Never Alone

I tell my story to be a witness so that you can tell your children and your friends that you heard a Jewish woman speak about the Holocaust and that it is true; she was there. It must never happen again-to anyone! When the Germans occupied Poland on September 1, 1939, I was a happy young girl. I grew up in a religious home where I was taught never to question God's will. I had wonderful parents, eight brothers and sisters, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and even two baby nephews. I had many friends and I looked forward to my teenage years to have fun, go dancing, date, and to do all the things teenagers do. When the Germans marched into my beloved hometown, the Jews were their main target. They burned Jewish homes and took away my father's business. They dragged us out into the streets and took our valuables. We were forbidden to go to school and required to wear a Star of David on our arms. If we walked on the sidewalks, the Germans would beat us and spit on us. We had to obey at all times, or we would be severely punished. We lived in constant fear. In December of 1940, all the Jews from my hometown were put on a cattle train and taken to the Warsaw Ghetto. Only about ten pounds of belongings per person; the rest they took away from us. Though Warsaw was only a short distance away, we were kept on the train for days. The Warsaw Ghetto was hell on earth: half a million people crowded into an area of about 840 acres [about 1.3 square miles]. We were cut off from the outside world by barbed wire fences and a ten foot high brick wall. We could not possibly survive on the rations given to us: frozen potatoes and stale bread (184 calories a day). The worst thing was the hunger. On the streets I would see people begging for food and children with swollen bellies suffering from hunger, no one to help them, their parents already dead. The streets were littered with dead people: men, women, and children. They couldn't pick them up fast enough. I would walk by, look and think, "That is where I might end up tomorrow." A typhus epidemic broke out, killing thousands more. The situation was so bad that my family had to look for a way to help ourselves. Because I was a little girl and did not look Jewish, I could sneak out through the holes in the wall and go back to the farmers who knew us. If they would have mercy and give us food, we might be able to sustain our lives a little longer. This was dangerous, but I was willing to do this for my family. I would walk about 30 miles to my hometown and walk back carrying potatoes, flour, beans - anything the farmers would give me. In July of 1942, I returned to Warsaw after one of my journeys to find the Ghetto being liquidated. All the Jews were being loaded onto cattle cars to be resettled somewhere; no one knew where. I snuck close to the fence and asked a Jewish worker to find out about my family - if they were still there. The next day, the worker told me that my family had been taken away and that I should stay outside and save myself any way I could. So I pretended to be Christian and stayed with kind strangers telling them my family died in a bombing. A Jewish girlfriend from my hometown saw me on the street in the summer of 1944. She told me about other Jews and non-Jews who were members of the Polish resistance movement. From then on, a new world opened up for me. I spent a lot of time with them and got to know them well. We felt that the end of the war was near. In January 1945, I was liberated by the Russian army. I didn't trust anyone right away; I was still scared. I went back to my hometown and didn't find anyone alive. From there I went to a displaced persons camp in Germany, where I met and married my husband, and we had a child. In 1949 we immigrated to the United States, the Land of Opportunity.