My father-in-law came to this country with four of his brothers. They opened a bakery in Portsmouth. One brother had a store that sold suitcases and stuff like that.
They came to this country and changed their name. They had a different name, but they changed their name. He was born here and all his family was here. He's never known anybody or anything from another country.
01:02:06Patty: Have you returned to any of the camps since liberation?
Rosalia: I don't think I could. I can't even go to Washington. My daughter went there, really. My son has not gone. He keeps himself away from anything that happens during the war with me. I don't think that he can absorb it. He doesn't like you to talk about it. My daughter wanted to know everything about it, and she knows everything.
She went to Washington. She went to the archives in Washington and found quite a few of my family members in there, where they died and when they died and all that stuff.
She only had a chance to do it one day, and she hasn't been back because she lives in Texas. She's gone there, true. She has told me that it wasn't something that I could see that she thought that I would get too upset about. I haven't done that. I have come to terms with talking about these things. I don't think you ever come to terms with what happened to you. You might not think about it no more because I don't ever think about it really no more. I go on with my life, but certain things can trigger it off, just little sayings or little things that you see on television or something. It can still trigger it off. Like the doctor said, it is in the back of your mind. The government from Holland told me that if I ever needed a psychiatrist, they would get me a psychiatrist. That's how much they still thought about that this still bothers me. At this point in my life, I want peace, and it's understandable.
01:04:25Patty: You have already answered this question quite a bit, but if there's anything that you would want to add to this, how did the Holocaust change your life?
Rosalia: It changed my life with, I think I have more patience, not because of the war itself, but because of afterthought of what people did and we still went on with life. When things happened nowadays, I can look at it and figure it out more or less. Say, for instance, if somebody should become sick, I don't go right away, "Oh, what to do now?" I'll stand back and say, "Okay, this needs to be done, that needs to be done, and that needs to be done." I think that's what you learn when you're on your own and you have to take care of yourself. When things happen to me, I am able to take care of me because I've done it for all these years. I had to take care of me when I was little. I had to take care of me when I was a teenager growing up. I have a husband that, as I said, he's easygoing, but that's why I took care of things like I almost was the head of household. Had I married somebody else that would have been strong like me, I don't think I could have done that. That is what changed in my lifetime. I became self-sufficient, I guess.
It's a good thing in one thing, it's not good in another thing because I have a hard time letting go of my reign. I take over a lot of times while I should stay more back and let somebody else do it. That's very hard for me, but that is what's changed it.
Patty: What one lesson do you think we should learn from remembering the Holocaust?
Rosalia: That, well, we haven't learned much. That life is precious and that we can't just take it for granted and that everybody's born a good person, but that we're made bad by circumstances. These circumstances are still going on because we are looking at me, what is good for me, but not what is good for the whole. I think we saw what happened during the war, that life was just a number and it didn't mean nothing as long as I get satisfied and I want what I want and what I get.
The world is still a lot the same. I look at the different parts of the world and I say, if you take a young person in fifth grade and you could put them together with people from all over the different parts of the world, they play together and they don't even think about anything but having a good time together and become friends. Why do we lose that when we become older? Why all of a sudden become our ideals more important than yours? I have friends in so many different religions and I am Jewish all inside, but that doesn't mean I can't have respect for your religion and for what you are because you feel comfortable in your world, in your space and what you have. But in a whole, we can become good and we can become strong. We don't have to be separated. Just have respect for each other. That's a message that is very hard to convey sometimes to people.
Patty: Is there anything else about the camps that you feel comfortable sharing?
Rosalia: Not really. I think that a lot has been said in a lot of different circumstances and you have lots of people that have been there who are more comfortable with it than I am. As a child, it was a very hard line. When the war was over, I weighed 36 pounds and was a very sick little girl with sores all over me and no hair and all that.
It's just very hard for me to remember. Very hard for me to remember. I hope that people don't think any less, but I hope that they learned something in my little time of life as a child, that there were many good people and that a little child that started as a seven-year-old wandering in different families and different places and still can come out. Hopefully, be decent and good human being that has played a role in society as a good person.
Patty: Do you have any last memory that you want to share?
Rosalia: I've had a good marriage. I have three children. They're all doing real well. I have a husband now that is starting with Alzheimer's, so I have a lot to take care of, but it really doesn't-- It's another part of life. I have had juvenile diabetes since I was a child. I have been on the doctor's care ever since I came here with it, but I'm doing well. I lost a lot of my sight. I'm legally blind, really. There's another thing, because I feel I was so strong with standing on my own two feet and doing for myself and doing for my family, I'm able to take care of myself and my husband right now.
This is another part of my life that he is 80 and I'm 72. I'll be 73 in December. We are very upbeat. He has the greatest sense of humor and relies on me, but listens to what I ask him to do because Alzheimer's is not an easy thing to take care of. He is as nice as he can be. He's not mean or anything with it, so I'm very thankful for that.
We take each day as it comes, and we're doing real well, and we take care of ourselves and take care of each other. Patty: Thank you for sharing about your life.
Rosalia: You're welcome.
