The story of Gizela - Afik Shiraz. Abinun Shmuel

agricultural to ice blocks for refrigerators of those days. Our neighbor had also a wagon, and as a result our home run of mice and rats.

We both worked for the Giltex pants factory. Leon used the bus and to bring home Cut and ready-to-sew fabric packs, so we bought a second sewing machine and worked together for many hours a day. In 1964, I received a one-time compensation from Germany for the first time in amount of 650 IL. We purchased a "refrigerator" which was an ice crate, and a gas stove with balloons. The ice we bought from a street vendor, who moved in the neighborhood or carried ourselves from the factory which was a few hundred meters from the house. I cooked on a kerosene burner and used aluminum pots and a few enamels that we brought from Yugoslavia. I have already mentioned that with my camp friends, I have little talk about the war period. By contrast, Leon was open and shared slightly more of his experiences. This is how I knew that during his time with the Italians he was pretending Croatian, and because he was a tailor he did occasional sewing work for the soldiers - a patch here and there, and in return for these works he got bread, an Italian bun called Panioca. Thanks to Spanish he knew, very similar to Italian, he could communicate with them. When his time came to be released he was told that it is difficult to decide what is better for him, to come home or stay in camp. Luckily for Leon, the next day he got a new name – Leopold - and a fake document that he could pass through. He bought a ticket train and drove away, and his memories of that time he reported and handed a copy to Yad Vashem. And I would often wake up in the middle of the night screaming from horror dreams. Leon would give me a drink so I would wake up and relax, and I would tell him I dreamed something, and that was it. I never told more. Even when I asked for compensation, I did not speak much to remember. I felt suffocated. I stood there and could not say a word, neither talk nor swallow. I was content with the dry facts: Bergen-Belsen, hut number 10. Later, when Samuel, my son, traveled with his wife and visited Bergen-Belsen in 2008, they turned to the camp coordinator, which became meanwhile to the museum, and the same coordinator showed them, here, this is the rectangle where the hut number 10 was. After the war, they left nothing there. Before getting up the camp there had been a forest, which had been cut to build the barracks, and since then, after the war the forest grew back. Even with Samuel, I had not talked about my experiences during the Holocaust over the years. He knew only that his parents were survivors, and for most of his life he had not researched beyond that, even at high school he learned little about (booklet named) "As a sheep for slaughter" and about the Warsaw ghetto. He knew only that he did not grow up with grandparents or large extended family. In 1961, the Eichmann trial opened, which revealed a large part of the public Israeli Holocaust Horror. Many survivors followed suit the trial, but Leon and I did little to talk about him and neither did our friend deal with the issue. I didn't want to read or hear the coverage on the radio and I didn't follow the case. I was glad he were sentenced to death and his ash was scattered over the sea and I didn't want to know more about it. It was still a time when we tried to continue our lives and forget. However, because my husband was similar

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