Tag #137940 - Interview #78465 (Egon Lovith)

I don’t know how long I had slept for but I woke up from the dawning light and realized that I was in a basement. I felt very hot. It turned out they put me in some kind of bed and they put an eiderdown blanket on me. They came down and took me upstairs to the kitchen, they tidied me up again, and gave me some clothes. I immediately got a latte and some bread, they started to feed me. I slept in the basement and once in a while they would come and wake me up and bring me up to the kitchen. Once, while I was up in the kitchen, we heard somebody banging on the door. They looked out: the German soldiers were retreating and they just wanted to come in to get warm. There was no time for the master of the house to hide me so we agreed that I was going to be an Italian prisoner whom they had let in. The Germans came inside with their guns, as they were. There was a great discussion. I told them something like, ‘Ich bin Italiener, io sono italiano.’ They also tried to talk to me in Italian but they couldn’t. But they weren’t too curious to find out more about me either and they were in pretty bad shape themselves; thin, with beards. Soon they left.