Joe Rosenblum

born in Miedzyrzec Podlaski, Poland

family:
parents: Samuel and Mindl;
brothers: Hymie and Benny;
sisters: Sarah, Fay and Rachel

inmate at Majdanek, Auschwitz and Dachau

memoirs: "Defy the Darkness: A Tale of Courage in the Shadow of Mengele" by Joe Rosenblum with David Kohn, Praeger Publishers, 2001. Excerpts from this book have been displayed here with the permission of the author.



A Bitter Harvest

My mother's fruit trees told us the life we knew was crumbling. For three weeks in September 1939, my mother and I stood for hours on a hilltop overlooking her miles of orchards: apples, plums, pears, and many other fruits, a green blanket with riotous reds, purples, and yellows stitched in.

My mother and I, along with my brothers and sisters, stood and watched swarms of desperate arms strip the trees of their fruit--and with them, our newly won comforts and our hope. We could see the fruit being smashed, carried away, or consumed. Eventually, most of my family would suffer the same fate.

At first, just a few people appeared in bunches of twos and threes. They pulled down the branches with grasping hands or shook the limbs, and bushels of fruit fell to the ground. Then they carried away the fruit in bags, in their clothes, or in anything else they could find.

Soon the refugees came in clusters of ten and twenty. Then hundreds. We could see the tree branches become increasingly bare, splotched with zigzag white spots. We could see where branches were broken and bent, while the people scrambled like a ragged ant army over the barbed wire. We could see their faces, white and frantic.
They didn't stay long. If the branches were low enough, the people would just bend a few and pull off the fruit while their hands shook and trembled. They kept their suitcases and bags of belongings close, afraid their possessions might be stolen by people who'd already taken their fill.

As the lower branches turned naked, the interlopers started climbing my mother's trees, gingerly shinnying out on limbs so they could shake or lower the branches for their friends and family.

My mother, Mindl Rosenblum, was a strong woman, in both body and character, fiercely proud of every tree she owned. Even so, she didn't try to stop any of the trespassers. Instead, every day she wore an elegant dress, as though she were attending a society event. She actually was attending the end of our society. The Germans had just crashed through the Polish army lines. That fact meant the Germans were coming, and we all knew what that meant, or thought we did.

During these few weeks, my mother mostly endured the wrecking of her orchards in silence, dressed every day in one of her long, splendid dresses, with shoes in matching colors, her hair piled high on her head in an elaborate style. Several times she had told us she wanted income from the orchards to pay for sending my brother Hymie and me to foreign medical schools. For the two months before the bombing, my mother had packed fruit, while all three of her trucks were busily speeding to Warsaw and back around the clock.

Now, every once in a while, she would look at me with her large brown eye turned sad, and say "Life is all over. All of the years we worked, all the things we hoped for, they're gone. It's the end of our future, the end of the orchard, the end of the money. We lived a good life these past couple of years. Now, God knows what's going to happen."



UNCLE YUDEL

Because of my rich uncle, Yudel, we all had a pretty good idea that what would happen was going to be disastrous.

We lived in Miedzyrzec, located about forty miles from the Russian border, near Brest-Litovsk. It is also southeast of Warsaw and north of Lublin, thirty-five miles from the Russian border and seventy miles from Treblinka. Yudel was a very modern man. As early as 1935, he had a radio and a telephone. In Poland, only a few people in any city of our size had either luxury. Yudel had both. He didn't look as though he were rich. He was five feet, eight inches, and was built like a barrel. He looked more like a wrestler.

He made his money from pig bristles, which were used for paintbrushes, clothing brushes, combs, and brushes for polishing shoes. He was so illiterate he couldn't sign his own name, but he had ben all over the world. He had forty-five people working for him, plus a few relatives. He created the idea of building slaughterhouses in small Chinese villages.

Farmers there traditionally would go to another town and pay to have their hogs butchered. Yudel did the butchering for free, but with the understanding that all the bristles from the hogs would belong to him. Then he'd ship the bristles to his factory in our town, where they would be treated, then sent to factories which made them into various kinds of brushes. He had customers in the United States, France, and England. I myself worked in Yudel's bristle factory after school. Yudel also owned a wholesale egg business which shipped thousands of eggs a year to England and even to Germany.

When my father, Samuel, and I went to visit Yudel on Saturdays, we would admire his tabletop radio, the only one in town. It held both fascination and menace. We always went to Yudel's house after attending synagogue on Saturday. It was a family tradition--first celebrate the Sabbath, then attend a gathering at Yudel's. My father, brothers, and I would dress up in our finest clothing. Sometimes my mother would go, too, elegant in high-heeled shoes and calf-length dresses trimmed in lace and made of silk. Usually, the dress was either bright purple or deep red. For the occasion, she always prepared fish and pastries, which she carried in sparkling clean glass containers.

Though not many of the women in the family attended these affairs, nobody doubted my mother's right to be there. As Yudel's little sister Mindl, she knew at least as much about politics and business as any man in the room. She also was universally respected for her skill and knowledge, both of which had made her orchard enterprise bloom. Meanwhile, my sisters, Sara, Fay, and Rachel, were visiting some of their girlfriends or attending a science club or political meeting instead.

Politics, business the comings and goings of the relatives, all were the staples of our Saturday conversations. Sometimes my father would tell his World War I stories, most of which we'd all heard countless times before.

We all were on our best behavior. We would talk, sip tea, munch cookies, and say hello to my father's cousin and brothers who lived in the city as well. Yudel's daughters, Sara, Rachel, Shana, and Liche; his sons, Hymie and Morris; and his wife, Mate, would stay dressed in their best synagogue garb and serve us food on silver platters. We would sit in Yudel's deep-cushioned chairs and marvel at the thick, polished wood of his furniture.

My brothers Hymie and Benny would run around the room, or rub at the ears of Yudel's Saint Bernard dog, who suffered through my brothers' rough-housing with a far better nature than I would have.

Hymie Kronhartz often was there. He was the son of Sarah, my mother's sister. Hymie Kronhartz was tall, with sculptured good looks. He was well respected in our town and in our family. He had graduated from a university, now lived on the main street in our town, and was a master photographer and portrait painter. He had a studio visited by the wealthiest people in town, who wanted their likeness captured by his skilled hands and eyes.



HITLER'S SPEECHES

All of us would pause when Yudel turned on the radio. I myself was fascinated by it, both as an object and as a source of news. I was passionate about talking politics, and I loved listening to Yudel's radio. It constantly amazed me that Yudel could just turn a knob on a box and voices would come pouring out, especially that of Adolph Hitler.

I had been hearing Hitler's speeches on that radio since 1935. Although I was now fourteen, I had been reading for several years, so I knew about Hitler's grabbing one country after another. And I knew Hitler's voice. Every time he would snatch another country, we would hear another speech about why it was necessary.

We also had movie theaters in our town, so we all had seen newsreels about the Kristallnacht in November 1938, when in one night the Nazis attacked thousands of Jews and destroyed centuries-old ghettos all over Germany and Austria. All of us in the family watched and listened to those reports and trembled. We knew if Hitler ever made it to Poland, he would do even worse to us.

We were right, though the awaiting ugliness was beyond what anyone could have imagined. How could we? I knew from my father, Samuel, and others that during World War I, the Germans had treated Polish Jews like brothers. We had no way of knowing the stabbing hatred in their hearts this time.

I particularly remember hearing Hitler's speech justifying his annexation of Czechoslovakia in March of that year. He had already sent troops to occupy the Rhineland and annexed Austria. I could feel Yudel's tea go sour in my stomach as I listened to Hitler's ranting.

The bad times are closing in on us, I thought. We have had our homes, our businesses, our lives here. We have been citizens of this town for hundreds of years. Our whole family has lived a peaceful life. Still, we have no place to run, no place to go, no place where we are welcome.

All of us had hoped England and France would put a stop to Hitler's devouring other countries. By this time, we were reading about Der Fuehrer and the Nazis every day in the press. And, of course, there were his radio speeches.

We had been living a comfortable life. There wasn't a trace of anti-Semitism in our city, but I still knew a lot about Hitler. I had learned by reading, but listening to his speeches was actually more educational. I heard the menace in his voice. I heard the hatred drench his words. He frightened me.

We were all terrified after hearing that speech about Czechoslovakia. My family talked long and hard. We knew Poland was near the top of Hitler's list, and our feeling that England and France wouldn't stop him made everyone's voice shake.

We also had some Jews living in our city who had lived under Hitler. The year before, Hitler had stripped German Jews whose parents were both Polish Jews of their property and shipped them back to our country. These people survived here by peddling perfumes and shoes. They told people what happened to them, and how Hitler was whipping up hatred against our people.

Our family had lived very well during the last five years. Our city, which was on the road between Berlin and Moscow, was Miedzyrzec, meaning "surrounded by rivers," as indeed it was. Our city was both the richest in Poland and almost exclusively Jewish. We thought of both facts as our good fortune. They may have been our greatest calamity.

Miedzyrzec was bursting with prosperity. We had about sixteen thousand people living there, of whom only four thousand were not Jewish. We had pharmacies, universities, a hospital, movies, and a theater. We had religious schools to which Jews from all over Europe came to study.

The city was filled with factories. The largest industry was making bristles for countries worldwide. There were dozens of such factories, of which Uncle Yudel's was only one. We had a leather tannery and factories making fertilizer and farm equipment. We had twenty bakeries and just as many butcher shops. We had a fire department with the newest trucks.

Aside from being prosperous and largely Jewish, my city had committed another sin in German eyes. We knew what the Germans were doing to our people in Germany, and we despised them for it. In 1935 and 1936, Germans sent trucks full of their glassware to our city. They made good glassware, but if it was German-made, we wouldn't touch it. I can jut imagine how our attitude must have eaten away, like dripping acid, on the Nazis' pride.

Whatever the reasons, we could see trouble coming. By listening to Yudel's radio and reading the newspapers, we knew Hitler wanted to take over Danzig, one of our most important ports. We knew when the Polish government refused him. We also knew when the Germans took that refusal as an excuse to declare war. After all, Hitler had a much bigger army.




MY MOTHER'S BUSINESS

Every unmarried man in Poland who was in good physical shape and over age eighteen was being drafted. My father was still with us. He wasn't drafted because he had already served in the army and was married. I was four years too young, so I was allowed to stay home. In fact, none of my immediate family was drafted. The closest the draft struck was when the son of our next-door neighbor had to go, as did hundreds of others. Our city seemed emptier now. Most of the men were gone, and the women and children had to do the work men would have done. My mother, however, already was laboring in her orchards. The whole family was extremely proud of what she had accomplished since she had bought one small orchard four years before.

In 1935, after bearing six children, she had told my father, Samuel Rosenblum, it was her turn to start a business. My father didn't mind. We needed the money. All of us children volunteered to do our share. My sister Sara became a seamstress and ran the house. Fay, the oldest, worked in an underwear factory. Rachel, Hymie, Benny, and I went to school. Meanwhile, my mother set out to build an orchard empire.

She was succeeding. My mother had an almost magical ability to calculate during the winter how much fruit each tree would bear come summer. As a girl, she had worked during the summer with her parents in many orchards. Her parents had never owned them, but she had inherited the experience of peering at the buds, knowing what fruits would bloom and when. That first year she had a six-acre apple farm. She had six times that acreage three years later.

In 1938, the year before we were standing on that hill together, she had bought the orchard that we were standing in. At five hundred acres, it was one of Poland's largest. It was in an ideal location, on the main highway between Berlin and Moscow.

Buying the orchard was difficult, but accomplishing it was a tribute to my mother's character and skills. The orchard was owned by a sharp-tongued old woman whose sons and daughters didn't want the business. Several people wanted to pay her large sums, but the woman trusted only my mother to treat the property with the respect and appreciation it deserved.

My mother had a charm about her everyone liked. She had grown up among Polish Gentiles, spoke Polish fluently, and was very smart. As Yudel's sister, she had learned much about politics and business matters. She was smart enough to get the vast financing she needed to buy the orchard by finding two silent partners.

Most people had confidence in my mother and her integrity after meeting her only once. Her trademark was her elegant way of dressing. No matter what the occasion, unless she was working in the fields, she would wear high heels and a stylish dress. She was five feet, three inches, and had rich black hair. She needed no jewelry to be attractive, though she had plenty: The way she dressed, spoke, and carried herself were striking enough on their own. When she worked in the orchards, however, she dressed plainly for the hard, sweaty work ahead.




THE BOMBS RAINED DOWN ON OUR LITTLE CITY

Now, as the German bombers blackened the sky over my mother's orchards and the refugees ripped the fruit from her trees, all of her hard work and our family's new prosperity began crashing down around us. The war between Poland and Germany had started that summer of 1939, and German bombs were raining down on our little city. The bombardments lasted for more than two weeks. Clumps of planes came at us from all directions. At times, we almost felt surrounded from the air.

Our city was on the highway connecting Germany and Russia, and tens of thousands of people were running east toward the Russian border to hide from the bombs and strafing. The roads were clogged with people on foot, in cars, on bicycles, with small bags or suitcases strapped with rope to every conceivable section of their vehicles and themselves.





Signs of Danger

The Nazis began hammering at us much sooner than my parents could possibly have imagined, smothering our lives with regulation after regulation, telling us what we had to do, and how and when we had to do it.

We had to wear patches above the left pocket on our shirts. The patches displayed a yellow Star of David, a six-pointed star which symbolized our religion. We had always thought of it as an emblem of pride. The Nazis wanted to make it a badge of shame.

If a German spoke to a Jewish man, the Jew had to take off his hat. We could no longer walk on the sidewalk. Only the Polish and German Gentiles could walk there. The Nazi method of enforcement was direct and brutal. If we refused to take off our hat or dared to walk on the sidewalk, Germans would beat us with their fists, with sticks, with a cane, with anything.

We were good people, used to obeying the rules of our religion and our city and country out of pride. Now, we obeyed because we had no choice. Whatever they did to us, we had to accept it meekly and quietly. If we didn't, then the treatment would get worse. At least, that's what we believed. Nobody dared to criticize the Germans openly.

We couldn't even criticize them in private, except to our closest friends. The Germans had spies everywhere. However, because this was a closely knit community, we knew who the spies were, and we made sure we told them nothing incriminating.

Soon drunken Nazi soldiers and SS showed up on our streets, and when they did, they would beat us. We had always prided ourselves on our clean and safe streets. Now we had nowhere else to walk but the streets, and they were full of danger.

A lot of people who had gone to Russia were dribbling back into our city, dejected and scared. Winter in Russia was bone-chilling, and they had nowhere to live. At least here they had a home, no matter how humble.

But the people with the best homes were in some danger, too. The Germans had evicted only some of the rich people. Those remaining had a lot of goods stashed away. Many times I saw Germans pull up to a rich person's house in a cart. I could hear the screams and yells as they beat the Jews, mostly the men, and then came out with their arms full of fine furs, clothing, as well as gold and silver objects of all sorts.

One time I saw a horse-drawn cart pull up to the house of some people I knew well. The people in the cart were laborers. Many of them, with few places to find honest work, were helping the Germans loot Jewish homes as a way to make a living. The SS and Polish police walked around a corner on foot, then banged on the door. When it opened, the SS yelled, "We know you've got bristle."

It didn't take much intelligence to figure that out. The man had owned a bristle factory.

"We want the product. We know you have it," the SS screamed.

The fact they had bristle was so obvious the family would have been killed if they'd lied. So the father took the Nazis to the back of the house where his warehouse was. The laborers tramped through the house, loaded up on bristle, and took it away. If the family had denied having bristle they would have been beaten to death and the Germans would have found it anyway. I didn't stay around to watch the rest.

After the Nazis left, I saw the family's son on the street.

"They cleaned us out. They took our jewelry, our bristles, the silk and flannel we had for special clothing, everything," he said mournfully.

Our family wasn't spared. Those few of us who had radios or telephones had to turn them n. The Germans confiscated Yudel's.

"They just came and pulled them out of the wall, no questions asked," Yudel told me. "All they said was that if I didn't like it, the alternative was a bullet."

There was no escaping into anonymity, no hoping the Germans wouldn't know who we were or where we lived. We had to carry a passport which showed our nationality and age, but no photograph.




LAZAR AND THE JEWISH COUNCIL

In addition, we had to register immediately with the Jewish Registry. In every city there was a Jewish agency which controlled Jewish affairs. In our city, there was one already in existence. It was the Jewish Council, which had been there for hundreds of years. The council's duties covered a wide spectrum of our lives, ranging from working on voluntary donations for various causes, to helping the poor, as well as choosing the rabbi and assistant rabbi for the city. It also supported the Jewish schools, hospitals, fire department, and orchestra. It collected taxes on each household. Because our town was so heavily Jewish, the Council essentially was the city government.

As a result, the Jews in our city had already registered with the council. The registry had on file our name, birthday, age, family members, and address. Now the Nazis were perverting the council's registry to their benefit. In addition, any new German regulation would be posted by the council.

The Germans were particularly interested in all Jews ages fourteen through sixty, because these were the ones who could work. The council members chose who would be picked as slave labor for the various jobs Germans assigned to us.

The council consisted of eight members, each of whom had inherited the job, one his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had held too. The Germans, however, added a member: Lazar. Lazar was about six feet tall, with thick arms, prominent cheekbones, movie star looks, and a deep voice.

Often he would dress in a nice suit jacket and tie. He was beardless. The Germans had forced Jews with beards to shave them off, but men his age didn't wear beards anyway.

Lazar was a peculiar man. He was brilliant. His sisters and brothers were nice people who worked hard, gave to various charities, and were generally admired. Lazar had married before the war, but his parents refused to give him anything. They told him to build up his fortune on his own.

Lazar had decided he would indeed make his own fortune, and he was in a hurry to do it. Supposedly Lazar was a furrier by trade, working in a factory making coats. In fact, he had ten to fifteen men working for him who would break into shops and warehouses, then steal furs, pelts, bristles, and anything else of value. They would either sell their booty on the black market or ransom it back to its original owner. Lazar also ran a protection racket, making sure the police didn't bother people who were running a business without a license.

He suited the Germans' purpose perfectly. They had sought him out to make him head of the Jewish Council because he was he local underworld king, a strong man with a strong mind. But if Lazar hadn't done the job, somebody else would have. He was basically a messenger for the Gestapo, who made sure they had the work force they required.

People still respected Lazar because he couldn't have stopped the Gestapo. People also were afraid of Lazar, and that's a quality the Germans admired.

Lazar was particularly useful to the Gestapo, two of whom had been assigned to the city to liquidate the Jews. Heinrich and Dietrich were their names. They were there because in December our city had been declared a ghetto, a dumping ground for Jews from all over Europe. We didn't know this fact at the time, but we found out soon enough.

We learned very quickly the difference between the SS and the Gestapo, at least in our city. The SS hunted down partisans and people who were prominent in politics. They were the ones who closed up the businesses and were in charge of shipping out of the city anything the Third Reich might have needed. The Gestapo were in charge of beatings and killings.

Heinrich and Dietrich would roam the streets all day. Together and separately, they would whip Jews with a short-handled riding whip whose braided leather lashes were lashed with wire. The whips hung from their thick black belts, the handles sitting right next to their Lugers. they were their own law. If they didn't like you, if they'd had a bad day and wanted to take it out on you, there was nothing you could do.

Lazar would tell them whatever they wanted to know: who had a lot of money, who worked in the government, who was part of the intelligentsia: teachers, doctors, lawyers, rich manufacturers, politicians. In short, anybody who was wealthy or prominent. To the Germans, these people were particularly suspect. Lazar also would tell who belonged to Zionist or Communist organizations. I knew about what he was doing because news traveled very fast.



BLOOD LUST

The minute the Germans came in, beating became a sport. Almost immediately, some of them satisfied their blood lust by hitting us. At first, the men from the regular army, the Wehrmacht, didn't do beatings. Later, however, even these relatively decent men turned to attacking us. As time went on, more and more of the Germans would beat us, until there were very few who restrained themselves.

There were ample opportunities for hitting and kicking us. Many people were forced to work for the Germans, cleaning the buildings the Germans lived and worked in, chopping wood, that kind of thing. In order to approach many of the buildings, the Jews had to walk on the sidewalk. There was no other way to get indoors. But because we were forbidden to walk there, the Germans would use that as an excuse to start hitting us with their fists, with belts, with anything they wanted to.

It happened to me several times. When the Germans saw that Jewish star patch, their faces narrowed, their fists knotted, and they would just jump on us and start flailing away.

"Juden, Juden, Juden. Pigs. Scum," they would yell. Then they would start kicking us with their heavy boots. Those boots, if they hit the right spot, could break bones. To fight back was to risk worse punishment, so people just curled up in a ball, waiting for the Germans to get tired.

We were safest in our own area. Where my family lived wasn't near the main street or any important buildings, so the Germans weren't much interested in us. Whenever we went to the main street, though, we were in danger. Most of the shops there still had the pockmarked boards that had been nailed over them during the bombing. Yudel's egg and bristle businesses were shut down. the few businesses that were open had been taken over by Christians.

If a woman were wearing a Jewish star, the Nazis would insult her in the same way as they would a man. But they didn't rape the women, nor did they beat them. Not at first. For some reason, they wanted to show what they considered a good face. That pose lasted for a few weeks, but the mask quickly fell off. Then they treated women the same, beating, kicking, spitting on them as much as the men. They'd kick the face, the groin, wherever their arrogance led them to.

We could not even have our homes to ourselves. The Jewish Council soon told us Jews wee being transported to our city from the western half of Poland, and we would have to take in one family apiece. We found out only when a member of the Jewish Council came to our house and announced we would be taking in a Jewish family from another city. the family was right behind him at our doorstep. All they had were a couple of small suitcases, a couple of bundles of underwear, and a small pot.

"You must take in these people. Make the best of it," he said.

We're in for a very long ride, I thought.

The family was pitiful. They had no friends or relatives here. The little boy and girl huddled together in a corner. The father looked at us soulfully and said, "Please do what you can for us. We didn't ask to be here."

"We'll do the best we can," my father replied.

"Don't worry about us," their father said. "We'll make it as long as we have a roof over our head. We're not going to make your life miserable."

It was a very tight squeeze. Our home was only somewhere between 450 and 600 square feet. That first night both families are together. We felt sorry for them. Our situation was pitiful, but at least we knew the neighbors and were living on our own street. They knew nobody. We had a dinner of potatoes and bread and Father said a little prayer: "Thanks to God, that we have what we do have."

Our new family, whose name I don't remember, had two parents and two children. The husband was middle-aged, perhaps forty-five. The wife was in her forties, with long black hair. The children, a boy and girl, were ages seven and eight.

The man and woman were always apologetic about being there. They were aware the Jewish culture requires seeing to the well-being of guests, but it wasn't as though we had invited them to move in. They knew this was going to be a bad time. We already had five children and my parents there. Now we had four more people....

My father often would share our food with other families. Seeing people go hungry tore at his heart. He did the same for the family living with us. Their father was working hard just to feed his family, but sometimes they had nothing.

"How could I let them go hungry under my own roof? my father would ask me. I admired his attitude, and I understood sharing food was one way to express that we were still human beings, not animals. It is a belief I've carried through-out my life....



THE JEWISH POLICE

The Germans made the Jewish police station from a nearby converted synagogue, intentionally desecrating our religious institutions. Our lives were further complicated by traitors among us. Within the first few months of their occupation, the Germans formed a Jewish police squad. The ones who joined were in their late teens and early twenties. They all were from rich homes, so they were accepted because their parents had enough money to bribe the Germans. I knew the families because Yudel had introduced me to them. They were all sons of manufacturers, people whose businesses had made leather soles, bristles, carriages.

Being a Jewish policeman was a good deal for people without a conscience. They got extra food and they could move around the city a lot more freely than the rest of us. I was never approached for the job, and my father never would have let me do it. He wouldn't have hurt a buzzing fly on the wall.

"The traitors. They're not going to help our agony. They're making it worse for us for their own selfish reasons. Those bastards," he muttered. He hardly ever swore in front of us. This time he was angry.

Still, I hadn't seen any Jewish policemen. Then one day I turned a corner and saw a half dozen of them walking smartly, patrolling our street. They had a hat and uniform similar to those of the Polish police, with two differences: The Jewish police had to wear a Star of David on their cap, and they didn't carry any weapons, just a rubber truncheon.

It's not enough we have the Germans on our backs. Now we've got our own people sucking up to the Germans. They're going to turn us in, spy on us, beat us, make our lives even more miserable. These traitors think the Germans are going to be grateful and save them. They're wrong, I thought.

The Jewish police turned out to be worse than I imagined. Lazar was in charge of them as well, and he made sure they did the Germans' bidding. In fact, the Jewish police later became spies for the Germans, turning in many people who were going into hiding.

For now, they were just patrolling. Sometimes they would accompany us to our work sites. To show their loyalty to the Germans, they would beat us harder than the Germans did.

I was stunned that some of our own people would turn on us. I knew their parents had English pounds, dollars, gold, and lots of material goods and connections to carry them through the war. Poor people didn't stand a chance, and these traitors were living proof. Even so, they still had the nerve to live among us as neighbors...




THE DEAD OF WINTER

The winter went on like a curse. The roads still were choked with snow and the Germans couldn't move their vehicles. All winter we cleaned off snow; the next day the roads would be covered again.

Even so, the Germans were still pouring more Jews into our city. Teenagers and people in their twenties and even thirties were being shipped off to factories as slave labor. The old, middle-aged, very young, the sick and the crippled, were taken to us. The Germans knew the one thing we had in abundance was lots of empty factories, warehouses, and synagogues.

We knew Jews were being evicted from their homes elsewhere. We could see the factories filling up, and we saw more and more people going door to door begging for food. We knew people slept on the floors of these buildings with no food, running water, or heat. We knew people in these buildings were shivering, covering up their faces and heads with only the clothes they had with them for warmth.

Many died. There was no heat in those buildings, and the corpses were cast out in front of the doorway, mostly children and old people, hundreds of them. The grave diggers had a small, two-wheeled pushcart on which they loaded eight or ten corpses and took them to the graveyard to be dumped in mass graves. Then they'd go back for more. Most of the corpses were frozen solid.

I tried foraging for food when I came home from work. We were all vultures, looking for something to break up so we could keep warm. One day I followed the grave diggers from the factories and the synagogues to the cemetery. Over and over again, I saw the mass graves, the piles of arms and legs and death-grinning heads, their eyes open in a kind of wide-eyed amazement that they died such a terrible death. Dead from starvation or freezing to death. I threw up.

We saw many of the dispossessed at our door. The parents would send their young children, because they knew people had more compassion for kids. With them they'd have a little plate, which they held out while looking at us with pitiful eyes.

"Please, please, give us whatever food you can spare. We're starving," they'd say, with big round eyes and runny noses. We would give them a little crust of bread, a small piece of potato. The children came all day and night.

The family living in our house was no exception. They sent both children out to beg, even after the husband had gone to work helping the farmers. I didn't resent their being in our house. It could have happened to us. They were our brothers and sisters. They belonged to this country. They just wanted a happy home, a job, and a chance to raise their children. These children didn't fight or whine. I even gave them some of my old shoes, shirts, and some blankets.

"We have everything; you have nothing," I told them. "Hitler took away all of our freedoms. And so it is with you."

Our people had always kept to themselves, had always been proud of being good neighbors. But when people are starving, they're bound to steal. We had piled potatoes and carrots under some straw, but the supply kept dwindling. We knew our neighbors were stealing food from us, but my father only shrugged his shoulders.

"It's no shame to steal when you're starving. People need to survive," he said.

There was a Jewish hospital in a now-abandoned synagogue. It was staffed by volunteer Jewish doctors, who did the best they could. However, the hospital had no medicine. People were dying by the hundreds. Because Yudel's house was right across from the hospital, I saw what went on there far more than I cared to.

Then one day, as the snow was melting in small rivers around the city and the sun began to feel warm again, a sign appeared in the town square. the sign said: "All young people gather in the square in a week to report for job assignments. Whoever does not show up and is caught will be shot."

We didn't know the meaning of the sign, but we knew it could not be good.