On The Train To Majdanek
Well, he felt terribly uncomfortable, but he gave me his address and he says, ‘Why don’t you try to come to Germany as a slave laborer.’ And he says, ‘And if you do, I would like to know how you are doing.’ I still have a letter from him.
“We said a little bit more, but he was getting, I could see he was getting fidgety. You know, he wasn’t feeling comfortable: he is harboring a Jew. So anyway, those few hours passed by, and he walked with me to the station. He said goodbye, and I took the train and went back to Warsaw.
“Back in Warsaw I got together with this fellow who is my friend. There is no trace of my sister. So I took the train and went back home. This was December. Maybe it was Christmas time, I mean two days before Christmas by the time all this traveling was done. I came home and my mother was still there and that was it. She said, ‘Sarka is gone.
“There we were, the two of us living with another 20 people in the same room. And the worst thing was that everybody was getting typhus. I had typhus before, so I could make myself useful. I was tending the people. What could you do, wipe their heads, we had nothing… I remember, every morning one of my cousins, my aunt – but my aunt died of typhus – there was this nurse, I don’t know who she was. She was coming in. She was at that time maybe 30 years old, and I was what, 21, 22, already, I think. Every morning when she came in, she saw me and she says, ‘How can you look so fresh right in the morning?’ After all I was only a 22-year-old girl.
“And that was it until the next… And for those few months it was quiet. Until the first of May.
What happened then?
“All kinds of things were happening. They took the whole contingent of policemen, [Jewish ghetto policeman], the ones who were there. One day they called them all together, they thought they are going to go out for some action, and they mowed them down with a machine gun. Then they selected some new boys. I mean everybody was really afraid. People were running away from becoming policemen. They selected a new group of policemen. So that’s how it was going until the first of May.
“The first of May was a… This was a deportation which I participated. So again, my mother and I, we hid in some little attic. It was like a little shack or something in this attic. And so, the first day was May 1st. And they didn’t find us. They were going from house to house, but they didn’t find us. And then, everything I think is a matter of chance. And the second of May there was shooting all day long. That day, whomever they found they shot on the spot. They didn’t find us.
“It was the next day I was taken. They dragged us down. But that day they didn’t shoot on the spot everybody. And they gathered us all up in this marketplace – every little town had a square – and there we were sitting all day long. And the Germans they were walking around and hitting us with the butts, you know with their guns, everybody, and shooting if they felt like it, and whatever. You ask for water, and they gave you a bullet through your head. I mean it was…
“Anyway, until about 6 o’clock in the evening. Then they started pushing people. So what would make me any different? Somebody hit me there with a… Blood started streaming down. Whoever was sitting behind me says, ‘Look, you are all bleeding.’ I said, ‘So what.’ I mean really it was… When you had those thoughts in your head – you’ll never see this, you’ll never see that. I had this absolute certainty that being deported is going straight to the gas chambers. And there we were in their hands and there was no way out, so I really didn’t care. This I remember distinctly. I really didn’t care, so I said, ‘so what.’
“And then they pushed us into those – those cars. So many people to a car, it was like hell. And they locked us in, and the train was standing there, I don’t know for how long. And it was hot like hell, and no water and people were screaming ‘Water, water!’ The Germans heard screaming, ‘Water,’ and they came to this little window and are shooting in. So, groans of dying. It was… It was…
“Then they finally started. The train started moving. I don’t know how fast it was going. We didn’t know where we were going. And then, I was in this car and…
I don’t really know how it started. I suppose some people wanted to make more room for more air. Some of the cars had this barbed wire over the windows. This train didn’t. So that window, I mean there was this opening, there was this high opening and they started picking up people and pushing them through that window. And that’s how I was pushed through.”
And your mother?
“I never saw my mother again. She was in the same car but she, she just… I mean there was another woman, Mrs. Zhitov, she was a good friend of hers. Her daughter worked in the Jewish employment office, a beautiful girl, and the mother wanted that the three of us go together to Germany. But of course… Never managed that. And so, my mother was lying in this corner with Mrs. Zhitov. They were both resigned to… I don’t even know if my mother knew that somebody pushed me out or not. I don’t know.
“I was lying in this ditch. I don’t know how long. And when I came to, it was night. It was night and there I was lying and I, I sort of sat up and I started touching myself to see if I have anything broken. I was in one piece. So I got up and started walking.
“I came to a village, and it was early in the morning, maybe six o’clock or so. And I saw some peasants, and asked them where I am. They said, ‘Oh, you are on the way to Lublin.’ So I realized that the train did not go to Treblinka, it went to Majdanek. Majdanek was a Lublin camp. I ask them, ‘Which way is it to Miedzyrzec Podlaski?’ I forgot how many kilometers they said. Anyway, I started walking. I don’t know what to do, and I was hungry, so I decided to go back to Miedzyrzec and wait for the next deportation. I mean, what else … What else was to be done?
“I started walking and this was, this was a long walk. It took me about fifteen days, and I did all kinds of things. Sometimes I slept in chicken coops, and barns, and rain came down, and pours came. And I was walking, and it was a horrible Spring downpour, and I got soaked. I stole into this abandoned, or it looked abandoned, this brick factory – I can even see it now – and I just lay down, curled up in the corner and I fell asleep.
“I remember I was lying, maybe for the night, when this shepherd boy, he didn’t know – he was maybe 12 years old – he thought it was someone just sleeping there. He touched me on the shoulder and says, ‘What are you doing here?’ Of course, I said, ‘I am sleeping.’ Where do you live?’ I says, ‘Oh, I don’t live so close.’ So he says, ‘Do you want some hot soup?’ or something, I remember it was those Polish dumplings. The Jews never ate it. But his mother had apparently given him that, because he came out with his cows after the rain. And this was the end of my exchange with him.
“When I think about it – the innocence of the children. He didn’t ask any questions; he wasn’t surprised that I am there; what I look like; who I am; nothing. I ate it and then, of course, I was trying not to meet anybody, and I was already a little bit concerned. Here he is and maybe his mother would come, and things could get much complicated, or an older brother or whatever, God knows. Plenty of the Poles were denouncing Jews, or if they suspected somebody of being a Jew. So I ate it up and I went on my way.
“I mostly tried to walk through meadows, not to walk the roads. But of course, one always prepares oneself. This instinct of self-preservation I think is extremely strong, or at least it must have been in me, because then I thought, ‘well I can’t always walk the meadows, and I cannot walk for fifteen days without stopping somewhere for a drink of water, ask for a piece of bread. It’s no use.’ Then I thought, ‘Well, if somebody asks me, I would tell them that I jumped out of a train, yes. I was caught by the Germans who had sent me off to slave-labor as a Pole.’
“As I mentioned to you earlier, there were many millions, millions of forced laborers who were sent to Germany from the occupied territories apart from the Jews. The same thing was happening to the Poles. There were those employment offices in every city or in every village. And to the young Poles, I don’t remember exactly, maybe between the ages of 16 and 35, they would promulgate orders that they have to come to this and this place to be sent off to Germany to work. Of course, some promised, you know, good working conditions, enough food, blah, blah, blah. Since this was war conditions, even the Poles, especially in the towns and cities, didn’t have too much food. Everything was rationed. The peasants had it very good. The peasants became rich during the war. That is always happening because they grow food, and even so they have to deliver it, they always manage to hide. Then they barter. I mean for the first time probably, they suddenly had sterling silver and God knows what.
(To be continued)
