Nina Muller.

At birth? Guttman.

I was born on April 20, 1928.

In Łódź. I even know exactly where I was born. I was born in the
clinic of Dr. Guttstadt, because as a child I used to go for walks with
my parents, and they would show me the place. Down below it there was a
statue of a stork.

In Łódź.

No.

Yechiel Meir.

1888.

His expertise was in textiles, like most of the people in Łódź.

My father was very tall and thin. He wore glasses and was usually
dressed very elegantly.

I don't know how to put it. Even now, with the perspective of
time, it is very hard for me to say. He died in '41. I think he was a
good person. I know that our home was always full of guests, full of
friends, and they had a big social circle. I know he tried to help
people. And with me, he played. My parents devoted a great deal of time
to me. I was an only child, and so they were very devoted to me.

Yes. I remember my father coming back from a trip to Berlin. That
was the first time I ate a banana—he had brought bananas home. But he
also spoke about the Reichstag fire¹. I didn't really know what the
Reichstag was, but I saw the expressions on people's faces around me and
understood that it was something bad.

I think my father raised me to believe in people. He taught me
that a person must also help others. He taught me that education in and
of itself was a good thing. And in fact, after the period of formal
schooling in the ghetto ended, my parents were among those who
volunteered and, on their own, continued teaching us, so that if and
when we left the ghetto, we would have some basic knowledge: languages
and—I don't want to say mathematics—but at least arithmetic.

I don't know.

I don't know.

No.

Yes. My parents went to synagogue on Yom Kippur. And I would stay
in the care of my cousins, who were much older than I was. For me, at
least, it was a day of great fun, because there was a very, very large
room, along the length of which were, I remember the number, nine
windows with very thick velvet curtains, and we would play hide-and-seek
behind those curtains.

Anna.

Rapoport.

My mother didn't have a profession. I know she would sometimes
say that when she was young, people told her it was a shame she wasn't a
boy, because otherwise she might have gone on to study for the
rabbinate, since there were rabbis in my mother's family in Kielce².
But my mother herself was only a high school graduate. I should mention
that she graduated from a Polish school. And since she was born in 1892,
that was well before Poland gained independence after the First World
War.

I also remember from my childhood that my mother would sing me songs
that only many years later I understood were songs from the Polish
uprising of 1905³.

No. I know the words, but I can't sing. I didn't inherit that
talent.

She was small and thin, with her hair gathered up in a large bun.
And as I learned after the war from cousins who were much older than I
was, she was their beloved aunt, and for some of them she was also like
a friend, because she was closer to them in age than they were to me. I
was actually the youngest in the family, because I was born after my
parents had been married for sixteen years.

I remember when my aunt—the aunt I loved most—died. By my
reckoning, I was about two and a half. My mother dressed in a very, very
unusual way, and she was very sad. And at that time, they let me play
with whatever I wanted in the house.

My mother used to tell me that one should be a good girl. And I
probably internalized it, because when people would ask me whether I was
a good girl, I would say that I was a difficult girl. So that was
probably also something I had heard. I know I was a very stubborn girl,
and I had a mind of my own.

But in fact, my mother was with me all the time. She didn't let anyone
else take care of me, and everywhere I went, I went with her. When she
took me, it wasn't with anyone else, only with her.

And I remember that on the first day of school, when the homeroom
teacher said, "Children, now we're going on a tour of the school," I
said to her, "No. I'm only going if I can hold my mother's hand."

No, but I think she believed in God.

Not more than my father. Now, our home was kosher, because all
the homes in Łódź that I knew before the war were kosher. And in the
city of Łódź there were very many Jews. People used to say that in that
city of 600,000 residents, every second person was Jewish. And in
practical terms, almost everyone I knew was Jewish, apart from the
immediate neighbors next door.

I didn't know them. They died many years before I was born. I had
only one grandmother, on my mother's side, who lived in Warsaw.

Guttman.

I think Aba and Nechama.

I don't know.

My mother's father died before she married, and my grandmother
lived in Warsaw. In fact, until I was already a big girl, I didn't know
what a grandfather was.

There were some very large public parks in Łódź with big trees, and
children would come there to play. I remember one day playing with a
girl and asking whether she was there with her mother or with the nanny.
She said, "No, I'm with my grandfather." And I said to her, "Show me
what a grandfather is." Then I saw an elderly man with white hair, with
a cane, with a silver knob. It fascinated me. And I remember I cried a
great deal: why don't I have a grandfather?

Not often, because in those days traveling from Łódź to Warsaw was
not something people did regularly, not even monthly. And my grandmother
died in '39, before the war began.

Yes. I had many aunts and many uncles. My mother had several
sisters, and my father did as well.

I loved having a big family. I always felt good at my aunt's house,
which was a large home with several children. I also felt very good at
my mother's aunt's home, my grandmother's sister, where, especially on
Shabbat, a very large family would gather around a very, very big table,
and it was very joyful because we ourselves were a very small family. I
was an only child. And in fact, come to think of it, most of my friends,
or most of my parents' friends, also had only one child.

Some of them very often. I would say at least once a month.

The ones we saw often lived in Łódź. In Warsaw, with my grandmother
and my aunts, I visited only a few times. And they also visited us a few
times.

In the city, within the city. I always thought Łódź was a very
beautiful city. It had many gardens. But after the war, when I grew up,
people explained to me that Łódź, compared to cities built in the Middle
Ages, was not considered a beautiful city at all. It was an industrial
city with straight, grid-like streets and very large buildings—not
skyscrapers, but many stories tall, four or five floors, with interior
courtyards and then another building behind. And there were many
factories, so from everywhere you could see the tall smokestacks of
Łódź's factories.

Yes. Południowa. It's "Southern Street." South.

Fifty-eight.

It wasn't a big house. But I remember more details about the inside
than I do about its overall appearance.

I remember the furniture. It was very heavy, hand-carved, with
ornamentation and moldings. I remember pictures on the walls, among them
a portrait of my mother.

I remember there were very many books, bound in leather with gold
lettering, in Polish, German, and Russian. Even before I knew how to
read, I could tell which book was which, and who wrote it, by the number
of letters on the spine. I could distinguish between Gogol and
Lermontov. My mother would sometimes tell me the content in Polish, and
sometimes she would read it to me in Russian and translate it for me.

I don't know. I do know that we children had a children's
newspaper. In translation you might call it something like "My Little
Voice." Mój Głosik. Children wrote for it, and there were meetings
with the editor. But I don't know which newspapers my parents read.

Polish. My parents also knew Yiddish, Russian, and German,
because before the war Poland had been divided into different regions
under different powers.

Yes. Palestine was an aspiration, an ideal, but Poland was our
homeland. Part of my family immigrated to Palestine in the early 1930s,
but in practice it was spoken of as something lofty, not something you
were going to realize immediately.

I think it was good.

No.

Yes.

I loved Passover very much.

We held a Seder, with matzah, round matzah, which was brought
home a long time before Passover. And I knew you weren't allowed to eat
the matzah before Passover. Every time I would go up to the cupboard,
I'd peek inside and remind myself, "It's forbidden to eat." And then
they would take out the beautiful dishes for Passover.

I also loved Simchat Torah. I think a few times I even went to synagogue
with a flag and an apple.

At age six.

To school.

It was a Jewish school where the language of instruction was
Polish. In Łódź there were many Jewish schools that taught in Polish.
There were also schools that taught in Hebrew. But I went to one that
taught in Polish, and it was a school that was closed on Shabbat.

I think the usual subjects you study in elementary school:
arithmetic, history, geography. We also studied Polish literature, where
I believe we learned a great deal about the Crusaders, about the period
of the Crusades. Even though, as far as I know, there are almost no
Crusader remains in Poland, a lot of literature is based on stories
about the Crusaders and about the great Polish victory over the
Crusaders. So when I came to Israel, I was so fascinated to see the
remains of the Crusader fortresses that I became hooked on archaeology.

No.

From primary school I can't recall her name.

No. Maybe only this: in second grade, when I had a loose tooth, I
went alone to the school dentist. She pulled out the tooth and put a
cotton ball in my mouth. When I came back to class and they asked me if
I had been with my mother and father, I said, "No, I was alone." And
from that day I suddenly became the class hero, without really
understanding why.

But I think that... well, I always had the ambition to be a good
student. But I don't remember special events.

In the early years my mother always accompanied me, and she also
brought me home. No, it wasn't very far. I didn't need to take
transportation.

I had girlfriends, and it was an all-girls school. Some of them are
now also in Tel Aviv. With one of them I'm still in touch, not very
closely, but we are in touch.

No. Only a neighbor, the son of our neighbors.

Until '39.

Then the war broke out. And when the war broke out, in fact, the
signs of war had already appeared a little earlier.

I remember us visiting an aunt who had returned from a trip to Palestine
with her daughter. I went to visit them in a small vacation resort, and
there I saw a newspaper whose headline I didn't understand. It was about
the Ribbentrop–Molotov Agreement⁴. In Polish they said they had
signed something called a pakt o nieagresji, or a non-aggression pact.
I didn't understand what that was, but once again, people made concerned
faces and we were made to understand that this was not something good.
And when I returned to Łódź, the whole city was trenches. They were
preparing trenches for war. And within a few days, the Germans entered
the city without much resistance. And I, as a child, was very
frightened.

I had read some book, around that same time, about what was happening in
Germany under the Nazi regime. Of course they shut me up. It wasn't the
first time. They told me that children don't know and don't understand
what they're talking about, and that Jews had done good business with
Germans in the First World War, and that Germans were cultured people,
and so forth.

But within a few weeks there was an impression that life was somehow
coming back to normal. We went back to school. Of course many were
missing, because people had fled the city.

But it didn't take long. At first, they would simply seize people in the
street and take them to work, to clean, or just to humiliate them—to
beat Jews. And then it began. I think at the beginning of November an
order was issued that all Jews had to wear a yellow band on the sleeve.

And within a short time, they also began removing people from their
homes without warning—Juden raus⁵. They would give only a few
minutes to leave, and then they would take over the apartments. At the
same time, many people thought it was wiser to leave voluntarily,
because even then it was said that in a certain part of the old city of
Łódź a ghetto would be established. So some people, and this is what my
parents did, loaded up a cart. I don't think it was pulled by horses. I
think people pulled it. It jolted along. And at the beginning of winter,
at the beginning of winter 1940, we moved into the ghetto.

I think the first few weeks were relatively quiet. After that, they
began taking Jews for forced work—mostly cleaning jobs—or they
simply beat them. I don't think there was much beyond that at the
beginning. At some point—and I think this was when we were already
wearing the yellow stripe—Jews were not allowed to walk on the
sidewalk. You had to step aside and let Germans pass.

It was a shock. It wasn't a patch yet at that time; it was still
just a stripe. I think it was a shock, suddenly being marked as
different from everyone else. I know people said, "I won't wear that, no
matter what." But we got used to it. Later, the stripe was replaced by a
patch in the shape of the Star of David, yellow on both sides.

When we were already sealed in the ghetto.

I think it was somewhere between denial and hostility, but
primarily they were occupied with themselves. I don't think anyone cared
that they were taking away the Jews, or that they were leaving and their
property was left abandoned.

The move to the ghetto was very, very traumatic, because we moved into
completely different conditions. These were very old, very small houses.
In many of them there was no running water, and the toilet was out in
the yard. Even renting a room from a family was difficult. People just
poured in and crowded into a tiny area. Life was very, very hard.

And yet we still thought that in the ghetto, with everyone together,
there was a sense of security. Maybe we also thought, 'Okay, ghettos
have existed before; they close the gate and you stay inside.'

Then other people began arriving in the ghetto. Germans sent Jews in
from all kinds of small towns, and the ghetto became terribly
overcrowded.

In 1940.

We rented a room from a family. The man was simple, but very
kind—he made wooden clogs. His son was my age. There was his wife and
their daughter.

No one. Everyone had to find something on their own. People who
lived there knew it was going to be a ghetto, and they rented out
whatever they could. At that time, there was still money.

It was also the period when the decrees began, when you had to hand over
everything to the Germans: jewelry, furs, candlesticks. I think most
things had to be surrendered. My mother kept one small piece of jewelry:
a gold pendant that she had bought when my parents were engaged in
Abacja⁶. It was a pendant meant to hang from a pocket watch. That
pendant stayed with me. I reached Auschwitz with it. There, obviously,
they confiscated it.

I can tell you what it didn't have. It was an apartment without
wallpaper, the kind people had in the city. It was just whitewashed. One
very small room. Simple bunks with very basic mattresses. We took with
us only what was truly essential: a little bedding, a few household
items, some tablecloths, and some clothing.

At that point, still in the kitchen of the apartment.

We didn't really. In 1940 you could still get materials to burn for
warmth. Later you couldn't.

I think you could buy them.

The ghetto was surrounded by a wire fence. The Łódź Ghetto was
actually divided into two parts, cut through by a main street which was
also fenced off. A wooden bridge passed over it so you could cross from
one side to the other—there was practically no transportation in the
ghetto. That bridge appears in many pictures; it is the symbol of the
Łódź Ghetto. In certain parts of the ghetto, you could see that the
other side of the street was the Polish side.

Germans, for one. I personally didn't come into much contact with
them. I understood there were Ukrainians, and I think Lithuanians too.
But we didn't speak with them. We only saw men in uniform with weapons.

No. A few months later they sealed it. I think it was sealed in the
spring.

I think so. And after it was sealed, there was a feeling that, at
least for the time being, we had come to a kind of rest.

No. We didn't. If other people in the ghetto did, I don't know.
We organized ourselves within the ghetto. There was the head of the
ghetto, Rumkowski⁷, and we started school again.

In a section called Marysin. They gathered all the children there
from all the schools that still existed, along with the teachers who
remained. The classes were mixed, with children from different schools
together. I made many friends there, and even today I'm still in touch
with some of the girls who studied with me in those years.

I remember two teachers especially well. Our homeroom teacher,
Pani⁸ Prechnerova, and our German teacher, Goldberg. He had been a
student of philosophy and theology in Germany and was sent to Poland in
'38. He didn't know a single word of Polish. He taught us German in a
very interesting way. He would make us debate.

One of the debates went something like this: One man's problem is that
he has no pants. Another man's problem is that his pants aren't ready
yet. Whose problem is bigger? And for at least half a year, we debated
each other in German. That's how we learned grammar, vocabulary, and
sentence structure. In the end, we resolved the problem—*Eine Sorge
ist eine Sorge*: a worry is a worry.

I also remember a teacher who came from somewhere else. Only later did I
realize she spoke with a Lithuanian accent. But this soon came to an end
as well.

Lots of Latin, Polish history, general history, and geography.

We studied all week, I think six days. It was a very long walk to
school—about 45 minutes or half an hour.

I don't remember. I assume it was at least until the afternoon.

I don't know. But I remember our school bordered the cemetery. I
think it was the first time I had ever seen a cemetery. We sat on the
fence during breaks. It wasn't scary. It was a beautiful cemetery. It
was the only green place left in the ghetto. It was an old cemetery.

I think through 1941.

Then the school was closed. I know there was one class that still
managed to complete their final exams in the ghetto. I heard after the
war that their diplomas were recognized by universities.

Among my acquaintances was the sister of a friend who finished school in
the ghetto and later studied medicine. After the school closed, my
parents took the initiative, and in small groups, they decided we should
continue to receive some sort of education.

People volunteered, including my parents, each in their own
field—languages, mathematics. But then my parents died. My father died
in the fall of 1941, and my mother in the summer of 1942.

Complications from pneumonia.

After surgery for breast cancer. She was operated on in the
ghetto. There was a hospital there. It was the first time I saw a
hospital, and I saw nurses and the care they gave. I think even then it
began to appeal to me—that being a nurse and helping others was
something beautiful.

I'm not sure that beyond the surgery she received any additional
treatment. I don't know whether treatment as we understand it today even
existed then, and I don't know what was available in the ghetto.

No. At that time, it still wasn't obligatory to work in the ghetto.
The obligation began later—after the big "selection," after the
Sperre⁹.

I was left alone. I stayed in the same apartment, together with the
son of the neighbors. His father—the boy's father—also died. He
helped me a great deal: he helped me make a fire, light it, bring water.

And at that time, we had neighbors with a little girl. They were people
who had always lived in that part of the city that later became the
ghetto. They couldn't really teach her many things. Somehow I grew close
to the girl. She was seven. I began teaching her a little—to read and
write—and I told her stories. I also gave her a doll. From the city to
the ghetto, I brought one doll with me, a doll I loved very, very much.
I know I received it when I was two years old. It was a big doll, and I
never separated from it. But then I gave it to her. Her family somehow
took me under their wing.

It started with them saying, "Come eat with us," or "We'll take your
things so you don't have to stand in line," or "We'll wash your
clothes." I can honestly say that thanks to them, I stayed alive. They
were very, very simple people. In Łódź, there was a large underworld,
and they were from that world, but they were wonderful people. Because
by then, food in the ghetto was already scarce. The lines were very
long. To receive anything, you had to stand all night. The few potatoes
people received were usually frozen. I'm sure I couldn't have borne that
burden. I simply would not have survived without their help.

And then came the big selection. I was sick at the time. When they
said we had to go out, I went out. I didn't really understand what was
happening. Left, right—people were being crushed together. I went back
home, to that little room we called home. And then I discovered that
most of the children who were around my age had also been taken away,
among them two of my cousins.

But alongside that, many people still managed to hide their children
inside the ghetto in one way or another, and those children were not
taken. For the people whose children were taken—while other people's
children remained—there was deep frustration, and a painful
disappointment in themselves: that they hadn't managed to protect their
children better.

It was also a period when many refugees were brought into the ghetto
from Czechoslovakia and from Germany. The people I knew were mostly from
Hamburg. They arrived with leather suitcases, dressed in pre-war
clothes, and within a very short time, they were simply destitute and
wiped out. I don't know how many survived. Two girls my age later worked
with me at a ressort¹⁰there.

One day, it was announced that everyone must work. There were no more
children, so everyone had to work. So I went to work. They let me work
in the tailoring division, the Schneider Ressort, a big factory where
they sewed uniforms for the German army—double-sided padded uniforms,
white on one side, khaki on the other.

Most of the people sent there were children of tailors. I was very
envious of them. First, they all spoke Yiddish, and I didn't. And they
knew how to prepare a coal iron—an iron you'd fill with glowing
coals—and you would set it where there's a draft, and when the coals
catch properly, you close the lid and it's ready to use. But I never
managed. Either it would burn, or it simply wouldn't light.

The floor supervisor was an old man with glasses perched on the tip of
his nose. His name was Mr. Masevitch. In his kindness, he asked me
whether I knew how to sew. I did, because I had sewn many things for my
dolls when I was very small. So he gave me a job sewing
buttons—buttons on both sides, one button on one side and one on the
other. I was very productive.

One day, he called me over and showed me a small coat, powder blue, for
a girl maybe one or two years old. It had a standing Chinese or Russian
collar that was embroidered. He said, "Look, do you think you could
embroider a collar like this?" I said, "Yes, of course."

"Great," he said, "Come with me to see the manager." That's how I met
Mr. Levkovitch, the factory manager. He asked if I could embroider the
collar, and I said yes. I did it. Then he asked, "Do you know how to
calculate how many threads of each color you would need for such a
collar?" I thought for a moment and said I would try. There were about
five colors. I cut the threads into meter lengths to see how much of
that meter I needed for one collar. To his satisfaction, I succeeded. He
told me I could choose other girls to help me embroider. We became a
collar embroidery workshop. The work wasn't that hard; we sang songs.

And during that period, I also came to know the manager's daughters.
They were twins. I had been fascinated by twins since childhood. When I
was little—maybe three years old—I saw two girls in the garden where
I played who looked exactly the same and wore exactly the same clothes.
I even remember their names to this day. I remember what they wore. It
fascinated me.

Mr. Levkovitch's twins fascinated me too. After work, for a long time, I
took it upon myself to teach them a little.

To read, to write... I read them stories—whatever I could.
They were little girls.

I think at that time, seven or eight.

No, they managed to hide them. So, my life—as far as one can
say "life" in the ghetto—was work. The neighbors' family took care of
me a little. What dominated that period was hunger. They simply starved
people. The amount of food we received was miserable.

We received a very small ration of bread. At workplaces, they began
cooking soups. Everyone would go with a container with a lid, a very
specific kind of container people learned to make. They were flat
containers, not round, with a handle, into which they would ladle the
soup. Usually, there was one potato in the soup. But if you were lucky,
if you had connections, you might get potato peels. And from the peels,
people made desserts.

Like chocolate cake. They would wash the potato peels, which were
usually frozen in the winter, grind them up, and mix them with the
'coffee grounds'—we got grain coffee. After drinking the coffee, they
mixed what was left with the peels and baked a kind of cake.

I once baked such a cake for a family who later, in effect, adopted
me—but that story comes a bit later. Should I tell it?

After my mother died, I wore black. One day I passed by the manager's
office—I don't even remember where I was going—and in front of the
office stood a strikingly beautiful woman with flowing black hair. I
looked at her and was struck by her beauty.

The next day, when I came to work, I was told the manager was looking
for me. I went to him. He told me that the day before, a woman named
Luba Chesnowitz had seen me in the corridor. Since she described what I
looked like, and since I was wearing black, it wasn't hard to identify
me. He told me she very much wanted to meet me.

In those days there was a call from Rumkowski—the
Judenälteste¹¹—urging people to adopt children from the
orphanage. Because if families did not take the children in, they would
simply be expelled from the ghetto.

So Luba Chesnowitz had gone from place to place and, as she told me
later, hadn't found what she was looking for. She came to Mr. Levkovitch
to ask what could be done. The Chesnowitz family had no children. He
suggested that I meet them, describing them as very good, devoted
people.

There were no telephones. She arranged that I would come the next day.
The neighbors made sure I got some potato peels. I baked one of those
cakes, placed it on one of the beautiful napkins we had brought from
home, and brought them the cake.

In that meeting it may not have been love at first sight, but it was
certainly affection and respect—and within a few days I moved in with
them. In fact, from that moment my life changed. There was someone who
looked after me, someone who guided me.

And Luba was a very intelligent woman. She knew how to guide me. I was
not easy to raise, as I already said earlier. Luba was a very
intelligent woman. One day she said to me, "Look—if you were my
daughter, I would beat you. But you're not, so I can't do that. You'd
always thing your mother wouldn't have done that." I took it very much
to heart, and I tried very hard not to be rebellious.

My life changed because, first of all, we had more to eat. As a factory
manager, the family received extra food—either allocated or bought in
special shops. The home was better heated. At a certain point we even
moved to live near the factory he managed.

At that time, Luba was very concerned that I continue my studies. They
hired private tutors, as much as was possible. But the general situation
in the ghetto was very hard. People were practically dying of hunger.
People became thinner and thinner and thinner; their legs would swell,
they had no strength, and they would simply die.

We're talking about 1943. All the time they were also sending
transports of people out of the ghetto—we didn't know where. They took
the orphanage; they took the hospital; they sent away people from the
factories who couldn't work. The ghetto became less crowded, and it
seemed as though it would never end.

All kinds of rumors began to spread. For example, we received soap in
the ghetto—small bars, like "Neka" soap today—and on it there were
letters: R, I, F. And people started saying, "Do you know what the soap
is made of? It's soap from Jewish fat—Reines Judenfett."¹² It was
hard for us to believe something like that could be true—that they
take people, kill them, take their fat, and make soap out of it.

After the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto¹³, a family arrived in
Łódź. The head of the family was a friend of Mr. Chesnowitz's. He sat
with us at home almost an entire night and told us about the liquidation
of the Warsaw ghetto. The next day, deeply shaken, I told my friend
about it. She turned to me on the stairs and she said, "I don't believe
a word you're saying." That very same friend I later met in Auschwitz.

In the morning, I would get up and go to work.

I worked in a factory managed by Mr. Chesnowitz. He simply
transferred me to his division. And in between tasks, I also helped the
secretary. She was very efficient, and I assisted her with secretarial
work. That's how I learned to type a little and how to be an assistant.
I also continued to teach Mr. Levkovitch's daughters. Of the Levkovitch
family, only Mr. Levkovitch survived. The wife and the two girls
perished in Auschwitz.

After work, I taught the girls, and we had a social circle of boys
and girls our age. There were quite a lot of books in the ghetto.
Somehow—I don't know if people managed to bring them in—we had the
opportunity to read a lot and debate a lot.

In homes. And we also studied a bit, as much as we could, with
whatever teachers were able to teach us.

Military uniforms.

He had a great deal of power. Power in the sense that he could decide
who would go. When a factory had to submit a quota of people for
transports out of the ghetto, he set those things. He could decide about
people: what they would do, how they would do it. It was not a very
pleasant role.

No. But I know he had dilemmas about how he could, with whom he
could, fill the lists for deportation. It was a period when we were
already beginning to understand that nothing good was happening to those
people. Very large quantities of stuff were arriving in the ghetto:
packages, suitcases, clothing—mostly clothing. Things people had taken
with them that were simply confiscated.

It was also a period when there were no new things in the ghetto, and a
kind of special "ghetto fashion" developed. From the clothes that
arrived—which were usually practically rags—there were still good
pieces left. If there was a dress, the skirt might still be usable. So
they would take two dresses in different colors: from one they would
make the skirt, and from the other they would make a blouse. And to make
it look coordinated, they would always decorate one with the
other—pockets in the color of the top on the skirt, or a collar in the
color of the skirt on the blouse. There was no limit to people's
imagination. So, in practice, people had something to wear.

I don't know. But I know that it happened, and it wasn't rare to
receive clothes. Food, on the other hand, was very rare. The ghetto was,
as far as I understand, quite sealed off, and there was very little
information, very little news from outside.

I know people were afraid of him. In the ghetto, where everyone was
very poor, the factory managers were dressed differently. They had high
boots, while other people had almost no shoes. People were more or less
dressed in rags. They wrapped their feet in rags.

Yes. The Germans visited the factory very often. They did quality
control and inspected the progress of the work, probably at different
stages, I don't really know. But I personally came into contact with
some of them.

They were very nice people, very "civilized," and they always spoke to
me politely, and they were impressed by my good German. But it turns out
the system of propaganda and deception was perfect. Because at a certain
point, early in 1944, a realization began to form among the youth: that
maybe the people being sent away really were being sent to camps after
all. Rumors began that people were being exterminated. And maybe it
would be better not to go on such transports, and to hide within the
ghetto instead.

In the factory, there was a top floor that you couldn't tell from the
outside was a floor. It looked as though it was just the façade of the
building, about a meter and a half high. We climbed up by ladder and
tried to imagine it as a wonderful hall up there, where maybe, for some
time, if we prepared enough water—we even thought about books—maybe
we could stay there.

This was already when the liquidation of the ghetto had begun. But the
Germans managed to convince my adoptive father that we were going to
much better conditions, and that it was important to take razors,
because there were none there and very important to take pots and pans
for cooking. They said they were simply closing the ghetto and moving us
somewhere much better.

There was the head of the Ghetto Administration, Hans
Biebow¹⁴, and there were others, one named Czarnulla¹⁵. They were
all SS. The day my father came and said he was going to the "Russian
Front"... well, the day he arrived there, we were later told—I don't
remember by whom, but by someone from the SS—that he [Czarnulla] was
killed that same day. I know that people were happy; they said he was a
bad man.

Yes.

My impression of him? A very big man, very tall. I met him in a
situation that wasn't particularly threatening—inside the factory.
Later, after I returned to Łódź, I understood he was captured and
executed. But at that point, it no longer interested me.

I think so.

I don't know names. But I knew the police; they were Jewish.

Look, if the question is "were we properly introduced," then
probably not. But you know, just like anywhere, you meet people.

I think, to a certain extent, people thought the police were just
doing a job. The Łódź Ghetto was an organized ghetto. They thought that
if we behaved well, worked hard, and met the deportation quotas before
the final liquidation, we would be useful to the Germans, and our
chances of survival would be better.

There are stories about Jewish policemen who behaved badly. And there's
a family story, not from the Łódź Ghetto, but from somewhere else: my
cousin, after her son died, wanted to take in her sister's daughter. And
a policeman informed the Germans that it wasn't her own child, and then
they took the girl. But I really can't speak generally about the
police's behavior.

I don't know.

I don't remember. But there were notices: posters in the ghetto, on
the walls.

From the Judenrat¹⁷*.

All the decrees. All the public announcements.

No, but I assume notices stating you had to report for work, or
surrender certain items, were published that way. I don't recall
newspaper distribution.

Not that I know of.

Yes. I think that for a period there was even some kind of theater.
People met and sang together.

There's a story about the Łódź Ghetto—I don't know it firsthand, I
only know it as a story—that someone sang "Ave Maria" so beautifully
that the German guarding that part of the ghetto (because the ghetto had
two parts) heard it, went up to the apartment, and said, "You're hiding
a radio here."

But in general, as far as what people could do, I don't think people had
much strength or time for cultural activities. They worked very hard,
they were very hungry, it was very cold, and it was very sad. There was
a feeling of something endless, of nothing changing.

I don't think so.

In homes, maybe, to the extent possible.

I don't remember. I remember we had many visitors, many guests; Luba
had family. But again, there was no mood for it, nor the conditions.
Look, the ghetto was dark. The distances, especially in winter, felt
longer through the snow and mud. I don't think people found the time or
desire to celebrate together. There were also no refreshments to serve
guests.

I don't remember. I suppose so, because we bought things with ghetto
money.

There was money that was printed in the ghetto, and it had value only
inside the ghetto.¹⁸ But the things you received on ration coupons, I
think you still had to pay for them with that money.

I think that was quite early on. I don't know.

Yes. There was once a party, an invitation for lots of the youth, at
one of the houses. They even had refreshments. Afterward, we all got
sick and ended up in the hospital.

I don't remember... I only remember the hospital part.

Yes, it looked like hospitals used to look until a few years ago.
Large rooms, beds, nurses in white, doctors in white.

Yes, a little, limited probably, but there was a period when there
were medicines. Later, I don't know if the hospital even existed
anymore.

Nothing at all. The ghetto was closed.

No, but I heard there was a Zigeunerlager¹⁹ in some isolated
part of the ghetto. Later there were rumors that they weren't Roma at
all, that they were very educated, very intelligent people—people with
education. I don't know where they were from.

Until August 1944. It was during the liquidation of the ghetto.

We were told, like I said before, that we were going to much
better places.

I told you—razors, because they said there wouldn't be razors
there, and pots and pans for cooking. And a few days before the ghetto
was liquidated, that same man I told you about earlier—the one who had
sat with us all night and told about the liquidation of the Warsaw
ghetto—he worked with the Germans. They took him in a black limousine
to the cemetery and put a bullet in his head.

There were many Jews who worked with the Gestapo. He was one of
them, which is why they gave him a chance to survive Warsaw and come to
Łódź. When they killed him, we somehow understood it was a sign that it
wasn't going to be good—that the Germans didn't really want any
witnesses to survive.

And then, even though we thought we shouldn't go, like at the beginning
of the war, the adults said, "We know better." And the Chesnowitz
family, and many others, decided that it must be as the Germans were
saying. So we went with our bundles, with all the things we could carry.
We got onto freight trains. Big cars, no benches, nothing, no air. It
was so crowded there was hardly room to sit.

No. But these were trains that went back and forth. A train would
fill up—I think these were trains with dozens of cars. It was
impossible to breathe inside. There was no toilet, just a bucket. We
traveled for many hours.

No. Not at all. I didn't know. Through the cracks in the cars you
could see fields. We called out to Poles working in the fields: "Where
are we going?" And they said: "You're going to Oświęcim²⁰" to
Auschwitz. I didn't know what Auschwitz was. And they said, "If you have
jewelry, if you have money, if you have anything, throw it to us,
because you won't be remaining alive anyway."

There were stretches when it moved very slowly and you could shout
to them. These weren't long conversations—a call here, a call there.

We arrived at what we later understood to be Auschwitz-Birkenau.

I think we traveled a day and a night. We arrived, and they opened
all the cars at once. There were many people in striped uniforms, and
lots of Germans with very beautiful dogs. They shouted: "Quickly,
quickly, quickly—get out!" They began to beat people, to push them.
"Don't take anything from the packages!" Immediately they began dividing
people into men and women.

It was daytime. There were masses of people. The shouting was
deafening. The panic was enormous. People simply didn't understand. You
couldn't grasp the speed with which they separated people. If you
weren't holding someone's hand very, very tightly, you simply
disappeared in the thousands of people there.

The people in striped uniforms, whom we didn't know then but later
found out were the Auschwitz guards, and Germans with dogs. First, they
separated men from women. Then we passed by the selection of Dr.
Mengele²¹. We saw how he looked at people and said, "Left, right,
left, right."

A very handsome man, very aristocratic-looking, with glasses.

A uniform.

I arrived in Auschwitz with Luba Chesnowitz, with her husband, with
her brother, with her sister-in-law and the daughter. And already at the
first selection, of course, they separated the men from the women, and
also separated women with children. Her sister-in-law and the daughter
went to one side, and Luba and I went to the other.

Everything happened at tremendous speed, with shouting. A cloud of dust
simply rose over the long railway tracks. It was not a station; they
simply unloaded us onto the tracks in the field. And then they led us
through a gate. I'm not sure if it was the gate that says "*Arbeit Macht
Frei*"²² on it, or if that was simply captured in my memory from
pictures and stories after the war.

There, they took us into a place and told us to quickly, quickly,
quickly undress, and if anyone still had jewelry, they brutally removed
it. That was how the cherished medallion my mother bought for my father
when they were engaged—she bought it for him in Abacja—was gone. We
were left naked. They shaved our hair.

We showered and then went outside, where we were given clothes. The
clothes were simply thrown at us, and although they were certainly not
rags, in many cases they didn't fit the body size at all. Someone who
was with me, a school graduate, received a dress that, by today's
standards, would be considered a "mini." Others received very large
things, very used things, just rags they took from other people, without
underwear, without shoes.

They led us to a barracks. The barracks was very long. In the middle
there was what they called a "stove," running the length of the
barracks—this was not the crematorium. On both sides were wooden bunks
in two tiers. Each bunk held ten people—five on one side and five on
the other—so that feet faced feet, and heads were toward the outside.
Wooden bunks, with nothing—no bedding, no covering.

On the way, when we walked to that barracks, it was very difficult to
recognize people, because a person without hair and in different clothes
looks completely different. Again and again, in a panic, I would shout
"Luba!" when I couldn't see her. And among all those people, I found my
friend from elementary school, her mother, and her aunt.

I was especially happy to meet the aunt. She was a doctor—Hadassah. In
Poland, with a name like that... she was a redhead, and as children, we
really admired her. They shaved Hadassah's hair in such a way that one
long red strand remained.

My friend's sister, Janka, had died a few days before they arrived in
Auschwitz, while still in the ghetto. And her mother kept saying how
fortunate little Janka was to have died and not arrived here.

Automatically, somehow, we became a group of five. Because all the time
there, people walked in fives. At some point we really thought: if we
ever went back to normal life, would we know how to walk alone, or in
pairs, and not always in a line of five?

After the shaving and issuing of the clothes, one of the workers in the
barracks got up on the heating duct—I remember the place, it was the
camp called B-2C and the block was 25—and she said something like
this: "This is a 'Sky Commando.'²³ No one leaves here. The families
you just separated from were taken to the crematoriums. You here stayed
alive."

Well, of course, it's hard to describe the crying and hysteria of people
who, many of whom had known very little, finally understood what was
happening.

Not on the arm. We were actually quite envious of the people who
had a number tattooed on their arm. Because those were people who at
least had some kind of identity, whereas we knew we were simply material
for extermination. We received the number later in the labor camp, which
was our identity number. Not the name, but the number.

I couldn't say because I wasn't the first to enter. So it's hard for
me to say if the barracks already had women who were there before. I
don't know what the procedure was, but it certainly filled up very
quickly. I wasn't among the first to enter.

I don't know. I don't know. And so, in the cold—even though it
was summer, it was August—we were without cover, and we couldn't turn
around unless the other one turned around too. Somehow the night
passed—half awake, half asleep—and in the morning they asked: who
wants to volunteer to bring soup? By nature, I'm a very curious person,
so I decided that going to get soup would be a good thing to do. Luba
came with me, and with a rather large group, we took a long route. In
the kitchen we were given containers—something like large milk cans
with two handles—and we carried them back into the block. Before we
entered, the woman in charge of the block stopped me. She began to speak
to me, asking who I was and where I was from, and then she said to her
deputy, "You see," she said, "she'll make it through Auschwitz."

It was the Lagerälteste²⁴. Later, when I talked to her, it
turned out she was from Tel Aviv; her name was Yehudit Reis. She had
come to visit Poland, to Krakow, and was trapped for the duration of the
war. She was sent to Auschwitz already in 1942 and told me many stories
about how, in the snow, they would be chased by dogs. I later met with
her a few more times in Auschwitz.

In any event, from that very day that I brought back the soup, she
called me and some others who brought the soup, and as a bonus, we got
more soup. Now, soup was not something you received in your own bowl.
There was a big pot given to ten people, and everyone would take one sip
and pass it, take a sip and pass it, until the pot was finished. It
wasn't terribly much, but I believe those who were in the Łódź Ghetto
didn't feel the hunger in Auschwitz was any worse than it was in the
ghetto. Although, of course, everywhere it is written and everyone says
that it was terrible.

The terrible things were completely different things. First of all, it
was a complete lack of privacy, and a lack of things—you have nothing.
Not even toilet paper. There is simply nothing. The same clothes a
person wears, that's all he has. No shoes, just like that.

Twice a day, they did a count. They took us out between the
barracks—each barracks had its own area—stood us in fives, and
counted. And this is a count that took a lot of time. We would stand for
hours. In the morning in the sun, which was very harsh even in August,
and in the evening, when it was already cold. But it was simply
exhausting, hours where you couldn't think or talk. It was very, very
hard.

No. I think most of the day was spent standing for the count.

How can I put it—it wasn't a routine, and it wasn't really a day.
But we received a slice of bread. We received soup. Between the time of
one count and the other, we would lie on the bunks, because it was
impossible to leave. The barracks were closed, not even to use the
bathroom. They would take us to bathe, or take us to a very public
latrine, like in the Roman baths.

And that is how several days passed. People somehow absorbed the shock
and the situation. The air was somehow saturated with a very distinctive
smell. And there was always a feeling that something was boiling. There
were always noises in the background. The sheer mass of people created a
kind of echo.

Now, between the camps there were electric wires, electrified fences.
There were people—among them was my cousin, as I heard about
later—who tried to commit suicide, to throw themselves against the
electrified fences. They pulled her down and beat her brutally. But I
know there were also people who managed to electrocute themselves.

In any case, after a few days, Hadassah, the doctor, was given the
opportunity to move to another barracks and serve there as the barracks
doctor. That day she told us that she wouldn't be able to take all of us
right then; she would take her sister and niece, and after the count in
the evening, she would make a request and return to take us too.

She did not return that evening. I tried to leave the barracks to go to
the barracks where she was, and one of the Kapos²⁵ allowed me to do
so and said to me: "Can't you see? The barracks is dark. They took
everyone away."

Then it became clear that on the same day she was transferred, they took
everyone to Bergen-Belsen. I know about each of them separately—about
Janka, about Hadassah, about her mother—that they died in
Bergen-Belsen from typhus. I asked about them.

Apparently, you can get used to anything, so that's what happened, and
after a while, they held another selection. Again we had to remove the
rags we were wearing, pass through completely naked, and at the end:
"Left, right—right, left."

The person in charge of the block somehow—I don't know how she did
it—but I suddenly found myself on the other side. Not before the
selection, but after the selection, on the side that was not marked to
be taken from the camp. So they moved us to another barracks. That
barracks had no bunks. We were all on the floor.

And there I also knew far fewer people than I did from the transport
that came with us. It was becoming September. September in Poland is
already a cold month; it was raining. Standing outside for hours was an
indescribable suffering of cold, and it seemed that this was it, that
this was the end.

People also asked themselves—sometimes there was talk—why don't the
Allies bomb the camp? To finish it, or even us, and end our suffering
once and for all, instead of letting the Germans torment us like this.
There was even talk that a factory in Auschwitz itself was bombed. But
we didn't know anything about that.

One day, someone from my previous block, Block 25, grabbed me and told
me: "You know the transport that's about to leave now? Try to join
that."

And so, we passed yet another selection. It took us a full day of
standing on the train tracks. They gave us some clothes, and for the
first time, a loaf of bread for each person, and they put us on that
train. Before they put us on the train, it took hours. Transport trucks
passed by, open in the back, filled with hundreds of people. On one of
those trucks, I recognized someone who was with me in the earlier
barracks, but they didn't come to the labor camp with us. Apparently
there were too many of us, and they simply went to the crematorium on
the way from there.

Germans.

I don't know.

Jews.

There was a Lagerälteste, she had a deputy, and there were girls
under her command—Kapos.

One. But I didn't know her personally. Her name was Piroska. That's
Hungarian, I believe, for "Little Redhead." Now, the thing was that the
Germans knew how to manipulate matters; usually, those responsible for
prisoners from Poland were Hungarian, and those responsible for
prisoners from Hungary were Poles. After the war, I once told some
Hungarian woman that I was in Auschwitz and she said, "So what, were you
a Kapo?" Because Poles would manage the barracks with Hungarians so
that there wouldn't be too much of a common language between them.

Look, I don't think one can really even speak of a "relationship"
because we are speaking about masses—you can't have a relationship to
a mass. We weren't individuals. Really, the only time I received
anything like personal attention was when I brought the soup and that
woman pulled me away from the others and talked to me, and then she also
told me about herself. And she had found out about the transport going
to labor.

And indeed, after many hours of traveling, we arrived at the labor camp.
We passed through towns, everything was already covered in snow. We
arrived at a train station. From the train station in the snow, we
walked to a large factory building. On the ground floor, there was a
very large hall where we lived. On the top floor, there was a textile
factory, for spinning yarn, I think. Right at the beginning they asked
who knew how to work in textiles, and there were many who either did, or
said they did. All the others went to work in a factory, which the
workers there later told us made parts for weapons. I joined
those—including Luba—who went to work in the weapons factory.

Now this camp, it was in Halbstadt, I think in the Sudetenland. I think
the Czechs called it Meziměstí. It was a beautiful place. The camp
itself—the hall—was heated, there was food, everyone had a
bed—bunk beds—but everyone had a bed with a straw mattress, with a
blanket, with two changes of colorful linens, which were laundered once
a week.

Each person received a package on their bed because our identity was the
number, which I have since forgotten. It was erased from my memory. It
was the number that accompanied me all the time during the day.

On Sundays, we didn't work. Otherwise, the work was 12 hours, in shifts.
So during the whole week, we didn't see the other shift, because when we
left for work, they hadn't yet returned. And when we returned, we saw
them walking in fives on the way to the factory. Now, the work was
hard—it was 12 hours, mostly at night—but it wasn't extremely
difficult labor. We worked on machines that made stencils and drilled
parts. The workers with us were French metalworkers and the foremen were
Czech. We were absolutely forbidden to speak with them.

No, no. No, no. They were French metalworkers, but we were
forbidden to talk to them—absolutely forbidden. But still, every now
and then a word passed, especially since they also had to either provide
the work or take the work back. I mean, there was some kind of
interaction.

One very interesting interaction I had there was with one of the SS
supervisors, who would always come and ask me a little bit about how I
was doing. And one day she brought me a sandwich. A sandwich like only
the Germans know to make: a slice of bread—thin, thin, thin—spread
with sausage, wrapped in a newspaper. A very large piece of newspaper.
When I opened the newspaper, I saw that it was that day's newspaper, so
I read it.

And this happened several times when we both worked the night shift. She
always tried to give me a sandwich wrapped in that day's newspaper, and
I think it was clear to her that I knew how to read it. I didn't
understand everything in it, not only in terms of the language, but in
terms of the events. We were so closed off that we didn't even know what
was happening. And after the war, it was hard work to learn those
concepts that were clear to any person who had read newspapers for the
past five years, unlike us, who didn't read and didn't know anything,
except that we once heard that Hitler attacked Russia... but we didn't
have any clear information.

Now, another very interesting event that happened... they celebrated my
birthday inside the camp. My birthday is also Hitler's birthday. And
they did it on Sunday evening, because everyone was in the camp and the
lights were on—otherwise it was usually dark when we had to sleep.
Everyone was there, and they gathered bits of bread among themselves and
made me a cake out of bread as a birthday present.

On Sundays we didn't work. They would take us for a walk, into the fresh
air in the forest, under the supervision of the SS girls. And when there
was time, the older people would tell stories about their previous
lives. About before the war. About balls, about dresses, about films,
about books. And it was simply a world full of knowledge.

No, not at all. We were locked inside the camp.

I would define it as a fair attitude, so long as you didn't do
anything that was forbidden. Many of those who had connections at work,
really with the French, sometimes received something, like a toothbrush
or a piece of chocolate, and if they found it during the inspection,
then they were beaten.

From the outside? I don't know.

No, no. Because to escape you need somewhere to escape to.

Excellent. There was a bed for everyone, a blanket, there was
laundry. We didn't have sheets, but underwear or a sleep-shirt made of
flannel, and that was laundered. There was food—not in abundance, but
regular food.

Yes.

Bread, margarine, soup. And after the starvation in the ghetto, it
wasn't so bad.

I didn't know most of them before. There was a girl I discovered in
the camp—she was the daughter of neighbors from before the war—and
she died in the camp of tuberculosis, in a sickroom. Sometimes after
work I would go visit her when she was dying.

I suppose so. I didn't need them.

From Auschwitz.

Mostly, I think, from Poland. There were a few Czechs and a few
Hungarians.

In the camp? They gave us shoes, socks, and even winter coats.
These were essentially the same clothes that were taken from the victims
in various places, and they more or less fit us. It was in complete
contrast to what we had in Auschwitz, where we were barefoot all the
time, and without underwear, despite the weather. I think to a certain
extent, in the labor camp, since there were other people around, they
had to be a little more careful about keeping up appearances—how we
looked to the others.

Not in ours.

I think six hundred women.

All of them Jewish. Some of them worked on the top floor of the
camp where there was a textile factory.

Yes, we worked the same shift, always. I mean, shifts could change
from week to week, but we were always in the same shift with the same
people, usually also at the same machines. There was a break for food,
so conversations developed between people.

About everyday things. Sometimes also about the news that the
French passed on. About how things used to be. But usually such things
were discussed not during work, but on the day off that we had, and what
a pleasure it was to hear those stories.

No. I don't think there were holidays during that period. Regarding
Christmas, I don't remember if they let us celebrate that, but there
also weren't other holidays during that time. It was just the winter of
'44-'45.

My birthday.

The camp was liberated on May 8th. Suddenly someone came running
and started shouting: "The Germans! The Germans fled! There is no one!"
And then someone came and said, "The war is over." Then Russian soldiers
started entering the camp. And the camp opened.

That day, when I realized that it was open and that it was possible to
leave, there were a few girls—Luba didn't join me—and we started
walking. We went outside, into the town. We walked along the road and we
met some Jewish men dressed in striped clothes, like the prisoners in
Auschwitz. They told us that there was a men's camp not far away. They
had heard that there was a women's camp and they wanted to see who was
left alive. We went to the men's camp. Then we went back to the women's
camp. All the lights were on; everyone was walking around with soldiers.

There was a big celebration, and Luba and I decided that we would not be
staying in the camp. Some of the men had already managed to find some
vacant apartment with the help of Russian soldiers. The town was
deserted; there were no residents, everyone had fled, only houses
remained. The soldiers said, "Please, come in," and there was food in
the houses.

That was actually the last time I was in the camp. I know that some
people stayed there for a long time. I know that at some point they also
arrested the female SS officers who were guarding us. At first, they
made them clean toilets and tortured them, and then they shot them. But
somehow, I had moved on from all that.

I think that those who caught them—the Russian soldiers—I think
with the help of the survivors.

Yes, and maybe others too. I just... my only thought was to get
out of there, to go back to Poland, and see who in the family was left
alive. I knew about my parents; I knew about some of my family that they
had died. I had great hope that my family from Warsaw was alive.

The journey to Łódź was not easy. I don't even know how we got there. I
know that part of the way we joined people in a wagon, then we traveled
by train—I have no idea if there were tickets—just however people
managed. The trains were packed with people.

We arrived in Łódź, got off at the train station. At that moment,
someone on the street said hello to Luba: "I know you." He told us to
contact the Jewish Community, gave us the address, and said, "I'll be
there in an hour to pick you up." They were acquaintances of the
Chesnowitz family. After we registered with the Jewish Community, they
took us to their home, and then we got some kind of accommodation. I
don't know, I assume it was organized through the Community. I don't
remember the address.

It turned out that from my family almost nobody survived. But I also saw
the destruction of Poland, and I heard about the destruction of Warsaw,
and I thought that here we are, back to normal, and that Poland needs to
be rebuilt. As the song says: "We will build you, Warsaw, even more
beautiful."

In Łódź, they immediately opened a school that allowed two years of
schooling in one year, to catch up. Because Polish children, too,
probably didn't study that much during the war. And I started working.
So I studied and worked. I was the only Jew in a company of 100 girls
who were traffic police.

Regular Gymnasium²⁶ studies.

It was a Polish school, yes.

Very few Poles paid attention or knew that I was Jewish. I never
hid it, but neither my accent, and apparently neither my appearance,
gave me away on the street as Jewish. But slowly I started to hear Poles
say something like this: "Look, look! They say Hitler killed all the
Zhidkes²⁷ and look, look how many are still walking around here."
The anti-Semitism was definitely felt. Not toward me personally, but I
heard it in all sorts of places.

In the place where I worked, I was probably just a bit of an anomaly,
even without taking into account that I was Jewish. The girls were
pretty simple girls. I more or less enjoyed the work. I did it for a
short time, and I realized that Poland is not my homeland, and that I
didn't want to stay in Poland.

I also knew—we knew right away when we arrived—that Mr. Chesnowitz
was not alive. From my family in Warsaw, my cousins, the whole family
had been on the Aryan²⁸ side. But my cousins were handed over to the
Gestapo by the Poles. And I decided that I had nothing left to do in
Poland.

Luba decided that she wanted to go to Canada, to her late husband's
family, so she remained in Poland temporarily. I really wanted to leave.
On January 1, 1946, I left Poland with a group of people traveling on
their own whom Luba knew, and who gave permission for me to be in their
company or under their supervision, so I could leave by whatever means
possible.

One thing was clear to me: I looked out from the train station at Łódź
and I knew that I would never return there again. Even after the war, I
did not go to see our house from before the war, nor my living quarters
in the ghetto. I simply didn't think I wanted to see how people lived
inside my house. I did not want to face that reality and see it. I
simply decided that it was over and there was another purpose.

I left Poland in the company of two elderly women—one had a son and
the other a daughter—and another young girl. And that is how we
arrived in Berlin. In Berlin, we were sent to a DP Camp²⁹.

Apparently someone knew that we were considered displaced people
without a homeland, and knew to send us to a DP camp in Berlin, in
Schlachtensee. By the way, there were many who stayed in Poland. Not
everyone wanted to leave. And so there I immediately started working,
since I knew both English and German. Not well, but I knew them. And
also reading and writing. So they took me to work registering the
refugees who came to the camp.

Sometimes fate plays a joke: 20 years later, I told one of the nurses I
worked with that I was in the refugee camp in Schlachtensee. She told
me, "Oh, my cousin was the director there, Helen Knopf." And I knew her
personally. I even went with her several times to the Officers' Club in
Berlin. Berlin then was not divided; although the four powers occupied
it, there was no border between them.

Berlin at that time was a very interesting city. It was completely
destroyed. I saw the Germans in their misery. How they were willing to
sell everything and beg for some food or some cigarettes. But there was
also culture. Brecht's theater was already running, and there, for the
first time, I saw The Threepenny Opera. Those are my memories from
Berlin.

At the camp, someone connected to the emissaries from Poland arranged
for me to join what was called a kibbutz³⁰, in order to emigrate to
Israel. This kibbutz was called Kibbutz BaDerech. Most of the people
were older than me; they were people who belonged to groups that were
supposed to emigrate to Israel before the war, but they missed the train
and were unable to get there. But most of them knew where their
kibbutzim in Israel were and had already managed to make contact. Of
course, we knew that we wouldn't be able to get there so quickly by
official means.

From the refugee camp we moved to Eschwege, where there was kibbutz
life, community life, some studies, some dancing. I worked in two roles
at that time: One, they sent me with another group of people much older
than me to open a chapter of Hashomer Hatzair³¹. And at another
point, I worked as an assistant in border smuggling, in what was called
the Bricha³², between the zone under Russian rule and the zone
under English rule. We had to transport big groups, sometimes of 200
people, sometimes in the dark, with packages through a field. In the
first meeting, I remember them sometimes saying: "Oh, you're our guide?
So tiny!"

From Eschwege, at a certain point, I think the leadership of *Hashomer
Hatzair* decided that we were going to Italy. In Italy, we were in a
little town near Rome called Grottaferrata. Every house we stayed in
there was a villa. I recall we lived in Villa Cicero. After the war, I
met people who were also in Grottaferrata, but they were in a different
villa at the same time. Apparently, it was an area with a lot of
refugees.

Overall, life there was essentially preparation for immigrating to
Israel, a little Hebrew study, emissaries came to us. The conditions
were not very good because we slept on military cots and had very simple
food, but we were happy, knowing that we would, at some point, get to
Palestine.

There were many groups. In my group, maybe 20–25 people.

They were all older than me.

Maybe 4 or 5 years. I'll tell you, I don't really know what the
mechanism was to join—I just joined in Berlin. But the youth were
usually already organized in groups from Poland, whereas I somehow
joined the older crowd. But I was very happy with them.

From there, one day we went to a port in southern Italy, a place called
Metaponto, and we came to Israel. We were preparing to have a struggle
with the British.

On April 1, 1947, I arrived in Cyprus. So it was at the end of
March. But we did not fight the British because our ship was beginning
to sink and we called them for help. The ship was tilting completely to
the side. They brought us to the port of Haifa. We saw Haifa like Moses
saw the Promised Land. They brought us over onto British destroyers.
They were perfect gentlemen; they gave us food, drink, blankets, and
transferred us with great respect to Cyprus.

I was in Cyprus for fourteen months, and I enjoyed every moment. We
lived in tin huts that were cold in the winter and scorching in the
summer. The area was called the "Winter Camp." It was completely bare;
there was one tree. And when we met "under the tree," it was clear which
tree we were meeting under. Under that tree, they also set up a record
player sent from Israel. I think I hadn't heard music like I heard there
at that time—with such crowds and such explanations—for many years.

Finally, we were organized. To say something about clothes: there were
no clothes. UNRRA³³ would send us rags, but who cared? The food... I
know that people complained about the food. The food was dried potatoes,
potato patties that were cooked on kerosene stoves, and the food always
smelled of kerosene. There were oranges, there was bread and margarine,
and in general, who needed more? We danced the horah.

I was very busy. First, I saw someone studying to be a nurse, and I
brought up the topic again that I also wanted to be a nurse. And I must
have caused quite a nuisance about it, but anyway, one day they said,
"There is something for you." Teachers came from Israel, from the
Rutenberg Seminar³⁴, and they really created an ulpan³⁵ for us.
They pulled people from all sorts of places where we lived, and we
studied from morning until ten at night for six weeks.

There was an entrance exam. As for Hebrew, I knew very little.

The person who examined me asked me if I knew a Polish writer named
Mickiewicz³⁶. So I told him yes. "What was his attitude toward Jews?"
So I told him he had a good attitude. And it was very difficult for me
to explain to him—a little in Hebrew and a little in Polish—that
this is expressed in a chapter of the book he wrote, about a musician,
about Jankiel the Cymbalist, whom he portrays as a Polish patriot.

In any case, I was accepted. And the first lesson, in Hebrew of course,
was about the French Revolution. So the content, I knew. To write, I
wrote in Polish. And somehow, I think, apart from the word "revolution,"
I understood some of the things. The second lesson was ballads by
Tchernichovsky³⁷. And that was a completely different story. But on
either side of me, on the bench, sat two guys from Bnei Akiva³⁸.
And they knew Hebrew very well. And they said, "No, you will write in
Hebrew." And I started writing Hebrew, and the one on one side and the
one on the other helped correct the mistakes.

After six weeks I went back to the kibbutz. And I spoke Hebrew. Only
Hebrew. And I finally rid myself of the stigma where they would say to
me in Yiddish: "A Polish princess, and you don't know Yiddish?" So I
spoke only Hebrew.

The second interesting thing I did in Cyprus was that we had a lot of
emissaries. The emissaries brought, of course, a lot of books, as I
said, and records. There were also Haganah³⁹ people. They taught
us—there was a basic course—some hand-to-hand training, face to face
with sticks, and familiarity with the weapons: the Bren and the Sten,
how to take them apart. For some reason they decided that I would go
from the basic course into an instructors' course. The moment I finished
the instructors' course, I immediately became an instructor in the
instructors' course, for first aid.

All in all, until the immigration to Israel—which we didn't even know
when it would be, because we had no official certificates to think
of—there were tens of thousands of people in Cyprus, and every time a
ship arrived, we were in a queue of who knows how many.

But in July '48, it was our turn to immigrate to Israel. It was already
the State of Israel, but the British and Cypriot authorities didn't
really let everyone immigrate. They let women, children, and the elderly
go, but not people who they thought could fight. So some of the guys
disguised themselves as old men, glued on beards, and that's how they
got to Israel.

Now, the adjustment to life in Israel, with all the enthusiasm to be in
Israel, was not easy at all. It was relatively easy for me, because I
had an address for my aunt in Tel Aviv, who was already a widow by then.
And my other aunt arrived, the one who was on the Aryan side of Warsaw.
My aunt had saved some money for us for initial arrangements, and of
course, I again claimed that I wanted to be a nurse.

There was even an attempt during my time in Cyprus, by my family in
Israel, to enroll me in the nursing school in Jerusalem on Mount Scopus.
We had correspondence from Cyprus—I would write letters every
day—but in the meantime, there was a war and that wasn't really
possible. I arrived in Israel practically organized through a kibbutz.
We were for a short time in Beit Alfa. Then I was accepted to the
nursing school at Assuta⁴⁰.

No. The reception in Israel was very, very difficult in that sense,
because at first, no one wanted to listen. I think the community in
Israel was busy with its own problems, its losses, its pain, and didn't
want to hear. The things sounded simply fantastical; even people who had
been through those things found it hard to believe that they were true.

The attitude was that we went like sheep to the slaughter. The questions
that were always there—even if not on the surface, then below the
surface—were: "How did you survive?" Like, "Why you in particular?"
"What did you do?" "Were you a whore? Were you a Kapo?" Because
otherwise, it seemed impossible.

And overall, they didn't really want to hear, and I think the majority
of people learned not to tell. I actually never told anyone. Except for
answering small questions, about fragments of some place or some
anecdote, I didn't tell anyone.

Not really. Neither did the new friends... none of them,
actually. I know I have a lot of friends who are sabras⁴¹ and would
really like to hear from me, but they don't always know how to ask.

The last time I was in the States, I was traveling with my son's
mother-in-law, and she very carefully asked me if I was ready, if I was
interested, to see the Holocaust Museum in Washington. People are still
very careful not to open wounds. On the one hand, it was genuinely out
of consideration not to open wounds. On the other, people were also very
burdened with their own problems—and there was no shortage of problems
here in '48—and it seemed to them that what they were being told was a
fantasy. Like, how could it really be? If we ourselves couldn't believe
the things, how could others believe that it really existed? As if they
were saying it was another planet.

No, it was not another planet. It was the planet we live on, and the
cruelty that people are capable of.

I am, in any case—and maybe it's my nature—but I leave the past
behind and move forward. I somehow have very little time left in life to
think, to look back—not with rage and not even with nostalgia—but
just to move forward. I had lots to do. After finishing school, I was an
instructor in the nursing school in Assuta. I then got married and went
to continue my studies in London. I came back and had two children. I
was head nurse at the hospital in Nahariya until five years ago, when I
retired.

I studied at the University of Haifa—Sociology and Anthropology—and
in '62, when my children were five and three, my husband was killed in a
car accident. So I was a full-time mom, and a full-time nurse, and a
part-time student. So that was certainly sufficient.

There are very few people with whom I maintain continuous contact from
then... I have a friend—if I think about it, one from school—with
whom I am in touch, though not continuously. It's just that somehow,
with all the good will, people somehow drift apart along the way.

I don't know, because I don't know, had I grown up differently,
how I would have done it differently. I don't know if the past or one's
character has the impact. I believe in education for independence, for
thinking. I tried very hard not to be too indulgent, but at the same
time to give the feeling of having a home and having someone to rely on.

Not much. I can't say that I wake up every night with nightmares.
Of course, it happens sometimes.

Look, I actually didn't think I had anything to be interviewed
about or that I had any interesting story. But on my last visit to the
United States, I met an American woman, close to 60 years old. A very
nice woman, whose family was very helpful to Holocaust survivors—not
Jews, but Jehovah's Witnesses⁴² who came to the United States and
passed through their home before they settled down in America. So the
family was very aware of the Holocaust. She was also with us—she is an
acquaintance of the family members was I traveling with—she visited
the Holocaust Museum with us.

It was not the first time she had been there, and on that same occasion
she told me that her brother was a Holocaust denier. Then I decided that
it was not enough to have numbers. If there is such a phenomenon, where
they say that it did not happen and was never real, then we are
obligated to do something.

First, that probably any person can be influenced; that they can be
brainwashed in such a way that they will dehumanize another group to the
point where their destruction seems understandable, legitimate, and
desirable.

The second thing is that the human being is good. That there is hope for
humanity; that in all difficult situations there are people who want and
are ready to help.

Yes. Earlier I said quite firmly that I am not returning to Poland.
I have nothing against the Poles who did not help the Jews. I do have
something against the Poles who handed over the Jews, who informed on
them. And that after the war, when so few people remained and returned,
there was a pogrom against Jews in the city of Kielce, and many Jews
were killed. And it was the only country that treated its remnant
survivors in this way.