Tag #125226 - Interview #89859 (Estera Sava)

Then my husband was sent to work in Ploiesti. Lucica and I went with him. During the war, there wasn’t one single Jew aged 16-55 in Ploiesti; it was an oil region and, you see, Jews were considered Communists and spies… The house we lived in also sheltered six Jewish families and six non-Jewish ones. We got along well with everyone, except for one single family – those were real pests, but there was nothing to do about it. We had female neighbors whose husbands or sons had been sent to labor camps. Some were in Buzau, some in Focsani, in the Vrancea region, and some were further away, in Transnistria. They weren’t all in the same place, so there could be no communication between them. Some returned, some didn’t. Of those who returned, some died in just a few months… I had three neighbors whose husbands were away and one neighbor whose sons had been sent to forced labor, because her husband was over 55. They didn’t earn anything; they were in a pitiful situation. My husband would bring food and would fill bags with some of it, and he would tell me: ‘Go to their places and give them these things and this food. Don’t call them over here, don’t insult them, don’t put them in an embarrassing position! You go to them!’ And I’d go and deliver those packages. My husband helped a lot of people, there’s no arguing about that!