BERNARD LANDAU

4/30/95 DARLINGTON HOUSE TOLEDO, OHIO

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My name is Bernard Landau, I was born in Hungary. I had two sisters one was Celia the other Giselle, and I had a younger brother. I lived in an industrial or agricultural provincial home in town. I didn't understand that place. I immigrated to Belgium to a town where I lived and worked until the Second World War broke out. I was under 40, I was born in in December 1906. Before the war the non-Jewish community treated the Jews amicably, but it was livable until the war broke out. Once the Germans came in, the attitude of the people, some were just hiding open antisemitism, but with this everything changed. Hungary had more antisemitism than Belgium. My family stayed in the place where I was born, Hungary, but then after the Germans came in, they tried to escape, and we managed to get out to Belgium. When the Germans came into Belgium, I escaped then to southern France, but that was not occupied at that time yet. I didn't want to serve, so I was afraid to stay in France, and I went and got a visa to Spain and Portugal and went through the Pyrenees, but I couldn't get to Portugal. Later it started getting more restricted and harder, but I escaped from Belgium right in the beginning, I escaped by foot until I was beyond Paris with my brother. You tried to avoid the German occupied areas, to get through what later became Vichy France, doing most of your traveling at night or in the daytime in non-occupied areas. There was a lot of confusion, because there were a lot of people, and the food was very poor, although it wasn't starving level. In a detention camp, we had military bread, we got half of it per day, and in the morning, we got coffee, and for lunch, and for supper, some potato soup, or something not to die from starvation. When we got out of the detention camp in 6 weeks, we were free in Madrid. I was on a convoy of American and English ships, going from Gibraltar to England, and ended in the army, until the end of the World War. I was part of the Allied Forces trying to free France. I was a civilian now so, I went back to Belgium, I didn't find anybody I knew.