The Dangerous Road Back
“So most of the young Poles didn’t want to go. Some did, especially from in the villages. But the little bit more educated, or from the city, they didn’t want to go. And the Germans were looking for them sometimes. And they were hiding. They knew that they were coming to their homes, so they were hiding at the uncle’s house or what have you. Then the Germans, with the help of the Polish police, they would make roundups.
They would stop a train, take off all the young people and send them off to Germany. In Warsaw I was hoping it would happen to me at one time. They were taking off young people from streetcars and sending them off to camp. This was a transient camp in Lublin or Warsaw or Krakow, there were a few of them. There they went through a physical examination, and they prepared all your papers and then they send you off. Some, as it happened when I got there, had pretty good working conditions. It really depended. Everything was just a matter of chance.
“Some were sent to labor camps, which were almost like concentration camps except that they got better food. I mean, they were not persecuted, they were not beaten, they were not starving, they were not shot like the Jews were. Some were employed in restaurants, in hotels, in hospitals. I was employed in a hospital, but that was later.
“Going back. So, I thought, ‘Well, if I will have to go through a village, I will have to go on a road, and if somebody…’ And what are you doing here?’ After all, our way of talking was sort of a city slicker. I mean, I didn’t speak like the peasants. I would tell them I was caught, and I jumped off the train. Of course, they took away everything, I don’t have anything. And in fact, this happened once, and he was suspicious.
“There are those things when you think back, really it was amazing that I wasn’t raped. You know, with young girls… There was this young man… I happened to come to a road, it was going through a village and this young man, I don’t know what he was, a peasant – actually a little bit better, an educated peasant. He sort of started walking with me and, where am I going? And I told him that story. So he says, ‘When did it happen?’ ‘Three days ago, four days ago, and I am going… and they took me from…’ I forgot whatever I said. I didn’t mention the city of the ghetto but some other place nearby. So he says, ‘Would you like to come with me?’ He lived with his parents, the farmers. He says, ‘Would you like to come with me to my parent’s house and wash up and maybe you can spend the night and then go on.’
“And so I did. Those things which one did, you know, it was just everything. There is a Jewish – word, halfger – you just let yourself go, you do whatever comes. And I did. First of all, I was so filthy I was just dying to wash up. This mother, at the beginning she was very polite. I came in and I introduced myself and, ’panienka.’ Panna means ‘miss’ in Polish. And ‘Where are you from and where are you going? And how are you and what was happening, and where did they catch you,’ you know, the whole thing. And she let me wash up and she served me some food. And, she says, if I would like to stay overnight, she would make some room for me in the barn there. And I did.
“The next day when I got up her tone changed a little. Somebody might have said something to her, ‘Well, do you just take any stranger into your house? How do you know, maybe it’s a Jewish girl. Nowadays you have to be careful, somebody may go to the Gestapo and say that she’s a…’ When I came down that next morning, she was sort of, sort of hinting she’d rather get rid of me. I was certainly alert enough to this type of reaction. She gave me some breakfast and I left. But, in the meanwhile, when we were walking, so this young man he says to me, ‘Well, maybe we can get married in the meanwhile or, maybe we can do this,’ you know what. He was ready to invite me to this barn to sleep with him. Those things were happening all the time.
“Anyway, I don’t know exactly the dates anymore. Day in and day out I slept in chicken coops. Many times, I slept in the woods for a few hours, then I woke up and went. By the time I got to the ghetto, I was surprised myself that I managed to come back. I suppose subconsciously I was expecting that something would happen on the way, somebody would catch me and would take me to the Gestapo. Either they would shoot me or send me on another train, deport me. But anyway, I did. Of course, that’s the story we have. If it did happen, then I wouldn’t be here telling you.
“When I came back to the ghetto – I think I explained to you that those deportations were taking place, like what they call ‘an action,’ a few days and then they would stop. Sometimes it would take a week or two weeks, and those that were hiding, really like rats in a cave or what have you, would get out. So by the time I came back to Miedzyrzec I didn’t even know if anybody is still left or not, but I didn’t know what else to do.
Somebody asked the other day and I said, ‘You know, it’s so difficult to imagine, but here you are. You are off the train. You are without a penny. You are a Jew who is sentenced to die. Because people said, ‘Why did you go back to that ghetto?’ Where should I have gone? What was there to do? Sit down on the road and wait for a, a… I don’t know if there were even cars, maybe a horse could have killed me.
“The deportation, that action, was for the time being finished. And there were still some Jews left. I don’t know how many there were. I don’t remember the name; I think it was Kravchek. Anyway, there was this man who was a friend of the family. His wife was already gone and most of the children, but apparently, he hid somehow, and was still here. And when he saw me…
And each time, another thing that the Nazi’s did, each time after the deportation so they reduced the ghetto. For instance, that room where they took us from this house was not in the ghetto anymore. And if some people were left, so you had to go hook yourself up with another room somebody would let you in. I mean life was no life anymore. It was really, it was all totally demoralizing and totally corrupted.
“There I was, you know a day or two, and people asked me, and I told them everything. There were a few Jewish policemen walking around. I told you about the hierarchy of the Jewish ghetto? This was really a diabolical plan that the Germans thought out so carefully. Everything was a euphemism. Ostensibly the Jews had their autonomy.
They had their city council, they had their president of the council, they had their police, they had their – well, that’s about it. And they were the ones, instead of the Germans doing the dirty work, they saved their people, and the Jews did the dirty work for them, whatever they wanted: ‘Deliver us 50 kilograms of gold by tomorrow night, if not we take 200 people to the marketplace!’ Whatever all those orders were being promulgated. Then with the deportation, they come to the Jewish council and tell them, ‘You deliver us 6,000 people tomorrow morning on the marketplace!’ This is where they were gathering people. That’s why Adam Czerniakow – maybe you read about Czerniakow? He was the president of the Jewish Council in Warsaw. When they started with the deportation in Warsaw, which was in April of 1942, it was Passover I think, and Czerniakow, after a day or so committed suicide. Raul Hilberg wrote a book about him, about some of his diaries.
Were the Jewish policemen resented?
“It really depended how they behaved. There were very many. Young men who didn’t want to be policemen. There were again… It is so difficult, at least for me to explain how this whole, that whole set up there. After all, let’s take a family like mine. We became refugees almost from the very beginning because we didn’t want to go to the ghetto. So we went to Skierniewice. We were refugees already. We didn’t have our home, and we didn’t have our furniture anymore. We had to struggle in this sense much more. Now when you came to a town where they were the people who lived there all the time…
“Of course, it depends upon the standing in the community, the Jewish community. It depended upon their financial – there were rich and there were poor and there was in between. But in the beginning in most of the cities, everybody was looking for somebody because they thought, well, he may have some influence with the Germans. One didn’t even realize, until this thing was progressing to the point that in the eyes of the German you are not a human being no matter what your education; no matter what your financial condition is; what your recognition in your community; you are somebody to be dead.
“But in between, when we were already starving, those people – if they worked with the Germans, like the Jewish policemen, they wore those elegant, high, black boots when I was walking practically barefoot. They were wheeling and dealing with the Germans. The Germans, needless to say, they were quite corruptible too. So, the Germans, they – as I saw many times, I mean it was open season on the Jews. Anyone could go into any Jewish home and take whatever he wanted. You saw a crystal vase, you like it, he took it. You could come in now like a burglar and say, ‘Give me your jewelry, if not I’m going to shoot you.’ But this was all legal, there was no defense against it.
(To be continued)
