Bella was the oldest of four children born to a Jewish family in Sosnowiec. Her father owned a knitting factory. After the Germans invaded Poland in 1939, they took over the factory. The family's furniture was given to a German woman. Bella was forced to work in a factory in the Sosnowiec ghetto in 1941. At the end of 1942 the family was deported to the Bedzin ghetto. Bella was deported to the Graeben subcamp of Gross-Rosen in 1943 and to Bergen-Belsen in 1944. She was liberated in April 1945, and immigrated to the United States in 1946.
In the fall of 1939, there was a knock on our door. And there was a German woman, and two SS men were with her and she...they came into our apartment, and she walked through the apartment and she turned to the SS men and she said, "Ich hab'es gerne. Alles." She said, "I like it. All of it." And they send in some people a day later...uh...probably they brought in a truck and they unloaded, they took everything out of our...out of our house. I'm talking about our furniture. All our furniture, rugs, whatever...whatever she wanted. She was a ni...nice lady. She send us an old table, some chairs, some old beds, uh, a wardrobe, probably what she had. She must not have been a very well-to-do woman, but you see she became rich, because she was German.
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