Transcript
[Text: Alex Buckman shares the story of his discovery, at age seven, that his aunt Rebecca Teitelbaum was not his mother as he had long believed. One day, at the beach, Alex got into a fight with his cousin.]
Alex Buckman: And he was really mad at me, and he punched me in the nose and then I was bleeding, and then I said what most kids would say, I'll tell my mother on you! And that's when he told me that my mother and my father were dead, and he just blurted it out like that, and I was seven years old when he did that. So I said no, it's not true, my mother and my father, they're at home and they just brought me to the sea and I will see them when I go back home. And he said no, they're not your parents, your parents are dead. And he said I know for sure because my mother told me. Well, I ran away and at night, the police found me and they brought me back to this aunt's house and then I asked her if it was true that what told me that my parents were dead, and she said, instead of answering me, she said I'll take you home. So they drove me home. The drive from the sea back to Brussels was like a two hour drive, so when I got home, I ran to Becky who was there and I said are you my mother or are you my aunt? And that's when she told me for the first time that your parents went to Auschwitz and they did not return, and that's the first time that I realized that all of a sudden, I didn't have any parents, I was alone, and I was wondering who's gonna take care of me? And then she said right away, we are going to take care of you. What had happened, going back to Ravensbrück, in the concentration camp, when she found out that my mother had died, that she was murdered, she made a promise apparently by looking up in the sky and she said when I will return, I will raise Alex as if he was my son and so that's what she did. Needless to say, I fell in love with her.
