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“Remember to Be A Good Human Being”
A Memoir of Life and The Holocaust
By Frances Irwin (Frymet Oksenhendler) as told to Rachel Epstein
Table of Contents:
Introduction
I was born and raised in Końskie, a town near Radom in the center of Poland. The town had a population of fifteen thousand,
half of whom were Jews. More than half of the Jews were shopkeepers and were engaged in light industry, although there was also one
Jewish doctor, which was unusual. What made the town special was our shul (synagogue), which had been built in honor of King Casimir
the Great (Kazimierz Wielki), who allowed the first Jews into Poland in the fourteenth century. The shul was built of wood without the
use of nails and it was like a historic landmark in that we were not allowed to fix or alter it, especially the inside. People came from all
over the world to see that beautiful shul, and we lived four or five houses away from it.
Our family’s location near the shul is significant because religion played an important part in our life. One of my first memories is getting up very
early to say morning prayers because my father insisted on it. I said them at home, sometimes alone and sometimes with my older sister, with
whom I went to school each morning. In the morning I went to public school from 8:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m., and then to a Bais Yaacov [Orthodox]
school for girls, where we learned until 5:00 p.m. After that I would come home and do homework from both schools, which made me very unhappy
because I had no time to play. Most of the children around me were playing, but I had to rush home, eat lunch in a hurry and then run to Hebrew
school, which was far away.
As much as I hated going to Hebrew school when I was a child, I am grateful now for my Jewish education because when I go to shul I can
read Hebrew and I understand what the prayers are about. My father actually established the Bais Yaacov school in Końskie, which made him
unusual because most religious people of that time did not believe it important to educate girls.
I remember being the youngest child at Bais Yaacov and standing on a chair to give a speech about Tu B’Shevat, Jewish Arbor Day that
occurs usually in February. My father, as President of the school, was sitting on the dais, and I can still feel the hug and kiss he gave me
and see his proud face as he lifted me off the chair when I was finished. I never forget things like that and because of these memories
holidays are sad times for me. Usually people love it when the holidays come, but for me it is the opposite. My husband used to make me
feel better on these holidays, but now that he is no longer here holidays are very sad.
Końskie was a shoemaking center and my father’s business supplied the shoe factories with leather that had been prepared in Radom.
He sold both wholesale and retail from a store as well as from a large warehouse behind the store. At a certain point I remember that the
Poles opened leather stores to compete with the Jews but they really could not compete because they did not have the required knowledge
and contacts. One Polish woman opened a shoe store, but she had to come to my father to buy leather and she would transact her business
at midnight with my father going to her store so that she would not be seen going into a Jewish store.
My father, grandfather, and my brothers were Hasidim, followers of the Gerrer rabbi, [1] who was saved by going to Palestine when the Nazis
came. But my father was more open-minded than the typical Hasid, as his belief in the importance of education for women demonstrates.
He was exceptionally honest and wise and had a reputation for being able to solve problems, a reputation that extended even to the non-Jews
in the town. For instance, the Mayor used to come to my father for advice, but he would come secretly so no one would see him asking a Jew
for help. My father was not a rich man, but they called him “the richest man in town” for the good deeds that he did.
My mother was also exceptional; she was the most wonderful, charitable woman imaginable. She used to help all the poor people in the town
and never thought of herself. I remember my father saying to her, “You must think of yourself too.” On Wednesdays she would go to the
butcher and buy meat for her friends who could not afford to do their own shopping, choosing different friends to help each week, depending
on what she could afford. Then she would buy meat for herself for our family, on Thursdays. I never knew why she shopped in that order until
I went to Israel after the war and met people from Końskie who had known my mother before Hitler came. One of those people was the butcher
where she used to shop, and he remembered asking her one day why she shopped for the people she was helping before she shopped for herself.
He said she told him, “When I take care of the poor people first, then I enjoy what I am buying for myself more.”
My mother probably inherited this charitable behavior from her father; he used to help a man who supported himself as a burglar and regularly
broke into my grandfather’s factory. My grandfather would tell the manager to leave the door open on Friday so that the burglar would not
have to violate the Sabbath by breaking the lock when he made his Friday evening “visit.”
I remember my mother making cranberry jam every summer, which we ate all winter and into the following summer. The pots she used were
bigger than I was. When she put the jam into jars she left a large portion in the pot and put the pot, along with spoons, out into the yard
so that any children who wanted to could come to our house and eat what was left in the pot. Half of my class and the neighbor’s children
used to follow me home that day to taste the jam. They could hardly wait and would keep asking me when my mother was going to be
making her special jam.
My mother also made cookies but I never ate them. I would accumulate them and give them to a friend who was very poor. One day
my mother saw me going out with the cookies in a bag and became very angry when I told her what I was doing. She said, “Why didn’t you
tell me? I’ll make a double recipe and you can bring hers to her on Friday.” l think this habit of being a small eater helped me to survive in the
camps and not die from hunger as many people did.
Our house revolved around the Jewish holidays, beginning, of course, with the Sabbath. Preparations began on Thursday when my mother
did all the shopping and baking. Friday was the day for cooking, which brought forth the most wonderful aromas. Sometimes I think I can still
feel that smell of Friday’s chicken soup with its boiled chicken and thin round pieces of dough, and of Saturday’s roast goose that we would
eat cold with the cholent[2] that was cooked by the baker.
We did net go to Bais Yaacov on Fridays and on late Friday afternoons we would wash and change into our festive Sabbath clothes. My
mother, who was blond and wore a blond sheitel[3] even changed her sheitel on Fridays. She would get dressed up and wear all her jewelry
as if she were going to a wedding. My father and brothers would go to the mikveh [ritual bath], when they came home from the store
and then go to shul. My father came home from shul with guests, people who had been there to pray but had no place to eat for the
Sabbath. Because of the guests we never knew how many people to set the table for and we always added extra place settings for these
people who my father would seat next to him at the enormous table.
The Sabbath atmosphere, with the kiddush[4] and the Hebrew songs and the table and the food is impossible to describe. It was as if God
himself were in the house.
Passover was also a big celebration. The only time we would get new clothes was for Passover, when we were outfitted from top to bottom.
I remember that my poor friend Malka, the one I brought the cookies to, never got new clothes for Passover. Once, when I was older and
my mother bought me a new green salt and pepper tweed suit for Passover that she wanted me to wear to my grandmother’s, I started
to cry that Malka never got any new clothes. I asked my mother if I could lend Malka the suit for Passover and I would wear the dress from
last year and then Malka will give it hack. My mother agreed and when I gave the suit to Malka we were both crying. After Passover I said
the suit didn’t fit me any more because I did not like to eat and had gotten skinny and I gave the suit to Malka to keep.
Because I was such a poor eater, my sister would follow me to school with food to try to make me eat. Once when she was doing this she
got run over by a car and broke her leg. Since there were very few cars in our town she was not used to looking out for them, and this car
was a military car, as I remember, filled with soldiers. My sister’s breaking her leg was terrible, the worst time of my life…
Getting back to Passover, it was the most beautiful holiday. My father reading the Haggadah[5] , and the songs, and all of us participating.
Shavuot[6] was also special as the whole house was full of fruit, vegetables and tree branches. On Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur you felt
very holy. It was actually scary, that feeling of holiness. My father would stay in the shul from Kol Nidre[7] to the next day, praying and
learning, and I was the one who brought him a pillow in case he wanted to make himself more comfortable on the chair. After that I
was afraid to go home because of the holiness. I do not remember being afraid of people, but the holiness was scary. It felt as if even
the air you were breathing was different and holy. Sukkot[8] was very beautiful. We had a wooden sukkah behind our house all year round
and we took the top off for the holiday and all the men, including my grandfather, ate in it during the entire holidav.
I had two brothers and two sisters. I vividly remember my oldest brother’s wedding. My parents used a matchmaker to pick a wife for him and
because she didn’t have a mother, we organized his wedding. We invited the whole town and emptied out the house so there would be room
for them, even for the poor people. The huppah[9] was on the street and the street was filled with hundreds of people holding candles.
After they were married my brother and his wife lived in rooms we had added at the back of our house with their own separate entrance
through the backyard. This brother was president of Young Aguda, of the Agudas Yisrael ultra-Orthodox political party. Through young
Aguda he worked hard, rounding up sick people and taking them to vote, so that a Jew could be elected to the Polish Parliament. Finally
he succeeded, and this person represented the Aguda in the Parliament.
My second oldest sister lived in Radom after she was married and I once went with my father to visit her there, just before Hitler invaded
Poland. The only other time I left my town was when my mother took me to Krakow to register me for the seminary where I would study
to become a Hebrew teacher. This school had been started by Sarah Schnirer who was an orthodox feminist, founder and head of all the
Bais Yaacov schools. Feminism was rare then and she was well known in Poland both before and after the Holocaust.
Of course, antisemitism did not arrive in our town with Hitler. I remember once on the way to school seeing a Jewish man lying on the
street bleeding to death. We were screaming and when the policeman heard our screams, he said, “Why did he walk on the street? If he
hadn’t walked here, he would have been alive!” That always struck me as terrible antisemitism, and, of course, I already mentioned how the
people did not want to be seen buying from my father because he was Jewish.
I first heard about Hitler in 1936 when I was 14. The information came from Polish-born Jews who had been living in Germany and came back
to Poland due to Hitler’s rise to power. This was before Kristallnacht and the Jews who returned did not say that terrible things were
happening to the Jews. We just knew he was not a good person but in our wildest dreams we could not imagine what was going to happen.
To print the Introduction click here.
CHAPTER 1 - Under Nazi Rule
We did not even really know when the war began. We heard bombs exploding and everyone said it was maneuvers. But when we
saw people taken to the hospital we knew it was more than maneuvers. We ran away to the woods just the way we were, not
taking anything with us. At this point the Poles were also running away. We stayed in the woods for a few days and when it was
quiet and there were no longer any houses burning we started to walk back to town. I remember my father putting something on
his face, covering his beard so the Germans would not see it. I do not know why he understood that this was a good thing to do,
but he did.
We came back to find our house just as we had left it. The next day the Germans said that all the men had to line up in the market
square and would work for them. On September 12, 1939, the Germans arrested a large number of Jews because they supposedly
killed a German. They were forced to dig a tremendous hole and then start running. The Germans started shooting at them and about
forty of them were killed. My uncle was one of those who was buried alive, so we knew right away what the Germans were out for.
There were other signs as well. We had to bring all our gold and silver to the Germans, which we did, except for a few small things
that we gave to the Mayor’s wife, the woman who used to buy from us secretly because my father liked the Mayor and wanted to
help him.
The day after they ordered all the men to the square we made a hole in the wall so my father could hide in a spare room in the back.
We put an armoire in front of the hole and my father hid there. From the day the Nazis came my father did not go outside. My father
refused to shave his beard but my brother shaved his and was taken to a work camp. My other brother was in Warsaw and could not
come home.
The Germans closed down my father’s business but one day a Pole who used to buy leather from us brought some Germans to the
warehouse and they piled all the leather we had onto trucks and shipped it back to Germany We lived on the little money we had
before the Germans came.
On the evening of the third day that the Germans were in the town we saw the outline of flames through the windows. The Germans
had set our beautiful shul on fire! When the fire spread to the nearby houses they were afraid that the whole town would burn down
and asked the Jews to put out the fire. We had no water in our house, so we had to go to the well and pump water. Everyone, including
women and children, was part of the fire brigade chain.
While the fire was burning we felt as if we ourselves were on fire; it was the most terrible thing because that shul was like our heart.
We worked all night and by morning the fire was out. My father had been in real danger because we lived so close to the shul, but he
still refused to go out.
As soon as the Germans came to town they began to set up a ghetto. Since our house was already in the ghetto we had to take in
other people from outside the ghetto. The house became terribly crowded and most of these people were sleeping on the floors, that
is, when we could sleep. We would listen for the sound of German boots and were terrified that they would come to our house because
we heard that they came to houses at night and took out people and shot them for no reason at all.
Because I spoke Polish without an accent I would sometimes leave the ghetto to go look for potatoes or any kind of food I could buy
to smuggle back into the ghetto so we would have food for my brother’s children, an older boy and a younger girl.
Then one day we saw all the Jews coming in from all the small villages around our city, and the houses in the ghetto were so crowded
that they could not even lie down at night; they had to stand.[10]
The Jewish police would watch us and were terribly distressed that they could not help because the Germans totally controlled them
and used them for their own purposes. If a policeman did not do what the Germans wanted, he was shot. We knew we could not
expect anything from them, but they tried to help the Germans as little as they could.
We lived in the ghetto for more than a year[11] and then one day the Judenrat (Jewish Council) ordered all the Jews into the market square
to be resettled, telling us that any Jews left in the town would be shot. My father decided that I should run out of the ghetto and hide.
I did not want to leave my family and my father and I argued about it for a whole day. My mother was crying and begging him not to send
me away but he said, as if he knew what was happening, that I was the only one with a chance to survive because of my perfect,
unaccented Polish, and he wanted someone in the family to survive. He told me to take good care of myself that winter, and in the
spring, he predicted, the Germans would lose the war. He said it would last only one winter. His last words to me were:
“Remember to be a good human being because only the person [who has been hurt] himself can forgive you, not God. So please remember
that.” Those words are always in my mind; every time I want to do something that is not right, or do not want to do something that I
should do, what my father said comes back to me.
I felt terrible because I did not want to leave my family and I could not understand, or did not want to understand, why he chose me.
But once it was decided that I would go by myself, we had to figure out how to do it. There was a 4:00 PM curfew in the town, which
applied to Poles as well as Jews, but my father got the idea that I could leave by the sewers, and asked a Jewish policeman to be sure he
closed the sewer cover after I went down.
I went to complain to my brother about what my father wanted me to do, and I saw his children lying in bed crying with hunger and I
said to myself, “I’m going to make my father happy and go, but I’ll probably never survive because they’ll find me and shoot me.” My father
made sure I had warm clothes and boots, which had been my sister’s, and he gave me all the money he had. And I remember that when
the family was preparing to go to the market square my mother asked my father what she should pack for the family and he said that all
he needed was a clean shirt, tallis[12] and
tefillin[13] “in case I’m going to be able to daven [pray] once more.”
When I got down to the sewer where the water was up to my knees, I heard voices and I was scared to death. But when a voice
asked in Yiddish, “Who is it?” I was not afraid anymore and I answered, “It’s me. I’m Jewish,” because I realized they were afraid that
I might be Polish. There were actually quite a lot of people in that sewer, all with the same idea of escaping.
At night we would go out searching for food. We knew there was a Polish cooperative farm nearby and we asked the same Jewish
policeman who had helped me get into the sewer safely to help us make a hole in the wall so we could get into the egg storage
area without cracking the lock. We were hiding in the cooperative farm when we saw all the Jews being taken out of town. We also
heard people rummaging through the houses and shooting people who were hiding. The policeman came by the window where we
were watching and threw us a box of hard candy and told us, “They’re sending us all away. You’re on your own.”
We used that candy to stay alive because there was no more food. Every day each of us got one piece of candy and we used it to
wet our mouths when they were dry. Even today when I take a candy in my mouth I never finish it; I take it out of my mouth, which
is a habit left over from those days. At night it was essential to be quiet and one of us would serve as guard to make sure no one
was snoring.
Suddenly we heard a noise. It was the Poles rummaging through the apartments where the Jews had lived and taking what the Germans
had left. The Poles knew more about hiding things than the Germans and they soon discovered where the bricks had been removed to
let us into the cooperative farm. We started to run and the Poles shouted to the Germans, “Juden.” We scattered all over. I knew exactly
where to go; I ran quite a distance to my friend’s backyard, which had a big outhouse. I went into one of the toilets, locked it, and stayed
there until it got dark. When I went out I did not know where to go or what to do, and I was terrified because I did not think there
were any Jews left.
My first idea was to go to the Mayor’s wife and ask her for help. On the way there I met my homeroom teacher from public school.
She belonged to the Sokolnia, a very patriotic nationalistic Polish organization. She was an antisemite and I was afraid she was going
to turn me in. She asked me if I had been resurrected like Jesus because I looked like I had come back from the grave. I told her
that I was hiding and I had not eaten or combed my hair, which was in braids down to my knees. I was very surprised when she
said, “Come with me,” and she took me to her house and told me to wash up and comb my hair and gave me something to eat.
She said she knew there were some Jews-the stronger ones-working on a big farm at the end of town. She told me I would be able
to bribe a German to let me work there, which I somehow had the courage to do. I stayed there for about four days, and I think I
was in the egg cooperative for about a week, although I am not at all sure of the lengths of time involved.
Then we heard rumors that even this farm was going to become Judenrein, and this time I did run to the Mayor’s wife. By then I had
become obsessed with the need to survive, and I told her that my father had chosen me to be the family member to outlive what was
happening. We both knew I needed Polish papers. She got them from her husband’s office and gave me a new name, Grubman, which
could be either Polish or Jewish. I spent the night there and when her husband came home he told me there were some Jewish men
working for the Germans, picking up scrap iron, and that maybe I could stay with them. The Mayor and his wife went out and I knew
that if the Germans caught me there they would kill them, so I had to leave.
I left a note, filled my pockets with all the food I could find, and went to where the Jews were working. I stayed there for a few days and
then the Germans started talking about sending the men away because they did not need the iron any more. The Jews were talking about
going to Szydlowiec, a town not far from mine, where the Germans were concentrating the Jews as they made the small towns nearby
Judenrein. At first I thought I would go there too but then I decided to go into the woods and join the partisans who were fighting Hitler.
I never found the partisans, so I was alone, hiding in the wheat fields at night and looking for blueberries in the woods during the day.
This went on for a summer and half of the winter, and when they cut the wheat and it no longer covered me I slept in the woods.
After the blueberries were gone I ate raw potatoes. The whole time I was terrified that a German or a Pole would find me.
One night I went to the train station and used my Polish papers to go to Szydlowiec. I was told to go to an old dilapidated leather factory
that my father used to do business with and I stayed there for a while until somebody heard that I was from Końskie. He asked if I knew
someone named Oksenhendler who he used to deal with. That was my family name and I became very excited. He told me that my
brother-in-law was in Radom, that they had taken away my sister-the one I used to go to school with-and the children but not him
because he was young and strong.
In Szydlowiec I met three girls, one of whom said she knew how to smuggle us into Radom and that it has to be on Sylvester Night
(New Year’s Eve). “All the Germans are drunk,” she told us, “And they don’t know what they are doing. I’ll show you how to get into
this little ghetto with a high fence, which you have to be prepared to jump.”
We got on the train to Radom and sat there terrified. The train was dark because the Germans were afraid of being bombed, and they
were all over singing songs about killing the Jews, bragging that this one killed so many and that one killed so many more.
The four of us smuggled ourselves into the Radom ghetto and then we all ran in different directions looking for people we knew.
When I found my brother-in-law we were so emotional we could not talk for a while. We were just crying. Then we began reminiscing.
He told me what happened to his family and I told him what happened to mine. We did not sleep at all that night; we just talked and cried.
He went to work early in the morning and I stayed in his tiny room without any food, just as he had told me to do. He returned with the
news that the Germans had caught two of the girls who had smuggled into the ghetto with me and that they had told the Judenrat that
if the other two did not come forward they would take out ten Jews and shoot them. This was a nightmare.
I knew I could not go right away because it was after the curfew when Jews were not allowed on the street. Early in the morning my
brother-in-law took me to the Judenrat. As the officer was calling the Gestapo to say they had me, the fourth girl walked in. Both of us
knew we could not let innocent Jews die for us and we thought we would be shot as soon as we came forward. After we had been sitting
at the Judenrat for about an hour, an SS man came and took us to the Gestapo office where the other two girls were already waiting.
The SS man said, “Now you’re all together, tell us how the partisans communicate.” Because of the partisans they were afraid to go into
the woods. We told them the truth, which was that we knew that the partisans lived in the woods but we had no idea how they got
ammunition. The Gestapo men did not believe us, and they called each of us to a different room to interrogate us individually. They spoke
to me as if I were a little girl and promised that if I told them the secrets of the partisans they would send me to Palestine to live. They
offered me anything they could think of, but I kept telling them, “I don’t know their secrets because I don’t belong to the partisans.”
I did not want them to know that I had come because of my brother-in-law because I thought that would put him in danger.
They tortured me by chaining me to the leg of a bed and putting food just out of my reach, which they said I could have if I told them
what they wanted to know They beat me too. Then they took me to another room and a different SS man came and started to beat
me in the worst way, and then, finally, I said, “I’m Jewish and you can shoot me and it’ll be over with.” When one of the SS men heard
this he said, “What? There’s a Jew still alive? Let’s shoot her and stuff her and put her in the museum.”
The following day they put me in a truck by myself and said, “You’re very lucky. They didn’t shoot you. You’re going to jail.” I was terrified.
I did not know anything about jail. It was a subject we never talked about at home, but somehow I had the idea that in jail I would be eaten
alive by rats. I kept asking God why they did not shoot me and asking my father why he had made me leave and run away to be so
scared of rats.
When we arrived at the jail, they put me in a room with the other three and we were all black and blue and swollen from the beatings
and we all cried together. There were rats, but we were covered up and when we saw a rat we started to move and the rat ran away.
We sat in jail without being beaten and without working but also with very little food, living mainly on the few scraps of bread brought to
us by the Judenrat. The Judenrat also told us that the Germans were going to make the area Judenrein by taking the Jews to Treblinka,
which we later learned was one of the killing camps.
One night a guard told us to get dressed and leave our cell. We were terrified because we had heard people being shot in the night and
we thought this was about to happen to us. One of the guards said to me, “What’s wrong with you people? Why are you crying? You’re
going to a place where you’ll have a chance to live out your life.” They put us on a truck with a lot of people, all Poles, no Jews, people
who were killers and robbers and political anti-Germans.
To print chapter 1 click here.
CHAPTER 2 - Two Years in the Hell of Auschwitz
We drove for I am not sure how long until we came to a place with the words Arbeit Macht Frei on the entrance gate. We said to
each other, “Maybe the guard was right and we will have a chance to live and work here.”
They told us that we were in Auschwitz, a name that meant nothing to us. But as we were going in we saw people coming back from
work, five in a row, thin like skeletons and so weak they could hardly walk. And all the time classical music was playing over the loudspeaker.
The combination of these broken people in rags and the classical music was unbelievable. All of a sudden we saw that these beaten-down
people were trying to stand up straight and walk better and that an SS man was looking them over. Later we learned that the SS man was
Mengele. None of this made any sense to us; we thought we were in a madhouse.
The ground was so limey it did not absorb water. It was almost like quicksand and it was hard to lift your feet out of the mud. Then we
noticed the barbed wire. We did not know that it was electrified, but we saw that every few steps there was a booth with an SS man inside.
We started to cry and one of the SS men said, “Don’t cry yet; you haven’t seen everything yet.” As we were being taken into a
building one of the women asked me if I wanted to give her my boots-beautiful boots from home-before they were taken away.
I was smart enough to say yes, which the others did not do because they thought they were going to get their clothes back.
After they took our clothes, they gave us showers and took us outside naked. This was February or March in 1943. An SS man pointed
out our bruises to the other people coming in and said, “This is what happens when you don’t listen; you get beaten up like these girls.”
They shaved our heads with a razor and two SS women were arguing about who would get my beautiful blond braids. The woman doing
the shaving cut them off separately and gave one braid to each of the women.
They put numbers on our arms with a needle and added triangles to our numbers as they were doing to the Poles, and this time we did not
tell them that we were Jewish. We were given a dress and wooden shoes-no underwear-and were taken to Block 14, which was filled with
Poles who recognized, as the Germans did not, that we were Jews and were always threatening to tell the Germans.
When I started working and complained to another Jewish woman who also had a triangle, she told me I should ask to be transferred
to her location, a Jewish block, and that I would not be putting myself into any additional danger because Jews who came like us and
like the Poles from jails were called karteimässig, which meant they were not to be taken to the gas chambers.
We had not known about the gas chambers when we arrived, but we saw the black soot and fires coming out of the chimneys and
smelled the fat and bodies burning, which smelled like meat burning. When we got to the block we asked right away, “What are those
chimneys?” The other prisoners told us that they were for burning the people who have been gassed because it does not take as much
room to store ashes as to store bodies.
It felt good to be among Jews and we started talking Yiddish, and people began telling us how Auschwitz worked. They told us that when
a transport came Mengele made his selections, putting those he wanted to be in camp on one side and those to be gassed on the other
side. And they told us about the ovens, the burning, and that Jews were chosen by the SS to work there, and that if they refused they
were shot and someone else was picked to do the work. These people in the ovens were the Sonderkommando who took out the gassed
people and examined them to remove any gold teeth for the Germans. This was the most terrible kind of work. They sometimes recognized
family members. There are no words to describe what these people must have felt but they had to do it because they wanted to survive.
I was sent to work with an Aussenkommando, which meant I was working outside the camp. The Germans were dynamiting the buildings
around Auschwitz, partly because they did not want any witnesses to what they were doing and partly because they needed the space to
build more barracks as more people were coming all the time. Our job was to pick out whatever the SS told us they wanted, things like
pieces of iron or metal and unbroken bricks. We would put the iron and the bricks in separate wheelbarrows and wheel them over to freight
cars where they were being sent back to Germany for the army. It was a terrible job.
The barracks we slept in had three levels of wooden shelves, each level for about fifteen people, covered with straw. We were so crowded
we could not lie down, so we slept sitting up. If one person had to move because she was stiff, we all had to move with her. We were
packed in like sardines, wearing the same dress we had worn all day and without any blankets. Body heat from our neighbors was what
kept us warm. If it had been raining, we went to sleep in wet clothes that dried on us at night.
They woke us up at 4:00 in the morning and we took turns going to the kitchen to pick up iron kettles of black water they called
“tea.” We held our noses closed when we drank this liquid, because it smelled so bad, but nevertheless everyone drank it. I was so
hungry that I did not turn down this stuff. I knew that if I did not drink it I would have nothing to drink all day.
The day began with the Appell (roll call). We stood outside in rows and they counted and recounted until it became light outside. They
did not want to send us to work when it was still dark.
The worst time for my kind of work was in the winter because then the snow accumulated on our backs and shoulders and when we
straightened up for even a few seconds, the SS saw the snowfall from our shoulders and knew that we had stopped and set the dogs
on us. That happened to me once. I knew I had to stand up straight for a few seconds and they set the dogs on me with a big smile.
(I ask myself often, “Am I dreaming?” “Did this really happen?”). People who were bitten on the neck bled to death, but I was lucky
because the dog bit me on the thigh and somehow it healed. My dress was full of blood and when I got back to the camp I washed it
off with black snow filthy from the chimneys where they were burning people.
They brought lunch in trucks to where we were working. Each of us had a metal bowl and spoon, which was the most important
thing in our lives because if we lost it, or if we pushed or talked, we did not eat. We held it continually and even slept with it. We
never let those things out of our sight. Can you imagine it? It was crazy. As we marched in rows of five to our work, we put the bowls
and spoons down before we began working. At lunchtime we quietly retrieved our bowls because if we made any noise they hit us
over the head really hard. Lunch was soup that was made from all the scraps from the SS dinner that should have gone into the garbage.
It was mainly potato peels and hot water with an occasional bit of potato or piece of meat.
Before it got dark they took us back to camp where Beethoven’s beautiful music was playing and Mengele was making his selections.
Then we had the Appell again, just like in the morning. They would count us over and over again. We were so exhausted we were
praying they would stop. Finally they did, gave us a piece of bread, and let us into the barracks.
People died during the night and rats and mice ate parts of their bodies. The rats also went after the living people but we could push
them away. We were always being eaten by the enormous lice that lodged in the seams of our dresses. It would keep us up all night,
picking at and killing lice, which is one reason we were so tired when they woke us up for the Appell.
In the morning we took out the dead bodies, which had to be counted. We would put them on the ground, a truck would collect
them, and the bodies would be taken to the ovens. It was so horrible and yet we could not even cry; there were no more tears.
The air in Auschwitz was so terrible from the soot from the burning bodies that our saliva was black, and this burning was endless.
On our way to work we passed the Sonderkommando. These were Jews who had the job of taking the bodies from the gas
chambers and putting them in the ovens to be burned. But before the bodies were burned these Jews had to remove any gold
teeth. We would see them pulling the gold teeth out of the bodies and if they stopped for a minute they were shot and replaced
by other people from the camp. I cannot imagine how they felt because sometimes they discovered that the bodies they were working
on were members of their own family.
It is impossible to describe the inhuman conditions in Auschwitz. The hard labor without rest, the hours standing at the Appell, the lack
of food, working to exhaustion, being beaten like mules, the rats and lice. Yet despite these inhuman conditions, the will to survive and
to see Hitler defeated was strong.
We talked about getting out, being free, surviving. We would cry as we thought about our parents and families, hoping that they were
alive somewhere, fighting to survive the way we were. We would pray together, making up prayers, asking God for certain things. Many
people said to us, “What are you praying for? There is no God.” But we answered, “There has to be a God because we’re alive.
We’re still here.”
We even managed to observe the holidays a little. We found out when it was Passover and did not eat our bread on the first day,
but we could not survive without that bread so we ate it the following day, but that first day was a small reminder of Passover.
I thought especially of my brother’s and sister’s children. After seeing what went on in Auschwitz, I did not think they were still alive but
I kept hoping When we passed by the gas chambers I saw the way they were tearing children from their mother’s arms and not even
waiting to get them into the gas chambers before they killed them on the spot. We could hear the mothers screaming. I really already knew
in my heart that they were not alive and I thought about them a lot.
Every time you saw another transport come in you prayed that when your family got to wherever they were going they were chosen
to work. I was pretty sure my mother and father would not have been selected for work, but I was always hoping that work somehow
was saving my sisters and brothers. Hoping to see our families when all this was over was what kept us alive; otherwise, there was no
reason to want to live the way we lived in Auschwitz.
I remember a song that was written in Auschwitz and became popular there called Niewolnicze Tango (Slaves’ Tango). It was about
dreaming of surviving and coming out of Auschwitz and what it would feel like to be free. These are the words: “We dream of the
smell of green fields, not of smoke, and that the whole world will get together and sing the freedom song, and each country will play
its own instrument, yet we’re never going to forget the horrors of Auschwitz.” Nobody ever wrote about this song, which was in Polish,
not in Yiddish.
I often wonder how I managed to live through Auschwitz. I know one reason is that I had a friend who saved my life. She worked in
the Bekleidungskammer, which was where they took and sorted the belongings from the suitcases of people who came to Auschwitz
thinking they were going to be resettled someplace where they could actually use the possessions from their old lives. Her job was to sort
through the clothes and open up seams to find the money and jewelry that people had sewn into their clothes. This is something I knew
about as my mother’s diamond had been hidden in the seam of my dress.
My friend’s name was Roza Robota. She came from Ciechanów in Poland and risked her life to bring me pieces of clothing to cover my
feet because I kept losing my wooden shoes and had to walk around barefoot because my feet were very small and the shoes very big.
Once your feet touched the limey soil in Auschwitz you could get trapped, like in quicksand, and she saved me from that.
One day there was a big explosion in Auschwitz. The alarm went off and the SS men were running all over. At first we hoped that this
meant we were about to be liberated; then we were afraid that they were going to empty the camp and put us all in the gas chambers.
We had the Appell early that day and they kept us in the barracks.
The next day we found out that an oven had been blown up-it is still visible in Auschwitz if you take a tour-and that four girls, including
Roza Robota, had been arrested. The other three were Regina Safirsztajn, Ala Gertner and Ester Wajcblum. Ala, Regina and Ester worked
in an ammunition factory not far from Auschwitz and smuggled in a little bit of dynamite every day. They gave the dynamite to Roza who
left it in one spot near the Sonderkommando who picked it up and accumulated it until they could blow up one oven. They reckoned that
if one oven was out of commission perhaps they would gas fewer people because they would not be able to burn them. One German was
killed and about a dozen were wounded. The oven did not operate anymore, so maybe a few lives were saved or were left to live a little
longer. These women were extremely brave; they knew that if they were caught they would not only be killed, but also tortured. Even with
the torturing, the four women never revealed any names because there were no other arrests. They were hanged before the entire camp on
January 6, and I light memorial candles and say the Kaddish prayer in their memory every year on that day. Roza Robota was the most caring
person who ever lived on this earth… and she had such a terrible death.
One day I had such a high fever that my tongue felt like black shoe leather and I could not move it from side to side. But even in those
inhuman conditions people were so good to me. They tried to hold me up during the Appell when the SS woman was not watching. I am
often asked why my experience during the war has not made me bitter, and my answer is that I learned about friendship in Auschwitz when
people helped keep me warm by shielding me with their bodies, which was all they had. The day when I had the fever I bent down to pick
up some black snow, so my mouth would not be so dry, and the SS man saw me do it and gave me such a terrible beating that I did not
think I would survive.
But that same day something happened which made it possible for me to survive. When we were standing at the Appell, a high-ranking
SS man came by and asked if any of us were seamstresses. Naturally everyone said they were, because we knew if we were going to do
sewing it had to be an inside job with better conditions. And I was the one he chose. This was the biggest miracle that happened to me
in Auschwitz because I could not take working outside one day longer. The sun burned through you, the rain drenched you, the wind
dried you out, and in the winter you froze. Being chosen allowed me to survive Auschwitz. Every time that it was really very bad and I
could not take anymore, something happened that made it seem as if an angel were watching over me and helping me to survive.
The next day I was put to work sewing on buttons by hand for German uniforms. Even now when I sew on a button it never falls
off and my friends save their buttons for me to attach. As we worked we listened, and every time a bomber flew over us-we could
tell the bombers because they made a heavier noise than other planes-we hoped that a bomb would hit the tracks so they could not
bring in any more transports, but it never happened.
To print chapter 2 click here.
CHAPTER 3 - From the Jaws of Death to a New Life
One morning, in January 1945, they took us out for the Appell and told us we were leaving Auschwitz. We had heard rumors that the Russians
were approaching, and that was why we were being taken away. As we walked out we met the men, who had been separated from us by
barbed wire, and we started to march together without knowing where we were going or what we were doing. There was deep snow on the
ground and it was freezing cold. At night they put us in a barn and guarded us so we would not run away. This was the Death March,
and many people died on the way. Others who could not walk were shot by the SS and left where they fell.
When I thought I could not walk any more and that this was the end, we came to a wagon loaded with knapsacks and blankets for the SS.
A Pole name Juzek said, “Come on here,” and picked me up and covered me with the blankets and knapsacks so I would not be seen. Then
when the SS came for their stuff, I jumped down so they would not find me. That day of resting and not walking saved my life, again. The
man who helped me was a political prisoner in Auschwitz, a communist or a Polish patriot. Those people were not gassed. If I could have
remembered his last name I would have looked for him after the war.
I do not know how long we walked or even if they fed us-how can there be a blank like that?-but after a while they started pushing
everyone who had been marching onto freight trains. But they could not fit us all onto the trains and I was one of about seventy
people who were left as the trains pulled away. We thought we would be shot there and then, but an hour later we were put on a truck and
we ended up in Mauthausen, in Austria. Mauthausen was like Auschwitz, a very large camp with gas chambers, but by the time we got there,
according to a Jew who was there, the gas chambers had stopped operating. We realized we had a chance to survive, and what further added
to our hope was when they put us into a room and locked the door we realized there were eighteen (a number whose name in Hebrew, Chai,
means life when adding up their numerical value) of us there.
After a few days they transferred us to a women’s camp in Lenzing, where it was so bad that the sleeping conditions-lice and mice and cold and
rain-were just as bad as Auschwitz. However, without gas chambers the place had an entirely different feel to it. But we still had the horrible SS
women who would beat us and shout at us and tell us, “Don’t think you’re going to survive because we’ll make sure that before the war ends
you’ll be dead.”
At noon they brought the soup that we used to get for lunch at the factory into the barracks where we were living. All of a sudden we
heard a voice screaming in broken German, “Don’t eat the food; the food is poisoned. You’re going to die if you eat the food.” He was a French
kitchen worker and he had picked up some German and was warning us. Then the SS women started screaming at us and beating us and urging
us to eat but somehow we held out and listened to the man. Those of us who wanted to eat were pushed away from the food by those who
believed we would be poisoned and a real fight broke out.
We had heard shots before and then there were shots again. The SS women disappeared and we spent the whole night alone, crying and hungry,
not knowing what was happening and afraid that the SS men would come in with their dogs and shoot us.
In the morning soldiers arrived in trucks and opened the doors and since we did not know what kind of soldiers they were we were very frightened.
One soldier was a Jew whose parents came from Poland and he started to talk to us in broken Polish that we could hardly understand, but we soon
realized he was saying, “Stop crying. You’re free. There are no more Germans here. We’re American soldiers and we’ll help you and take care of
you.” The other soldiers were standing around crying like I had never seen-big men with guns in uniforms crying. And we were crying too. We
told the Jewish soldier what the Frenchman had said about the food in the kitchen being poisoned. He realized we were starving and he gave us
all the food meant for the soldiers and he opened the cans and fed us. At the same time a different soldier fed the food from the kitchen to a cat
and it died on the spot.
We stayed in the barracks and other soldiers who wanted to see us brought us food. We really could not go out because our clothes were so
worn they kept tearing and we had no shoes.
One day some men came and started talking to us in Yiddish. They said they were from an organization called the Joint (American Jewish Joint
Distribution Committee) in the United States and that they had packages for us. We thought angels had come down to earth to help us; we
could not imagine that people as far away as America knew about us and about our situation and wanted to help. When we got the packages we
were so emotional we could not even open them. We kept listening to them say, “The Jews in America will not forget you.” One man told us that
in a day or two they would take us to a decent place and asked us to be patient.
Once they left we opened the boxes and found that they were filled with big woolen scarves, crackers, candy, all kinds of food in packages,
cigarettes, soap, toothpaste, and creams. These things were so precious because someone had given them to us. We slept holding the stuff;
we did not want to let it out of our sight.
At last we had decent food to eat. They brought us soup and we realized it was made for us and that it was real soup, not made from leftovers
from the SS. It was so thick that our spoons stood up in it. We said to ourselves, “it’s not water, it’s soup.” I later found out it was split pea soup,
which I had never had before. Unfortunately some people ate too much of it and got sick.
The people from Joint measured our feet and said they would bring us shoes and better clothes as soon as they could and would also move us to
a better place.
They took some of us who were sick to an American field hospital. I was not sick but I was so skinny they were afraid if I moved around my
bones would break. They put me in a body cast and I was fed so that I would have some meat on my bones. I also had no muscles. I do not
remember how long I was there because every time I asked they answered me, “What, are you in a hurry? Take it easy; we’re going to make
you well.” Reluctantly I let the nurses take the package that Joint had given me, which I only gave up because they gave me their word that
they would return it. There were a few soldiers and a nurse who spoke Yiddish and they were the ones I spoke with.
When I got out of the cast I began moving around, slowly and holding on at first and then, gradually, walking on my own. When they released
me they kept their word and returned my package. I was brought to where the other women were-the SS barracks in Kammer Schörfling,
Austria. This was the most beautiful spot I have ever seen in my life, near the Attersee, with villas across the road where rich people lived. I
wondered if perhaps the owners of the villas had been Jews whose homes had been taken from them.
Even the SS barracks was beautiful and I was given a beautiful skirt to wear. But I did not have any top to go with it so I unraveled the scarf
they had given me and the soldiers got me crocheting needles and I crocheted a sweater with short sleeves because there was not enough
wool for long sleeves. I brought that sweater with me to America and today it is in the Holocaust Museum in Washington. It was dark sand
brown, like a manila envelope. We all got the same skirt but in different colors. Mine was black.
The Joint kept helping us, but not directly. They would bring things for us to the Central Committee in Salzburg[14] , which is the organization that
took care of us. We had a representative that we elected who spoke for us to this committee. Soon men came to live in half of the barracks,
and when a man became our representative we were able to get more things from the Central Committee.
But even with the man representing us we were not getting everything we needed. So a group of five of us went to Salzburg, and when we
were standing in line for the bus a large group of SS women who had just come from visiting their husbands in a POW camp joined us. When
we were at the head of the line the bus driver opened the back of the bus, which meant that these women got seats and we did not. One
woman shouted as she got off, “If you think the Hitler regime is over, you are wrong. Another Hitler is coming... and you are not going to live
long.” This has been ringing in my ears all these years. I cannot get it out of my head because antisemitism still exists.
While we were living there, people from the Hagana[15] came and asked us if we wanted to go to Palestine. They said they were going to take us
out of the DP camps and smuggle us in. They said the arrangements would take a while and during this time we should take care of ourselves,
get well, be patient, and that through the Central Committee they would let us know their progress.
We became friendly with the men who had come to the camp, and many of the women started dating them. One of the men, Reuben
Ivanonovich, liked the way I kept talking about Jewishness and that we have to do things to help ourselves and have to go to Palestine
because it is the only place for Jews, and when people would talk about going back to Poland I would talk them out of it. Reuben used to
say he saw things in me he did not see in other women.
I started going out with Reuben and almost immediately the Hagana said we should come to Salzburg so they could begin the process for
taking us to Palestine. I told Reuben of my plans and encouraged him to come, but he had two brothers in America and said that because
of them he could not go with me. He accompanied me to Salzburg and stayed there while the Hagana started us on our journey to the
Middle East.
At the border between Austria and Italy I became very sick and began coughing violently. One of the Hagana men approached me and said
that my loud coughing could ruin it for the whole transport, and that I had to go back to Salzburg, get well, and join the next transport. In
Salzburg I met Reuben again and he said, “You see, it is meant to be. Now you should really decide we should get married and you’ll come
with me to America.” I began to think that my getting sick was God’s will, so I agreed.
While we were waiting to leave, we rested, we relaxed, and we began to send letters through the Central Committee to all the DP camps in
Austria and Germany asking for lists of survivors. I received a letter from my sister’s brother-in-law, the older brother of the man I had seen in
the ghetto, which said he was coming to see me. When we saw each other again the crying and the excitement was unbearable, and then
he told me that my sisters were not alive, that their children were not alive and that no one from his family had survived, which meant my
sister’s husband was not alive either.
This man naturally assumed that he and I would marry each other, but Reuben told him that he had asked me to marry him, although he had
not yet done so, and since he thought Reuben was the finest man he had ever met, he told me I should marry Reuben and that he would
pay for the wedding. Then Reuben said we should get engaged and married so we would not be so lonely I really must have been lucky
because quite a few men were interested in me, like my sisters who had married young.
My brother-in-law’s brother lived in Gnadenwald, a little town near Innsbruck, where the Hagana had a kibbutz training-center on the top
of a hill in a hotel with an absolutely splendid view overlooking Switzerland and Italy. I lived in the American zone of Austria and the kibbutz
was in the French zone, which meant I needed papers to go there, like crossing from one country to another. After being told by the Central
Committee in Salzburg that they could not issue the documents, I got them from the Mayor of Lenzing, where I was then living in abandoned
workers’ housing.
A jeep driven by a soldier in the American army drove us to the kibbutz where a Jewish man, not a rabbi, married us and an older couple who
had found each other after the war gave us away under the huppah. Also present was a survivor who was a ritual slaughterer, and they
slaughtered a cow and made all the food for the Sabbath. We were married on a Friday and celebrated the wedding throughout the day on
Saturday.
I stood under the huppah and knew I was not going to be alone anymore, but it broke my heart that I had to look for somebody who I had
never seen in my whole life to give me away.
When we went back to Lenzing as a married couple, we learned that a lieutenant had come asking for Reuben and would come back the
following week. We were afraid but we could not do anything except wait. When he returned he introduced himself as Lieutenant Joe
Auster and said that he was working for General Clark of the Intelligence Service. He told us he was from Brooklyn and knew Reuben’s
brother; that, in fact, his father worked for Reuben’s brother, and that his name is no longer Ivanovich but Irwin. He said that Reuben’s
brother, now Harry Irwin, who had left Poland to avoid serving in World War I, had written to see if any of his family had survived. Joe Auster
said he would write back, tell him he had found Reuben, and find out what his brother wanted Reuben to do. In the meantime he brought us
food and cigarettes, which Reuben smoked. This news was very comforting because we thought we had someone who would help us.
While we were waiting to go to America we received letters from Harry and packages from his daughter Yolanda. One package contained
my first lipstick and some Maybelline cream, which I still use to this day. Because I had come of age in Auschwitz I had never seen lipstick
before, and Joe Auster showed me how to put it on. One of Harry’s letters said it was difficult for him to bring us in and that the process
would go more quickly if we were brought in by HIAS (Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society).
While we were waiting we would hitchhike on U.S. Army cars and trucks and look for members of our families who might possibly be in
DP camps in Germany. Even though I had heard that they had been killed, I was still hoping to find someone in my family who had been
spared. But whoever I talked to told me that everyone from my town had been sent straight to Treblinka and that the only people who
survived from Końskie were a small number, like me, who had gone into hiding. Then I knew, finally, that no one had survived.
All of a sudden we saw the name David Ivanovich on a list hanging on the wall and my husband started to scream that David was his nephew.
We found him right away at the DP camp office, and when Reuben and David met there was wild hugging and kissing, crying and hysteria.
David told Reuben that no one had survived from either his immediate family or from Reuben’s.
We had David added to the HIAS list and he waited with us in our one room in Lenzing until we heard from the U.S. Consul that we could
leave. Until then we used the small amount of money we made selling cigarettes from the Joint packages to buy food.
Finally around the festival of Purim, 1947-the best Purim present ever-we were told to go to the American Consul in Munich. We went via
Salzburg and the Joint arranged our transportation to Munich, to a place called “the golden doors,” even though it was so decrepit that rain
came in and we did not even have a real apartment, just a compartment in a big building, and we did not have enough to eat because the
German ration cards purchased such a small amount of food. But apparently the name was accurate because it meant that sooner or later
we would be getting out of Germany.
In Lenzing Reuben had a friend who had survived with him. He was alone, with no family in America, and when we left he cried hysterically.
Without family the wait was very long. I knew that if there was someone in America who promised to give you work so you would not be a
burden on the country and said he would find you a place to live, you could get there a lot faster. When I got to America I went to HIAS
and told them this friend could live with us and signed my brother-in-law’s name, promising to give him a job in his business that manufactured
men’s clothing. I was afraid that if I asked my brother-in-law about this he would refuse and then we would not be able to keep our promise to
help this man to get to the United States.
While we were in Munich we spent our time filling out forms and going for medical examinations. The doctors kept taking X-rays of me, but
whatever the problem was it did not clear up. So, after living in those terrible conditions for three or four months, I told my husband and his
nephew they should go to America without me. They refused and I went back to the doctor and started crying and telling him that we could
not live in those conditions any longer, that we were getting sicker rather than better by being where we were. The doctor then said, “Don’t
cry Your X-rays are O.K. now. You’ll be able to go. I’m signing the papers.” I have forgotten what was wrong with me but it had something to
do with a blood count showing that my body was fighting an infection.
But the waiting was not over. While we were waiting we went to Hamburg where a 15-year-old boy from Końskie, who I had helped when we
were hiding, was living with his mother. When his mother met me she started crying and thanking me profusely for helping her son to survive. This
woman had known my parents, so it felt good to talk with her, and she even told me stories about them that I had not known.
As we were walking around Hamburg with her my husband suddenly became pale and began to cry. He said that he had just seen an SS man who
had been very brutal to him in the camp. I asked if he was sure and Reuben said he recognized the man’s walk because he had a limp. I do not know
where Reuben got the courage but he took the man by the arm, called him by his name and said he knew he had been the SS person in charge at
the camp in Poznań. The man tried to deny it, but Reuben would not let him and said, “I’ll never forget your face.” The man said, “Leave me alone
and I’ll give you the diamonds I collected.” We called the German policeman who was standing right there, and he was taken to jail. We told the
Americans about this so that he would not be released from prison, but the Americans said they needed another witness to testify to his identity.
We asked them to contact all the other DP camps and issue bulletins that whoever was in Poznań should come forward to identify this particular
SS man. About three witnesses came and this SS man was tried and condemned to jail for the rest of his life. I know this because the story was
reported in the New York Yiddish daily, The Forward, soon after we got to America.
About a week after the doctor gave me a clean bill of health, we were sent to Bremerhaven and embarked on a big transport ship with sleeping
bunks filled with Jews. The journey to America took two weeks and we landed in New York on June 7, 1947. I had been seasick for the whole
trip and could barely get out of my bunk, but when we arrived Reuben helped me stand on the deck so I could see America. We cried and screamed
from happiness. Finally, we thought, we are in what we used to call “di goldene medina” (the land of gold). In Germany, in the broadcasting
center in Munich, while we were waiting to leave they used to say that in America you just have to bend down to pick up the money that is
lying in the street.
After the first excitement, I looked out at New York and started to cry bitterly. “What kind of country have we come to? How can we raise
children here when you can’t cross the street?” I was looking at the West Side Highway and it looked like millions of cars going without stopping
which seemed terrifying to me because I had seen maybe three cars before the war. But after hearing that all you see in America is factories
with no green and no trees, I was relieved to see gorgeous trees and flowers growing alongside the West Side Highway.
Since there was a tugboat strike, we had to stand at anchor without landing for two days. Once we docked they let people come on board to
look for members of their families. My husband’s brother and his wife came and took us to their home, which was a big private home on 21st Street
and Avenue J in Brooklyn. When I saw the trees on the street and the garden in the backyard, I knew that the people who had said America was
a country filled only with factories had been wrong.
We arrived in New York the day before Shavuot, and on Shavuot we all went to the Young Israel of Flatbush synagogue, where Reuben’s brother
was a member. The welcome we received there was overwhelming and the rabbi had tears in his eyes as he greeted us. We may have been the
first survivors they had seen, because this was not a neighborhood to which survivors were likely to come. A man came over to me, crying, and
wished us all the good things in the world and said that if he could help in any way, he wanted to and that when Shabbat was over he would write
down his telephone number. The man was Mr. Kestenbaum and I am still friendly with his daughter, Shirley Schulder.
As soon as we moved in with Reuben’s brother, who owned one of the country’s largest men’s clothing factories, located on West 23rd Street, a
couple came to us and said they had seen in the papers that someone named Ivanovich had been on our ship and that my husband had helped her
sister become reunited with her husband, who was in the Polish army. The sister was now living in New Jersey and her Brooklyn sister had come
to us to thank us in her sister’s name and to say that because my husband had been so wonderful to her sister, if I ever wanted a job in the nursing
home she owned all I would have to do is call her and the job would be mine.
She had made that offer because I told her that while I was in Austria waiting to come to America I had been studying to be a nurse, but I knew I
could not be a registered nurse here because I did not have a college education. I felt that the only kind of work I could do would be to help people
and that nursing was a way to do it.
After about two months we decided to move out. Housing was very tight because all the returning soldiers wanted someplace to live. After a day of
walking all over Brooklyn I found a furnished room on West 6th Street near Kings Highway, but we could not stay there long because our landlady never
stopped crying over the son she’d lost in the army. I had lost my whole family and I could not bear listening to her crying.
Luckily, two weeks after we moved there Reuben found us a better place to live. We moved in the next day. I had nothing to bring; I just picked
myself up and went to the new place. We really had nothing and my husband’s brother was only paying him $20 a week even though he was so
educated, intelligent and had begun studying English in college because of his brother in America.
The day after we moved I went to work in the nursing home where I was soon making $50 a week, which was good money. I started studying
English at night in an elementary school on Seventh Avenue that the owner told me about, and after a year I began taking evening classes at Erasmus
Hall High School and four years later I received my high school diploma.
I wanted to have a baby but I had stopped menstruating when I arrived in Auschwitz and still was not. A doctor whose mother lived in the nursing home
helped me, and after a minor operation at Beth Israel Hospital I began to menstruate and became pregnant, which was the biggest miracle of all. On
October 15, 1949, I gave birth to a baby boy and named him Moshe in Hebrew after my father, Martin in English.
It was my husband’s niece Yolanda who took me to the hospital at two in the morning when my water broke and who found a doctor for me when
I became pregnant. She even taught me how to take care of the baby and was always there for me whenever I had a problem, either with Martin
or with anything else. In fact, from my first day in this country she was my helper and my interpreter, and I do not know what I would have done
without her.
When Martin was born I stopped working but I continued studying. It was hectic. When Reuben would get home the baby was sleeping, his dinner
was on the table, I had my coat on and I ran out so I would not be late. An old man who took the same train I did every day said, “You’re rushing the
life out of you.” It was hard but I wanted that diploma, and when I graduated we went out to eat, which was my first meal in a restaurant, and I was
very proud.
We had applied to become citizens, and when we took our citizenship test with hundreds of others we answered all the questions correctly. The day
we were sworn in at a courthouse in Brooklyn was the holiest day for me, the greatest day of my life, because I had become a citizen of the United
States.
When Martin was five he went to Yeshiva (Jewish day school) Kindergarten. I decided to send him to a Yeshiva because I did not want to have to go
through what I saw happening with my neighbor and friend, who had to fight with her son every day when he came home from school to get him to
go to the afternoon Talmud Torah for Jewish studies. I had been preparing for his education from the day he was born, when I made a vow to put aside
five dollars every week for his education. And every Friday when I got Reuben’s check, I would put aside five dollars in Martin’s name even if I did not
have money for things that we needed that week.
When he started school I went back to work for four hours a day at a private hospital run by five surgeons so that we could pay for his education.
I did not want Reuben to know that we needed money, so I did not tell him I was working. But when it came time to pay our income taxes I told
Reuben I had been keeping something from him. He promised not to be angry so I showed him all the slips for the money I had been earning. I had
not slept for nights worrying about how I was going to tell him. I was afraid they would send me back to Poland if I did not pay my income tax.
I also became active in the Yeshiva and served as class mother. I think the energy to do this while I was also working came from my determination to
make my mother and father, who I believed were watching me from heaven, proud that I had not forgotten what they taught me.
One day Helen Gould, a United Jewish Appeal (UJA) professional, came to the Yeshiva and said she wanted to arrange a fundraising luncheon for the
organization. When she told me that HIAS and Joint were part of UJA, I said, “I owe them a lot, so I’ll do whatever you want me to do.” I worked
with her arranging the luncheon and pledged $18, which I had no idea how I was going to pay, and even lost sleep worrying where the money would
come from. But I saved it up quickly and ever since I have been paying back for what was done for me. Those organizations had helped me get out of
the most terrible place in the world, Germany, a place in which I could never have borne to stay. And to this day I still work very hard for UJA and am
devoted to helping them with their mission of helping any Jew in need anywhere in the world.
I am also involved with Brooklyn College Hillel because Jewish youth is our future. And when the Russian Jews started to arrive in Brooklyn, I told them
my story, hoping they would identify with a fellow immigrant, and I encouraged them to become involved with the Jewish community. As a community,
I believe we can do everything; as individuals, we are powerless. Jeremiah said, “There is hope for your future.” That quote helped me survive in
Auschwitz and I think of it often.
To print chapter 3 click here.
[1] Rabbinic dynasty from Góra Kalwaria (called Gur by the Jews).
[2] Cholent, a traditional stew that is cooked slowly overnight and eaten on Saturday, consists
of meat or chicken, potatoes and grains.
[3]A wig worn by married Orthodox women, based on the Talmudic injunction that married women should not appear attractive to
men other than their husbands.
[4]Blessing on wine that is drunk before Sabbath and festival meals.
[5]Story read before the Passover meal that recounts the Jews’ slavery in Egypt and their
exodus to the Promised Land.
[6]Festival commemorating God giving the Torah to Moses on Mount Sinai; it is also an agricultural holiday.
[7]The prayer recited at the start of the Yom Kippur service.
[8] Eight-day festival commemorating the exodus from Egypt. The sukkah, a wooden booth reminiscent of
the portable abodes that the Israelites lived in, is used for eating and sometimes sleeping during this holiday.
[9]Wedding canopy held above the bridal couple during the ceremony.
[10]Several waves of refugees arrived in the town - from Łódź in 1939-40; from Plock in February
1941, and from the nearby small towns and villages in summer-fall 1942.
[11]The ghetto had been closed apparently in spring 1941, and the author is probably referring to
this as the period from which she is counting “more than a year.” The deportations to Treblinka were in November 1942.
[12] Prayer shawl worn by men during morning prayers.
[13] Phylacteries, two small leather boxes containing prayers and worn on the weaker arm and
forehead by men during morning weekday prayers.
[14]The survivors in the DP (Displaced Persons) camps elected a representative leadership, the
Central Committee of Liberated Jews in the American Zone. The reference here is to the Salzburg office of this committee.
[15]Underground army in Palestine before Israel gained independence in 1948.
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