Blanka Fischer Rothschild (1922–2010) grew up as an only child in a close-knit, affluent Jewish family in Łódź, Poland. Her father died in 1937. A few months after the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, Blanka, her mother, Anna, and other relatives were imprisoned in the Łódź ghetto. Blanka and her mother remained in the ghetto for more than four years. During the liquidation of the ghetto in August 1944, they managed to escape transport to Auschwitz. In fall 1944, they were deported to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. They were then sent to a subcamp of Sachsenhausen, where Blanka worked in an airplane factory in Wittenberg. Her mother was sent to a different camp. Soviet forces liberated Blanka in spring 1945. Blanka made her way back to Łódź, hoping to find living relatives. None of her relatives, including her mother, survived. Blanka immigrated to the United States in 1947.
It was done not by SS, but it was done by the German supervisor in my factory where I worked, Arado, the airplane factory. I was very sick at the time. I had fever, my finger. I couldn't perform the work. He didn't know that I was sabotaging all along, but the beating was about my inability to perform my work. He threw me down. He wore high boots, and he start, started to stomp on me. They didn't have guns, the Meisters. He was stomping on me breaking my ribs. It was horrible. I had a fever anyway because my finger was infected. And the two girls that worked in the same division, the same horrible place, helped me back after our work and that's when I went to that place where the sick people were. And they said, "Don't say a word because in a few days we will be liberated." We knew the fire was--we were liberated April 20-something when the Russians reached Wittenberg and displaced the people from the camps. They had no time to kill us. They went, the, the plan was to kill us, but they just plainly didn't have time, and, uh, I survived.
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