Tag #125637 - Interview #78561 (Sofi Eshua Danon-Moshe)

At that time, during the Holocaust, my mother got pregnant with my youngest brother Shemuel. She believed for a long time that she had gotten some illness but in the end she found out that she was pregnant. I was eavesdropping once and heard her telling my father off for not being careful. The times weren’t suitable for raising children. So, my brother Shemuel was born on 19th October 1943 and, of course, raising him under the conditions in which we were living was a difficult task. My mother hadn’t expected to get pregnant at the age of 45 and had given out the diapers and the baby clothes to the people accommodated in the school because there were babies among them. Her labor-pains started in the yard. We took her to the maternity ward right away but she was of age and her loose muscles weren’t able to throw away the placenta. So we took her to the hospital where they managed to push out the placenta.

Afterwards the Brit ritual was performed where all the relatives were present. During the Holocaust several people had learnt to perform Brit at home. In order to sedate the baby and to make the procedure less painful all the people had to dip a finger in wine and the baby licked it. The next morning the baby started vomiting a lot because our relatives were overzealous and each of them gave the baby two fingers of wine to lick instead of one, because they wanted to reduce the pain. The diapers were a problem as we had to tear and sew anew, nobody gave us anything. It was such a whirlpool; we were in quite a scary situation.