European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

I always answered: “No, I’m not sad.”

I said that out of defiance and out of furiousness.

I got so furious when someone asked me about that.

I either didn’t answer at all or I just coldly said: “No, I’m not sad at all.”

Although I was very sad, really, that nobody would come back to the house of my birth.

Two aunts got killed with the partisans,

my mother and one aunt died in the concentration camp in Ravensbrück.

Two uncles died in Dachau

and one cousin got killed with the partisans,

one uncle fell in Russia.

Altogether

it added up to 12 people that died.

They were my closest relatives, who I grew up with, who were near and dear to me.

The mother was in the concentration camp.

Father went to the partisans.

He had fought for Hitler in Finland or somewhere, before.

He saw that it was wrong and when he came home on holiday, he went to the partisans.

But he was with them for only for ten minutes and died,

because somebody betrayed him.

Partisan killed at farmers house