Šaul Gattenyo

"After my military service when I was about twenty-one, I realized I hadn't known the whereabouts of my savior Zora. I hadn't thought about it for a long time. The family that brought me up was not in touch with her. I knew a family of survivors from Yugoslavia, my relatives. They lived in Jerusalem and I often visited them during Shabbat. I even gave them some money. They were great, both her and her husband. Her second husband then went to Yugoslavia and I asked him to look for Zora. They wrote in the newspapers, tried via the Red Cross. To no avail. Once, in September 1973, I got a phone call from an acquaintance, telling me they found Zora. Where? In Ljubljana. I got her address and phone. Instantly, I wrote to her and called her, asking her to come to Israel."

"Up until 1945 when we were in the Letnica monastery I thought Zora was my mummy. I called her 'majka', meaning mummy. As a child, I thought I was Christian, knew all the prayers and thought she was my mummy. When we returned to Skopje to Ester, Chananja and her daughter Sheli, they told me that my parents and the whole family - uncles, grandma, the whole extended family - died in Treblinka. That was very hard for me. I kept crying at night, it was horrible. I had a dream of hijacking a plane and bombing Germany. It was very difficult."

"Yad Vashem wants people to tell what they went through during the Shoah. They call it testimony. I went to Yad Vashem and undertook a several day-long course. From the morning till the evening, we were taught how to speak in front of people and so on. There were sixty of us and this took place some two or three years ago. I began talking to other survivors from all around Europe that I met there. I asked them about things. I recall one nice gentleman who was in Auschwitz and at the moment of liberation, weighed some forty or forty-five kilos. Then he made it to the Israeli air force. I talked to pretty much everyone. I found out a part of them were in Auschwitz, others elsewhere. Their lives were very difficult and it was a miracle that they survived. But almost everyone had at least some survivor in their family. For some, it was their sister, for others, their grandma. Myself, I was never hurt physically, I didn't spend time in a concentration camp where Jews were being murdered. I never received a beating. But on the other hand, I was left with nobody from my family."