Šaul Gattenyo

"We found shelter with the nuns in a monastery in Skopje. But soon thereafter, since there were Bulgarian and German soldiers all around, they became scared. After a couple days they sent us along with one Jewish girl and a ten-year-old boy in a horsecart out of Skopje. First, we rode in the horsecard until at some point, the nun told us to carry on on foot. We walked for three days until we reached southern Kosovo and the monastery of Letnica. We were not scared on the way. There were no Germans or Bulgarians there. At night, we sat on tree stumps and made fire because it was cold. We prayed not to be killed by wolves. Then we made it to Letnica where we were admitted by the nuns. I was baptized and given the name Sasha. I learned all the Christian prayers by heart and we stayed there throughout the war. It was a very good place. In 1945, when the war ended, we set off with Zora and a horsecart back to Skopje."

"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."

"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."