Abraham Lewent describes hunger and death in the Warsaw ghetto
Like other Jews, the Lewents were confined to the Warsaw ghetto. In 1942, as Abraham hid in a crawl space, the Germans seized his mother and sisters in a raid. They perished. He was deployed for forced labor nearby, but escaped to return to his father in the ghetto. In 1943, the two were deported to Majdanek, where Abraham's father died. Abraham later was sent to Skarzysko, Buchenwald, Schlieben, Bisingen, and Dachau. US troops liberated Abraham as the Germans evacuated prisoners.
Item ViewBeno Helmer describes conditions in the Lodz ghetto
As a young man, Beno used his foreign language skills to land small movie roles. He and his family were deported to the Lodz ghetto, where they struggled daily to find food. In the underground, Beno became an expert at derailing trains. The family was sent to Auschwitz and was separated. All but Beno and one sister, whom he found after the war, died. Beno survived a series of camps and later helped to track war criminals.
Item ViewBlanka Rothschild describes deportations from the Lodz ghetto
Blanka was an only child in a close-knit family in Lodz, Poland. Her father died in 1937. After the German invasion of Poland, Blanka and her mother remained in Lodz with Blanka's grandmother, who was unable to travel. Along with other relatives, they were forced into the Lodz ghetto in 1940. There, Blanka worked in a bakery. She and her mother later worked in a hospital in the Lodz ghetto, where they remained until late 1944 when they were deported to the Ravensbrück camp in Germany. From Ravensbrueck, Blanka and her mother were sent to a subcamp of Sachsenhausen. Blanka was forced to work in an airplane factory (Arado-Werke). Her mother was sent to another camp. Soviet forces liberated Blanka in spring 1945. Blanka, living in abandoned houses, made her way back to Lodz. She discovered that none of her relatives, including her mother, had survived. Blanka then moved westward to Berlin, eventually to a displaced persons camp. She immigrated to the United States in 1947.
Item ViewCecilie Klein-Pollack describes deportation from Huszt
Cecilie was the youngest of six children born to a religious, middle-class Jewish family. In 1939, Hungary occupied Cecilie's area of Czechoslovakia. Members of her family were imprisoned. The Germans occupied Hungary in 1944. Cecilie and her family had to move into a ghetto in Huszt and were later deported to Auschwitz. Cecilie and her sister were chosen for forced labor; the rest of her family was gassed upon arrival. Cecilie was transferred to several other camps, where she labored in factories. Allied forces liberated her in 1945. After the war she was reunited with and married her fiance.
Item ViewSam Itzkowitz describes forced labor in the Makow ghetto
The Germans invaded Poland in September 1939. When Makow was occupied, Sam fled to Soviet territory. He returned to Makow for provisions, but was forced to remain in the ghetto. In 1942, he was deported to Auschwitz. As the Soviet army advanced in 1944, Sam and other prisoners were sent to camps in Germany. The inmates were put on a death march early in 1945. American forces liberated Sam after he escaped during a bombing raid.
Item ViewCharlene Schiff describes children smuggling food into the Horochow ghetto
Both of Charlene's parents were local Jewish community leaders, and the family was active in community life. Charlene's father was a professor of philosophy at the State University of Lvov. World War II began with the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939. Charlene's town was in the part of eastern Poland occupied by the Soviet Union under the German-Soviet Pact of August 1939. Under the Soviet occupation, the family remained in its home and Charlene's father continued to teach. The Germans invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, and arrested Charlene's father after they occupied the town. She never saw him again. Charlene, her mother, and sister were forced into a ghetto the Germans established in Horochow. In 1942, Charlene and her mother fled from the ghetto after hearing rumors that the Germans were about to destroy it. Her sister attempted to hide separately, but was never heard from again. Charlene and her mother hid in underbrush at the river's edge, and avoided discovery by submerging themselves in the water for part of the time. They hid for several days. One day, Charlene awoke to find that her mother had disappeared. Charlene survived by herself in the forests near Horochow, and was liberated by Soviet troops. She eventually immigrated to the United States.
Item ViewCharlene Schiff describes a clandestine school for children in the Horochow ghetto
Both of Charlene's parents were local Jewish community leaders, and the family was active in community life. Charlene's father was a professor of philosophy at the State University of Lvov. World War II began with the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939. Charlene's town was in the part of eastern Poland occupied by the Soviet Union under the German-Soviet Pact of August 1939. Under the Soviet occupation, the family remained in its home and Charlene's father continued to teach. The Germans invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, and arrested Charlene's father after they occupied the town. She never saw him again. Charlene, her mother, and sister were forced into a ghetto the Germans established in Horochow. In 1942, Charlene and her mother fled from the ghetto after hearing rumors that the Germans were about to destroy it. Her sister attempted to hide separately, but was never heard from again. Charlene and her mother hid in underbrush at the river's edge, and avoided discovery by submerging themselves in the water for part of the time. They hid for several days. One day, Charlene awoke to find that her mother had disappeared. Charlene survived by herself in the forests near Horochow, and was liberated by Soviet troops. She eventually immigrated to the United States.es.
Item ViewBlanka Rothschild describes the role of sharing and friendship in surviving the Lodz ghetto
Blanka was an only child in a close-knit family in Lodz, Poland. Her father died in 1937. After the German invasion of Poland, Blanka and her mother remained in Lodz with Blanka's grandmother, who was unable to travel. Along with other relatives, they were forced into the Lodz ghetto in 1940. There, Blanka worked in a bakery. She and her mother later worked in a hospital in the Lodz ghetto, where they remained until late 1944 when they were deported to the Ravensbrueck camp in Germany. From Ravensbrueck, Blanka and her mother were sent to a subcamp of Sachsenhausen. Blanka was forced to work in an airplane factory (Arado-Werke). Her mother was sent to another camp. Soviet forces liberated Blanka in spring 1945. Blanka, living in abandoned houses, made her way back to Lodz. She discovered that none of her relatives, including her mother, had survived. Blanka then moved westward to Berlin, eventually to a displaced persons camp. She immigrated to the United States in 1947.
Item ViewLeah Hammerstein Silverstein describes starvation in the Warsaw ghetto
Leah grew up in Praga, a suburb of Warsaw, Poland. She was active in the Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa'ir Zionist youth movement. Germany invaded Poland in September 1939. Jews were forced to live in the Warsaw ghetto, which the Germans sealed off in November 1940. In the ghetto, Leah lived with a group of Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa'ir members. In September 1941, she and other members of the youth group escaped from the ghetto to a Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa'ir farm in Zarki, near Czestochowa, Poland. In May 1942, Leah became a courier for the underground, using false Polish papers and traveling between the Krakow ghetto and the nearby Plaszow camp. As conditions worsened, she escaped to Tarnow, but soon decided to return to Krakow. Leah also posed as a non-Jewish Pole in Czestochowa and Warsaw, and was a courier for the Jewish National Committee and the Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB). She fought with a Jewish unit in the Armia Ludowa (People's Army) during the Warsaw Polish uprising in 1944. Leah was liberated by Soviet forces. After the war she helped people emigrate from Poland, then moved to Israel herself before settling in the United States.
Item ViewEmanuel Tanay describes the establishment of the Miechow ghetto
Emanuel and his family lived in the small town of Miechow, north of Krakow. After Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, persecution of Jews increased. The Germans established a ghetto in Miechow. Emanuel was forced to live in the ghetto. Emanuel, his mother, and his sister escaped from the ghetto before it was destroyed in 1942. He stayed in a monastery, under an assumed identity, along with members of the Polish underground. Emanuel left the monastery after about a year when a teacher began to suspect he was Jewish. Emanuel then became involved in the smuggling of goods to Krakow and Warsaw. He fled to Hungary in the fall of 1943. After the German occupation of Hungary in 1944, Emanuel again attempted to flee but was caught and imprisoned. He survived the war.
Item ViewPaula Garfinkel
Paula was one of four children born to a religious Jewish family in Lodz, an industrial city with a large Jewish population. As a child, Paula attended public schools and was tutored at home in Jewish studies three times a week. Her father owned a furniture store.
1933-39: Paula, her brothers, and sisters spent a lot of time at the clubhouse of their Zionist group, Gordonia. Their group believed in humanistic values, Jewish self-labor, and in building a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Paula liked to work with her hands and did a lot of knitting, crocheting, and sewing. In September 1939, when she was in secondary school, her studies were cut short when Germany invaded Poland and seized Lodz on September 8th.
1940-44: In early 1940 Paula's family was forcibly relocated to the Lodz ghetto, where they were assigned one room for all six of them. Food was the main problem. At the women's clothing factory where Paula worked, she at least got some soup for lunch. But her family desperately needed to find more food for her younger brother, who was very sick and bleeding internally. From the window at her factory she looked out at a potato field. Knowing that if she was caught, she'd be shot, she crept out one night to the field, dug up as many potatoes as she could, and ran home.
In 1944 Paula was deported to Bremen, Germany, as a forced laborer. She was freed in the Bergen-Belsen camp in 1945. After the war, she immigrated to the United States.
Item ViewNanny Gottschalk Lewin
Nanny was the oldest of four children born to Jewish parents in the small town of Schlawe in northern Germany, where her father owned the town's grain mill. Nanny was given the Hebrew name Nocha. She grew up on the mill grounds in a house surrounded by orchards and a big garden. In 1911 Nanny married Arthur Lewin. Together, they raised two children, Ludwig and Ursula.
1933-39: Nanny and her widowed mother have moved to Berlin. They feared the rising antisemitism in Schlawe and hoped, as Jews, to be less conspicuous here in a large city. They live downstairs from Nanny's sister Kathe who is married to a Protestant and has converted. Shortly after they got settled, the Germans restricted the public movements of Jews, so that they no longer feel safe when they're out of their apartment.
1940-44: Nanny and her mother have been deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto in Bohemia. They've been assigned a room on the second floor of a house that is dirty, crowded and infested with lice. The stove is fueled with sawdust. As the youngest in their room--and Nanny is 56--she's been lugging in the bags of sawdust on her back. She's been getting increasingly weaker, is now hard of hearing and needs a cane to walk. Early this morning Nanny learned that she's on a list of people to go to another camp. She doesn't want to go but has no choice.
Nanny was deported to Auschwitz on May 15, 1944, and was gassed immediately upon arrival. She was 56 years old.
Item ViewDavid J. Selznik
The village in Lithuania where David grew up was located near the Latvian border. His father was a peddler. At age 6, David was sent to Ukmerge, a town known to Jews by its Russian name, Vilkomir, to study traditional Jewish texts at the rabbinical academy there. Six years later, David was called to return home to head the Selznik family because his father had died.
1933-39: David lost his job in 1933, so he left Lithuania and went to the United States and then Portugal. But in 1936 the Baltic states were vulnerable to Stalin and Hitler, and David decided to return home to help his mother and sisters, who had since moved to the city of Kovno. The threat of war loomed over them, but the Jews could not leave. Through business contacts he found a job in a retail outlet for office supplies.
1940-44: In summer 1941 the Germans occupied Kovno and David was forced into a ghetto. Conditions worsened in 1943. The murder of Jews in the ghetto escalated in March 1944. He saw some Ukrainians and Lithuanians helping the Nazis. David watched as they took children to the top floor of a building and dropped them out the window to a guard who stood on the street. The guard then picked them up and knocked their heads against the wall until each child was dead.
In 1944 David fled from a transport as it left the ghetto and hid in a nearby forest for three weeks until the area was liberated. He immigrated to the United States in 1949.
Item ViewFeiga Kisielnicki
Feiga lived with her husband, Welwel, and their three children in the small, predominantly Jewish town of Kaluszyn, which was 35 miles east of Warsaw. The Kisielnickis were religious and spoke Yiddish in their home. Feiga was a housewife and her husband was a merchant who often traveled, by horse and wagon, to Warsaw on business.
1933-39: Germany recently invaded Poland, and several days ago, German forces fought Polish troops in a battle right here in Kaluszyn. Half the town, including Feiga's house, has been flattened by bombs, so they've moved to Welwel's cousin Mojsze's neighborhood, on the outskirts of town. German troops are now in Kaluszyn, and the Nazis are "resettling" here hundreds of Jews from other towns. Families have all had to double up.
1940-44: Conditions in Kaluszyn have continued to worsen. Here in the ghetto, which the Nazis recently sealed, people are dying of hunger. It's difficult for Feiga's family to keep their overcrowded houses clean of the deadly typhus-carrying lice, and Feiga's 21-year-old son, Israel Yitzac, has already come down with the fever. Feiga is afraid for him. He's already weak from hunger, and there's very little medicine. She nurses him as best she can.
Feiga's son died of typhus. In late 1942, the Nazis liquidated Kaluszyn, sending most of the ghetto's population to the Treblinka killing center. Fifty-four-year old Feiga perished.
Item ViewInge Auerbacher
Inge was the only child of Berthold and Regina Auerbacher, religious Jews living in Kippenheim, a village in southwestern Germany near the Black Forest. Her father was a textile merchant. The family lived in a large house with 17 rooms and had servants to help with the housework.
1933-39: On November 10, 1938, hoodlums threw rocks and broke all the windows of Inge's home. That same day police arrested her father and grandfather. Inge, her mother and grandmother managed to hide in a shed until it was quiet. When they came out, the town's Jewish men had been taken to the Dachau concentration camp. Her father and grandfather were allowed to return home a few weeks later, but that May her grandfather died of a heart attack.
1940-45: When Inge was 7, she was deported with her parents to the Theresienstadt ghetto in Czechoslovakia. When they arrived, everything was taken from them, except for the clothes they wore and Inge's doll, Marlene. Conditions in the camp were harsh. Potatoes were as valuable as diamonds. Inge was hungry, scared and sick most of the time. For her eighth birthday, her parents gave her a tiny potato cake with a hint of sugar; for her ninth birthday, an outfit sewn from rags for her doll; and for her tenth birthday, a poem written by her mother.
On May 8, 1945, Inge and her parents were liberated from the Theresienstadt ghetto where they had spent nearly three years. They immigrated to the United States in May 1946.
Item ViewElse Rosenberg
Else, born Else Herz, was one of three children born to a Jewish family in the large port city of Hamburg. Her father owned a grain import-export business. As a child, Else attended a private girls' school. In 1913 she married Fritz Rosenberg and the couple moved to Goettingen where they raised three children.
1933-39: With the onset of the Depression in the 1930s, Else's husband's linen factory went into decline. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, they confiscated the Rosenberg's factory. Deprived of their livelihood, the family was then evicted from their home. They relocated to Hamburg where they relied upon financial support from relatives and whatever earnings two of the children could bring in as sales apprentices.
1940-43: In late 1941 the Rosenbergs were deported 800 miles east to the Minsk ghetto in the USSR. Else was put to work cleaning snow and ice from railway tracks at night. In July 1942, after the work brigades left the ghetto for the day, it was surrounded by SS men. Else's brigade heard gunfire from the ghetto. For three days the laborers were kept at their sites; unrest grew by the hour. When allowed to return, Else saw hundreds of corpses on the ground; miraculously, her family was still alive. Some 30,000 had been killed.
Else's son Heinz was taken to the Treblinka killing center in September 1943. Two weeks later, the ghetto was liquidated. Else and the rest of her family were not heard from again.
Item ViewFritz Alexander Rosenberg
Fritz was one of three sons born to a Jewish family in the university city of Goettingen, where the Rosenbergs had lived since the 1600s. His father owned a linen factory. Fritz worked as a salesman there, and later he and his brothers inherited the business. In 1913 Fritz married Else Herz. By the early 1920s they had two sons and a daughter.
1933-39: In 1933 the Nazis came to power in Germany. A year later the Rosenbergs' factory was seized and three Nazis came to the family's home. An officer set a gun on the table and informed Fritz that if they didn't leave in a week they and their furniture would be thrown out the window. Within a month the family moved to Hamburg. Supported by Fritz's uncle, the family remained in Hamburg until the war broke out in autumn 1939.
1940-43: In November 1941 Fritz and his family were deported to the Minsk ghetto in the USSR along with 1,000 other Jews from Hamburg. Herded by SS guards to a red brick building on arrival, the family saw bodies scattered over the ground. Before the Hamburg transport could be lodged, corpses had to be dragged from the building, and blood scrubbed from the walls. Half-eaten food was still on the tables. The prisoners there said that thousands of Soviet Jews had been killed to make room for the new transports.
The Minsk ghetto was liquidated in October 1943. Fritz was not heard from again. His son Heinz was deported in September and was the only one in his family to survive the war.
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