Tag #124289 - Interview #78113 (Louiza Vecsler)

I was directly confronted with anti-Semitism when I finished university, I think I was in my last year, during the last period of practical training in 1941. We had a neighbor, a Jewish widow, who sold her house to a Romanian sergeant. This sergeant, who lived near us, was some kind of surgeon's assistant, and he sometimes came to the hospital to pick up some drugs. He used to say to me, 'Good morning, Miss! How are you? I saw your mother this morning and I told her I'm on my way to the hospital.' This lasted until just before the beginning of World War II. One day, I was on my way home - at that time I was already wearing the yellow star [5] - and a soldier stopped me in the street. A couple was also coming down the street, and they stopped to show their IDs as well. The man who had stopped me told them, 'Go ahead!', and they said, 'Ah, you're only checking the ones with the yellow star?' And he said, 'Yes, only them'. I was in my early twenties and wearing the star was compulsory. After he checked my ID, he let me go. It had rained heavily, there was mud everywhere. Then, when I was almost home and wanted to step on a dry rock, I heard a voice behind me: 'Step aside, you Jew [in Romanian: 'jidauca'], I will not step in mud with my new shoes because of you!' It was the sergeant who was our neighbor and who a month or two ago had said to me, 'Good morning, Miss!' After that I was forbidden to work.