Tag #139605 - Interview #101729 (Bella Steinmetz)

My brother didn’t want to come home at all. I was very desperate. He found employment in Germany, in a factory, and stayed there. A friend of him too stayed there. ‘Let’s not go home, it’s useless. Let’s start a new life!’ Especially that he spoke German perfectly, it wasn’t a problem for him to do every kind of work. His wife was a young woman from Nagyvarad, they took her to Riga, the capital of Latvia. People still hoped there that the Germans would win. So the Fuhrer from there received the command to shoot all the concentration camp. My brother knew this. He felt he had nothing to come home for: ‘I have no wife, Bella – that’s me – won’t resist, I have no mammy, Bella’s husband died.’ ‘And one night – he says – I felt I had to come home.’ So I arrived home around June, and he stayed there until the end of October, one morning he got up and said: ‘I’m going home though, perhaps Bellus is alive.’ In November he just stepped in one day. The poor man, how bad he looked like… in an awful clothe, shabby, famished. The trains didn’t run then [as they do now]. So he related me that one night he dreamt that maybe – as he knew me as a fit girl, who has such strength of will –, maybe I’m alive after all. And he came home.