The Deportations. As the Ghetto Dwindles…
“Then the same morning a deportation started again. Everybody was taken away. But my mother and my little sister, again with some neighbors – I mean those people really helped them – they hid themselves in some cellar. But I didn’t know if anybody was still there in my family.
“This ‘action’ what the Germans called it, was taking quite a few days and there we were lying in this hayloft. Our toes froze off at that time. It was very cold. We were now looking out through those cracks to see what is happening. In the meanwhile, it started snowing. It was November and one day we see a detachment of Jewish workers on the road. We gathered that the deportation is over if people came out to work again. So we stole down and went into this farmhouse. It was like a gentleman farmer. They were both really very nice and they gave us a good meal, and we talked about it. They were decent people. They felt sorry for us.
“We joined this detachment in the evening and we went back to town. But when we came back to town, we realized the deportation was not officially lifted. It was like – the ghetto was like an Acropolis. It was a dead city. This was the Stuere Company, a big road building company, and the people that worked that detachment, they had some warehouse or something where they housed them. They gave us a bowl of soup and you slept on the floor, and the next morning you got up and went back to the road.
“Maybe for ten days we were there. We became a part of this detachment. And we didn’t know what is going on. The same thing – Eshte, she didn’t know if she had a mother and sister also, whether they are, anybody is still alive, or what is happening. So maybe for another ten days, we didn’t know …
“Then the deportation was officially lifted, and I went back to – I don’t think that we were in this room anymore. After every deportation they would reduce the ghetto. So when I came back there, this was not in the ghetto anymore, but somebody told me that my mother is alive. We finally found each other. By then it was late November and it sort of quieted down.”
Your sister was still alive?
“My sister was still alive, and she was away when this deportation took place. She traveled quite a bit. She, in the meanwhile – really it is such irony that she is dead, and I am alive. She was much more, I think, outgoing than I was. And she had Polish friends all over the place. Some knew she is Jewish, and some didn’t. She knew that the deportation is still not lifted, so she stayed away. Then when the deportation was lifted a few days later, she came home and there we were, the three of us.
“Things were really quite desperate at that time. People really thought that this was it. So then, my mother wasn’t the only one that started especially since we were traveling, ‘Why don’t you save yourself, go.’ There were started those rumors about going to Germany as a non-Jew. You know, the Germans from all the occupied territories, I’m not talking about the Jews, the Jews is a different chapter but in the occupied territories the Germans took over almost all of Europe. They demanded that the young people, men, and women, come to Germany and work for them as forced labor. They were sending them out letters, and many of them didn’t want to go and were hiding. They would round them up in the trains, in the streetcars in the big cities, or simply send out a detachment of Germans and went from house to house. Anyway, that’s how it was, and people were sent to Germany in order to work in the factories or hospitals or restaurants, hotels, etc., because most of the German manpower was on the front.
“What was going on there? Germany was being bombarded and what have you. So some of the quote-unquote non-Jewish looking young people, the families insisted when it became that desperate thing, every family was repeating, ‘Well, somebody has to survive to tell the story otherwise the world will never believe it.’
“And after this one deportation, my aunt was still alive, she also hid, and I think her two daughters Malka, the one who is in Israel now, and Ginda, the three daughters, Hanna too, she was still alive. But they looked more Jewish. So my mother – the thing was that my sister and I, we should try. We should go to Warsaw, and we should go to the German employment office and volunteer. ‘And, if you are lucky, let yourself be caught in the streetcar because they were rounding up. So, if you are caught, they certainly are not going to ask you any questions about papers or ID’s or what have you. And if not, go and try to volunteer.’
“This was the beginning of December. It was winter. It was cold. Mother still had some buried jewelry hidden, also my aunt. So we decided we are going to go to Warsaw. We were supposed to – we had those contacts of my sister’s – to sell this jewelry, to bring the money back to my aunt and my mother and then go volunteer.
“We came to Warsaw one day and there we knew this young Jewish man. He had all kinds of contacts, and he was waiting at the railway station. He had a place of us to go and stay overnight. And as soon – this was really something, those Polish blackmailers …
“We are coming to this apartment, a Polish woman’s apartment, and maybe 15 minutes later a few Poles come and say we are Jews, and they are taking us to the Gestapo. So this other fellow, he already had experience with them, I mean, they were, they were blackmailers. So he says, ‘Fine, take us to the Gestapo.’ And we walk out of the apartment. And we walk. And then they start talking. ‘Well, so what will I gain, what with the Gestapo …’ They said we should give them the money, I don’t know 50,000 or something, some astronomical figure that none of us has.
“And finally, somehow, they were reducing, reducing, reducing, and whatever they could, they got out of us, and they left us alone. Then my sister and I, we decided, well, we better go to a hotel. We knew about one hotel … and I think this woman knew. There were many war tragedies. There was this woman with this lovely apartment whose husband was a Polish officer who was killed in Katyn, where the Russians killed so many Polish officers. So she was renting out rooms. I don’t exactly remember if it was this young man told us, or whatever, and we rented the room.
“There were several other people, and I suspect maybe some others were also Jews, who knows … And my sister, she was the one who was … She always said, ‘Well, I look much better than you do.’ Maybe she did a little bit. She had a very narrow face and really looked like, really Polish. So she was going back to deliver that money to my mother and my aunt and then come back to Warsaw. She never did come back …
“So there I was. She was supposed to come back in two days, and every morning I hear the train and I’m counting and I’m counting and I’m counting. Of course, I was meeting with this young man because he wanted to know, ‘Is Sarka back, did she come back yet?’ Then after a few days he came to me with another one of those, you know, those things that one experiences. So he came to me, and he says, ‘I have a friend here who would like you to go with her to a city called Sambor,’ which was on the Russian border. This was December. So what was her story?
“She was a married woman. She had this three-year-old child, an adorable little child really, blond, sweet. And she and her child lived in Warsaw as non-Jews. Her husband was in this city Sambor, where he lived. I don’t know how he got there, but this was, of course, to save his life. There he pretends to be a Ukrainian and lives there with this Polish or Ukrainian woman who is very much in love with him. She knows, the woman knows, that he had an affair with another woman, and he has a small child.
“She decided, because the ground was getting very hot for her in Warsaw, especially with this small child, so she decided no matter what, she is going to Sambor. I don’t know if she communicated with him before or she didn’t. But she was afraid to travel by herself in case something happens to her because of the child. If there is going to be another person, so maybe it’s easier – two. So the fellow says, ‘I told her about you since you are sitting here and waiting for … Maybe you want to go. It won’t be but a manner of a few days. Maybe you want to go?
“Two, three days later – and it’s winter, it’s December, maybe the 10th of December, I don’t remember. I met with her once before – very pleasant, and this little child she was adorable. So we got the tickets, and we take the train, and we go to Sambor. It was southeast. So first you had to go to Krakow. Krakow was the seat of the Nazi government in Poland. This was the capitol of the government. It wasn’t Warsaw, it was Krakow. We arrive in Krakow about 8-9 o’clock in the evening. There’s a curfew for the Poles also, and it’s cold, freezing cold. We don’t know a soul. We come. We are told that our train is going to leave tomorrow morning, so we have to wait at the train station.
“We come into the waiting room. Those Poles are really something – they were pretty much persecuted, but in spite of it … We come in, there is a waiting room for the Germans, a nice, heated waiting room. There is a waiting room for the Poles – freezing. People sitting on the floor over their suitcases, suitcases hardly, their bundles. The poor child, she starts crying, she’s cold. We probably did have some food; I don’t remember anymore. So we don’t know what to do. I mean you freeze in this place.
“So we decide. As I say, when a situation gets so, so … We decide we are going to talk to that trainmaster whoever he is, German, no German, we are going to talk to him. I spoke German quite well. German was my foreign language I was studying six years when I was going to school. But I didn’t like to speak German.
(To be continued)
