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RG-50.030.0002

And there weren't too many rough restrictions?

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RG-50.030.0002

Well, no. We had every once in a while the Germans would come in. There were restrictions where you couldn't have certain metals and precious metals and then they started raids, and it was just wild. They would come in from all sides, line up, the ones with the brown shirts and the red armbands, they were lined up at arms lengths, they even took the boy scouts, the Hitler Youth, they lined up and they would go from apartment to apartment from room to room and looking for furs and looking for metals and naturally silver. But even cooper and pewter, whatever metals they could melt. There were several incidents like this. They were also at one time, they wanted to evacuate Jewish youngsters. They were looking -- my mother got hold of -- I mean she knew about it a few days before, and I was hidden and some Jewish woman came with the Germans and said there is a young girl. I said I'm in the hospital, I was in the hospital.

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RG-50.030.0002

What were they going to do?

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RG-50.030.0002

They took them away. We do not know what happened to them.

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RG-50.030.0002

Were Jews allowed to keep businesses or anything like that?

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RG-50.030.0002

Local businesses. There was a restaurant and shoemakers and things like this, but no business as such. Once they established the factory, they were making money. They were paying them money, the operators. That brought some income to the Ghetto under ;

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RG-50.030.0002

I want to back track for a second because I forgot to ask you about how before the Germans arrived in your town, your community starting to prepare for that possibility?

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RG-50.030.0002

I don't know. I really don't know what way they did and whether they didn't. There were a lot of people like the doctor upstairs. There were Polish, in the Polish army officers, there were Jewish officers, and they were drafted and they went with the Army. Most of them, they wound up in Italy or many of them went up in . We don't know who killed them. I think the Germans, but the Germans were blaming the Russians, and the Russians were blaming the Germans. But this was most of the Polish army was destroyed there, the officers.

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RG-50.030.0002

You had mentioned that there was sort of an organizing for this. The masks --

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RG-50.030.0002

Oh, the masks because they were afraid to throw down the gas bombs. We were afraid of the gas bombs. There were a few raids in town, and we used to sit when there was a raid, we used to sit I don't know what you call it -- in Poland they had the drive in like it was a drive in under to go to the yard. So, they had this one section and it was supposedly the safest place to be in case of an attack or bomb falling down. There were some dog fights around. We saw a German plane being shot down. The Polish army was a joke. We never realized that. We thought, oh they are so strong. They used to have a song about the march of the Reds. He wouldn't give anything. He wouldn't give a buck, and when we started running away from the Germans we were following the Polish army. They were with the little scrawny horses, with little cots pulling the small arms, absolutely disorganized bunch of nothing. They were like 18th century and here was the smite of German army. So, they were overrun in no time.

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RG-50.030.0002

So what were these masks?

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RG-50.030.0002

They were afraid of gas. They were supposed to be prevent us from being poisoned by gas.

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RG-50.030.0002

Did you use them?

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RG-50.030.0002

One time we were sitting down, there was a raid, and everybody was "Oh, they threw a bomb." They were masks like surgeons wear. The whole thing was a joke, but we didn't realize it.

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RG-50.030.0002

Anything else you all did in preparation for this?

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RG-50.030.0002

No, that's all.

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RG-50.030.0002

What were the circumstances that you had to leave?

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RG-50.030.0002

They announced that the Ghetto would be liquidated, and we had like two days to get ready.

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RG-50.030.0002

This was when?

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RG-50.030.0002

May of '42. In fact, the 15th or 16th of May because my friend, Alena had a birthday that date. They announced -- first of all there was a group of men who will be working in those factories, the coat factories. They will stay for a while. They selected a group of people who would stay in the Ghetto and clean it up. And they needed medical person also. There was a doctor and he was old and he was a bachelor, and he had a sister who was a dentist, and they volunteered to stay. Our family was ordered to go to the hospital, because there were a lot of patients. The population was told to bring all the infirm, all the sick ones, all the very old ones to the hospital. So, on a given day, and we were allowed to just take what we had on our backs and those bundles. We wore a few layers of clothes and we went to the hospital. On the given day, when we got to the hospital, we were told that there 1s an old age home somewhere so we carried the patients, whoever was left, and this place was filled to the rafters because they brought everybody who was in any way infirm there. That first day, they marched the whole population to that stadium, which was actually at the other end of town. And we have been in a hospital that night, so we haven't seen what happened, but we were told what happened. As they approached the stadium there was an area which was like fenced off which was before you entered actually the stadium. They started separating the parents, the old ones, and they started taking the children away. All the children under ten years old. I was told that they threw a baby over the fence and said we don't need such . Smashed child's, baby's head on a fence. They took them all to the railroad station. They grabbed a bunch of boys, young fellows and they took them to the railroad station. That night, they took all the women who were left to Lodz. The following day they came to the hospital, and the group which came were the same boys and they were friends of ours. They were my friends. I knew them. They told us that they were putting people into those cattle cars and then they took the women to Lodz by street cars and just the men are left in the stadium. They were the ones who carried the patients to the lorries, carts really, and they announced who couldn't walk should go on a lorry. And my grandmother felt that she couldn't walk all the way down. So, we had kind of a touchy moment because we walked through town. I think this was Sunday, because a lot of people were there and some of them would make the sign of a cross when they recognized us, and the whole personnel was walking. There was one woman who was hiding a kid in her backpack and she was walking. She wouldn't go on the cart, and when we reached shortly before we reached the stadium, you had to turn left at the stadium and the station was straight ahead and all the carts with the patients went straight, and the cart with the boys went straight and then we kind of froze for a minute, and the cart with my grandmother and other people went leftward to the stadium. So, they were with us. That night and a man told us again about these awful, awful scenes which took place -- I think that out of population of 8,000 finally 3,000, 3,500 wound up in large Ghetto. That night they took us to Lodz by street cars. The street cars stopped running about midnight, and that's when they were taking us all to large Ghetto. That second day, were just men and group from hospital.

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RG-50.030.0002

And the children who hadn't been evacuated?

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RG-50.030.0002

Well, I don't think there were too many children at that time.

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RG-50.030.0002

Because of that earlier --?

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RG-50.030.0002

That day before, they took them all away.

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RG-50.030.0002

You had mentioned that earlier in the Ghetto --?

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RG-50.030.0002

There were some teenagers, but not too many. I think they sent them to some work camps, but not too many. We arrived at Ghetto late at night and they put us in some place, just empty rooms. We were told that the gypsies were evacuated from that area before and that's just like a holding area. And people were crying and crying about their lost children and their grandchildren. It was just very, very sad about the old people, and some other people wanted to know about what happened to the sick and the infirm. They left them in the hospital, and what happened to them? And that same morning some friends of our starting coming in looking for us, and one couple took care of my mother and me, and one person took my grandmother, someone took my grandfather. We stayed with those people. They shared a couple of days they shared their food with us. They could hardly afford it. Then we got a room for the four of us and we started our existence. I wouldn't call it living, in the large Ghetto.

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RG-50.030.0002

One thing that strikes me about all of this is your mother must have been pretty strong?

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RG-50.030.0002

She was unbelievable. She held the family together. She had tremendous resources. Later on, here, she was very unsure of herself and very vague and afraid, and even my husband who knew her younger, younger age, he couldn't understand how absolutely brave and resourceful and fighting for life.

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RG-50.030.0002

Was that unusual for a woman?

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RG-50.030.0002

To be a dentist?

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RG-50.030.0002

Not to be a dentist, but to really be taking care of everyone?

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RG-50.030.0002

Well, she had to. There was no one else. She went to school when she was 18 years old. When she finished high school she went to Warsaw to study dentistry. There were no dorms, she lived on her own. She rented a room and lived on her own. She had to. Her father paid for it, but still, she had to be resourceful.

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RG-50.030.0002

So, now you're in Lodz.

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RG-50.030.0002

We're in Lodz.

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RG-50.030.0002

Conditions, I'm sure, are a little bit different?

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RG-50.030.0002

Conditions are horrid. We had this one room, which was our bedroom, our living room, our kitchen, our bathroom. The first few nights, Mom and I slept on a straw mattress on the floor, and mice came in and started running on our faces, so we had to give this up. So, we shared one bed and Grandma had a cot, and Grandfather had a bed. We all worked. , who was the head of Lodz Ghetto, didn't like dentists, so she worked as a nurse in one of the factories. I worked in a brassiere factory. Grandfather was working also like a male nurse in one of the factories. Grandma got a job, old ladies were sorting rags and making bowls out of those colored rags, and eventually some younger women were knitting rugs for the Germans. The problem was that the rags were full of lice and they were sorting them on wire tables. So, she was bringing the lice home. When they give us rations, you have to pick up the rations, the first day because very often they would run out of the things. I think there were 750 to 900 calories a day what we were getting at that time. And just before the winter they decided to give us rations for the whole winter. Our wood and coal and turnips and potatoes and cabbage and beets. So, we had to go and pick it up at night. Mom and I would stand in line. The only way to pick this up was to put it on a sack and put it on your shoulders and carry it. You wouldn't let anyone carry it, because they would disappear. We had four people, so we sometimes had to do it in four installments, four nights in a row to pick up that stuff. On the one bed we had the coal and the wood, and on the other bed we had all the potatoes and cabbage and we had the inventory. We knew how many months it was supposed to last, and every couple of nights we would check which potatoes were getting rotten. And this is the potatoes we ate because we knew it had to last for the whole winter. We also got bread, a loaf of bread. So, again, we cut up the bread in sections and little slices so we had for breakfast a piece and for lunch a piece and for dinner a piece and so we were not- we were always hungry, but some people would eat the bread on the first day or the second day and they were starving the rest of the week. And what else we did, we all got some kind of a -- we didn't make anything warm to drink in the morning but you could buy hot water or coffee, so Grandma was going later to work so she volunteered. Then she started tripping on the street and falling down. She would come with a bloody face, whether she was weak or whether she had pressure too long, we don't know. So, we gave that up. During the day we all got soup. If you worked, you got the soup. And you had to work because you would get the money, the German money. The , they were named after Mr. who was the absolute tyrant in the Ghetto. And then at night we made a little something to eat, from whatever we had, whatever rations we had. If we had any vegetables we made it a little bit thick with any starches or whatever they give us. This was the existence. Cold miserable and we all started getting sick. I was getting abscesses on my face and sties in my eyes. Grandfather fell on ice and broke his arm, and he started staying in bed. Grandmother had those dizzy spells, and we just tried to exist, and this was two years.

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RG-50.030.0002

Did you have much contact with people outside of your family?

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RG-50.030.0002

Oh yes. At work, you work. I had a boyfriend, and we used to walk the streets because he had no place to go, and I had no place to go, so it was cold and we used to walk the streets and talk.

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RG-50.030.0002

Were there curfews?

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RG-50.030.0002

I think there were curfews. I'm sure there were. We didn't walk at night. We walked on a Saturday. It was a day off, so we walked. Towards the very end of the Ghetto, I got a job in the fields, in the vegetable fields. There were two kinds of police in the large Ghetto. There was this regular order police. They watched the exits. They watch order and stuff like this. And there was so-called commando. The head of commando was someone called Mark Kleeger (ph). Those bunch of thugs, they would get orders from Germans to deliver diamonds or deliver or find gold among the Jews, but they were nasty. They would come into someone's house looking for this stuff, and naturally they figure out the person would hide the stuff in sugar or flour. So, instead of taking a plate or a bowl, they would just dump everything out on the floor looking for the valuables. They were in charge of the fields where they distributed the vegetables. I mean, so if you knew someone and we knew someone and they were there and they put the finger on the scale a little bit or lifted the scale you could get a little bit more. They had special rations. They ate in special places. They would buy their groceries in a special store like all the others of ;

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RG-50.030.0002

These were Jewish police?

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RG-50.030.0002

That was Jewish police. And as I said, he had those fields out near the Jewish cemetery. He established vegetable fields. We had people working there. And I was getting sick and through connections and through people I got the job in those fields. It was a hard labor. So, first of all you got two soups a day instead of one. I had to walk two or three miles to that place, but the fresh air. I mean there was nothing much to do, the fresh air and the sun started drying up my face, and then we were working when we were weeding, we would take the weeds home. They were a source of green vegetable. When we were thinning out radishes, we would eat raw radishes. That they couldn't catch us, but when we were doing something with the weeds, weeding the weeds, we used to eat the raw bean and put the greens back into the ground so they couldn't figure out who was eating them. We weren't really stealing, we were just hungry so we'd eat a bean. But that helped me later on to survive the rest of it, because all of a sudden my health improved so much. And because I was getting two soups a day, I didn't have to each so much at home. I was getting the extra soup. I would bring it home at night so we had it. And my grandfather was getting weaker and weaker. He couldn't eat. This was really awful, so we kept on saving his bread. And his wish was to live so long that we can pick up his rations. This was his inheritance because he said he lost all his gold, he can't leave us anything else. What we did he died the day before the rations came, and we didn't report it until the following day, we picked it up and then I reported the death, so we had this extra little food and an extra loaf of bread, which later I left 1f in Auschwitz because we're still hoarding and we're still afraid to let go and eat everything a once. But the existence in Lodz Ghetto was awful. They also had the criminal police, , this was German police. They had their headquarters in a little church, and they would call people in and say what do you have? Our landlord, he was the head of fences before the war. A real, very unsavory character, but he had a heart of gold. And he must have had money. They beat him to death. They let him out, he died a day later. But he was like -- his face was like liver. He never told them what he had. They called my mother in. They said we heard you are a rich dentist from . What do you have? And she said, "Well, I have a couple of gold chains, I have a little diamond." And they said, bring it in. So, she brought it in and they let her go. So, they were satisfied. If she would have said she had nothing, they would have tortured her. This between the and the Jews under commando, this was pretty tight situation over there. And then they started evacuations. They were evacuating constantly people. One of the worst actions was when they took the children out. Orders came that they have to take the children, they're going to take them to better places. There will be fresh air and farms and the people put signs on it and they mobilized all the Jewish police including all the people who worked for the health department, including my mother, and they had to go and collect the children. The children were being taken voluntarily by the parents, taken down, because they couldn't hide them. The moment the family would hide a child, the rations would be taken away, so not only the child didn't have the rations, but the family wouldn't have the rations. Our next door neighbors had hidden a child and they struggled. Unfortunately she died later, but it was -- and then they were taking the old people. They would make you line up on the street and get out and just select the old people and the children Now, one of the worst actions was around the Jewish holidays, this was '44, I believe. And we lived on the corner, and the lady the one who was our so-called landlady, she was the wife of the guy who was killed. Before the war she was in Argentina. So, we started lining up on one street and she called everybody up and she said forget it. This is not our street. Our address is the next street. There were two entrances there. She said, all of you go back home and hide. Just sit quiet, don't open the window, don't stand next to windows. At that time she had hidden some children and my grandparents. We didn't know where they were, somewhere. They had all kinds of nooks and crannies in that building, and we had all hidden quietly, and at noon they rang the whistles and they stopped the action. So, they were ready to call that second street, where we were, they called it off, so we were saved. If she would have -- we walked out and somebody said to us, someone who knew us and said, where are your parents, and my mother said, hidden. He said, that's silly, they'll find them. They'll kill them. And he was not sure about mom, but when we went back, like I said, that action was closed. I mean stopped, and that's it.

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RG-50.030.0002

Were you all sort of fatalistic about this? Was it terrifying to you?

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RG-50.030.0002

It was terrifying. You didn't know what's going to happen. Some friends of my mother's he was high official, she had her parents, and they went down when the street went down, and he told that he'll be able to release them because he was a very, very high position, and he could never do anything about it. They took him. They started having lists and first I knew I was not on the list. One of my grandmother's sister was on the list, and we tried to get her out, and my friend told her to go, because there was no -- you couldn't support them. You couldn't do anything with them. Once they were on the list, the rations were cancelled. So, who could afford to feed them. So, they took her, and my grandmother had one brother and two sisters in large Ghetto. One of the sister-in-laws died, two children were evacuated, one uncle was evacuated, the girl finally , and she died there. The other aunt, they took them away and we never heard of them again. The woman, the last one's husband was either taken away or died, and she was the last one who was evacuated before our family was gone. So, they all were gone. I mean, there were relatives in other towns, but we never knew what happened to them, but those I knew until '43 what happened to them.

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RG-50.030.0002

Now, I want to know a little bit more to the organization of this Ghetto. I know there were Jewish police.

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RG-50.030.0002

Well, the organization was the head of the large Ghetto was .

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RG-50.030.0002

Did you have any contact with him?

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RG-50.030.0002

No, he slapped my mother's face once, because he thought she was peddling something on the street and he was going in his carriage and there was a peddlar and she ran into our building and my mother was working in the building and he ran after her and slapped her face. At one time I wanted to get a petition, when I had those abscesses, for some different job. I never got into him. I never had any contact with him. He had his own clique. His brother, we called Prince Joseph, after Napoleon's brother. They all had good apartments. They had special rations. They all wore high boots like the Germans. They all rode in those carriages with the horses, and he thought he was a king. The money was-the only money we could use in Ghetto were pictures on it. We called it . That was the only way you could buy anything. He liked the doctors, he didn't like the dentists, so the dentists were person non grata.

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RG-50.030.0002

Your mother didn't practice dentistry at all in the large Ghetto?

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RG-50.030.0002

Oh yes.

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RG-50.030.0002

All right, we'll get to that. I'll let you finish.

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RG-50.030.0002

If someone displeased him, he would just send them out, either send them out on transport or if someone did something which was according to his rules not right, maybe abuses, they were assigned to the feces brigade. And this was the most horrid thing you ever saw. They would collect, there were cesspools, so they would collect the feces from the cesspool in wagons 1n special tanks. But those people were pulling those things, and they had to empty them somewhere in the suburbs of the Ghetto. I remember there was a young couple. I don't know what he did, and they punished him. She was a beautiful blonde and she used to pull that thing. They were covered with feces. Naturally a lot of those feces were full of disease, so those people never lasted too long. You probably know the landmark of the Ghetto was everybody carried a little canteen to work because we got our soup in it. So we all carried it. As a matter fact, I got as a birthday present, someone made one that was not made out of tin but made some nice metal so that it didn't have that tinny taste, because the soup would get soured in it. Even those people who pulled those feces wagons, they would walk around with their bowl or their canteens attached to their belts because somehow on their route they would stop and wherever and they would get their soup. So, as filthy and dirty and miserable as they were, they ate on the road. But those people really, this was like he punished them. This was worse punishment I think than being evacuated on the transports. I also had a hard time with grandfather when he was dying. We had cold water only. We had to pump the water downstairs to bring it up. And they had laundries, public laundries. You sent out your stuff, took three months, two months you got it back. Not that we had valuable things. They gave us things out when we came to the Ghetto. Well, Grandfather was sick towards the end and he had uremia, and he had accidents, and 1n order to change the bed I had to pick him up and put him on another bed. We'd change the bed and finally when he died -- he wanted to commit suicide. He had some procaine (ph) and his cousin caught him and he was ready to take it, but anyway, he died. In order to bury him, one had to provide two clean sheets for a shroud. We had no clean sheets. So, I went to these friends of my mother's who lived in Lodz before the war, and there were several families there that they all lived in Lodz. And that was the one who lost their parents, and I said, could you lend me two sheets so I can bury Grandfather and we will either buy some on the Black Market later on, or we'll get our bundle and we'll give it back to you. She said, "No, I'm sorry, I don't have it." I was devastated. And finally the people next door who were new acquaintances, the ones who had lost the child, she knocked on the door. She said, "I hear you have a problem. Here are the two sheets." So, this is how we managed to bury him in clean sheets. This was towards the end of the war, and they felt that they are going to survive the war and they're going to have their linens and have everything else. They lost half of their family and they still couldn't understand that those things were not important. Tape #2

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RG-50.030.0002

I was mentioning that as far as I understand it, there was a lot of organization in the large Ghetto. Cultural activities, little religious programs, theater?

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RG-50.030.0002

I have never attended any of it. I don't know anything much. There was a private library, and I used to go for books. The front was bordering the street which was closed. The main street of Lodz Ghetto had street cars going like in . No one lived in those buildings. I think they had factories, most of them. There was barbed wire. This was guarded by the Jewish policeman watching that no one should sneak out and so on. That library, the private lending library was on that street, but I know we used to go through the back and stand in line and borrow books. That's the only thing which I had in terms of cultural events. As I said, I was there for two years, and we had to take care of the old people. We had to bring the rations, and bring the food and do the fire and bring the water, and bring the slops down. Everything was on my mother's and my back, and one time she had an infection in her finger, so she couldn't grab. She had an infection in her palm and she couldn't carry things. She would go with me to pick up the rations just to guard me and I was carrying it. I worked, and as I said, Saturdays I would go out, and I met this guy. I started going out with him on Saturdays. We would just walk, because he was taking care of his mother and sister-in-law and a child, and he was a policeman, but he was not doing anything how should I say, he didn't beat people. He was watching, I think he was a sergeant, but they call it in German " " that means people who kept the order. They were not the criminals and they were not the commander. Those were the thugs. They are the ones who are the messy guys.

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RG-50.030.0002

When you would take walks, what would you see?

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RG-50.030.0002

People very often, you saw people lying on the ground. They found bodies on the street. The children, they used to sell , and there were children, there was a little chant the little children would sell , and three for one mark. This was almost like a Ghetto song, those little children selling. Children were working. My mother was working in a factory where children were working. I don't know what jobs they had, sorting something putting something together. They were little children. And I remember once she told a story about a little boy and he said he saw a goose, but he said it in Jewish and he says I saw a gants, not something whole a gants, he meant a goose and he started flapping with his wing and trying to say what the goose was. And he saw a gants, and my mother said the eyes would dig because he saw an animal. Even the little children, the ones who were finally eventually were evacuated, but at one time they had little factories for them. Even they had to work to get a little soup. Life was -- there were wives who fought with husbands about food. The husbands would threaten the wives or steal. People would steal the food from each other. People would sell the bread for cigarettes and then they were starving. It was so difficult to live. Now, I was a young girl and I didn't have any clothing, and we used every piece of scrap of whatever we could do something to make something. When we first came in, they gave us some stuff, some linens, some pots and pans, because they had from other liquidated Ghettos, they would get the stuff in and when people were brought in, that was the organization. They would distribute some of the stuff. I remember we got this big grey shawl with fringes on it, full of holes. And I ripped the shawl, I took out the fringes and pieced the whole thing together. I think I made three hats for us, for mother, for grandmother and for me, because it was cold and some mittens. We grabbed things out of the Ghetto, Ghetto. Among other things there was a piece of fabric. I'll always remember it was an orange piece of fabric and I needed something. And it was not enough for a dress. I had a friend who was working with me and she was a dressmaker and she said find some wool. So we found -- I found some on the Black Market, some yarn, and she made me knit parts of the sleeves and the yoke and the turtleneck, and some trim on the skirt, she made like pockets, and I had a beautiful dress, I mean made out of very small piece of fabric and those scraps. And the Polish peasant women never wore coats, even working women, they wear those big plaid throws, I mean like big squares. They were square. So, I was with Mom, we bought this plaid thing and made a jacket for me, because you had to I needed some clothes. I was outgrowing what I had, and I needed something. We managed as I say, things from scraps. Every little scrap of wool, every piece of scrap of something, you pieced it. You bought pieces of wool and made a sweater. You're talking about people in Ghetto how short sighted they were. When I was working for that factory, the corset factory, we would get this was for the German population, and Germans would send in cut out pieces of brassieres, I mean they were all cut, and all the fittings and the little hooks and buttons, whatever, slides for the brassieres or if we did corsets there were stays and eyelets, and we had to count everything and package it in small loads so we would distribute it to the assembly line. I worked in the warehouse where we would distribute. We even measured thread. We gave them certain amount of thread so no one could steal anything. The guy who was in charge of the factory was a manufacturer before the war, and he felt that the factory has to be run in the correct order. There were times we had absolutely nothing to do. No shipment came. There was very little and the assembly line was working very slowly and they would come in and they needed a dozen buttons, a dozen stays and we would just give them to the assembly line, but the biggest work was when the shipments would come in. We had to count, like I say, every button and repackage it. So, the foreman of the factory used to say, "Whatever you're doing, just make believe you're working." So, we would have a book in the drawer and we'd knit under the table and on the table we would have button or stays open up a package and make believe we were counting or whatever. This guy would come in, you would have to hide from him because he did not believe, he could not bring himself to say, "Look girls, there is nothing to do." As long as the Germans don't come in and they don't catch you with it, he was petrified. When the time came for me to get transferred to the fields, I needed his release, and he wouldn't release. With all the connections I had to get to those fields, he didn't want to lose one of his workers. Finally, someone from our hometown, who was also director of a more important factory, he was a director of the uniforms, the coats for the German Army, he finally approached him and said, "There's a young girl here. She's sick. She needs some fresh air. This dust in the factory is killing her." I couldn't breath, I was having attacks of asthma. "Why don't you release her?" Finally, I got the release from him, but when I approached him he wouldn't do it. There were many people like this. They were so self important. They felt so important, and they were nobodies nothings. All of a sudden they became heads of factory or whatever. And Ghetto was one huge factory, starting from electronic equipment, uniforms, which was the most important things, boots, supplies for the Army, going down to the brassieres, hats, artificial flowers, brooms. And even those rag rugs, braided rugs which were made out of scraps. They would take torn sheets which they would get from various cities when the other towns or cities were liquidated like in . That group saw that the good stuff went to Germany or for the German settlers. The junk came back to Lodz Ghetto. Some of the stuff was torn, they were rags. They would dye them different colors and make braided rugs out of them. So, everybody was working and everybody produced something, and we produced and the Ghetto was getting food. There was no money.

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How were these people selected to be in positions of authority whether it was the police or the factory?

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I don't know, connections, basically.

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Were there ever women in positions of authority?

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I think so. I think so, I don't know how many, mostly a men's society. The guy Kleeger, the one who was the head of the commando, he had a brother who's the most extremely decent guy, and she was a friend of my mother's from before the war, and he was in charge -- this is a specialty of empty containers. You see, if they brought containers to Ghetto, let's say they brought brown sugar or they brought flour or something, that department would scrape out the things and there was still food in it and they had to return to those things back to the Germans to refill it. So, he was in charge of the empty containers. This was -- he had a high position, but he felt that this was a position which in any way he's not jeopardizing anyone's life and anyone's position. He wanted to survive, and he survived and his wife, but this was his job, and one day I told you when the commander, his brother's hoodlums were coming into the building, one day he was passing our apartment building and he saw the guys were coming in to check, and he just walked in. My grandparents were home. He walked in and just sat down and talked to them. He was waiting for those guys to come and he wanted to chase them on their way. He felt they shouldn't anyway, he never said anything later, and they left the building and he later told my mother that he came in because my grandparents said "What was Simon doing here? He just came to visit us in the middle of the day?" He came, he wanted to prevent any scenes with my grandparents. As I said, he was the most decent guy in the world. His brother survived, I think, either brother or nephew. He was hiding. Those people survived that lived in Israel, and we saw them. There were a lot of decent people.

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There was also corruption?

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I think there was corruption. There had to be corruption. There had to be corruption. You see, in large Ghetto I was such a low level of living that I really don't know what was going on, but we know -- the whole administration and when I read this book about Lodz Ghetto, one time he had theaters here and orphanages, he had schools, he was making the famous speech, give me your children, he felt justified in sending out the children because maybe he can save some people. When finally it came to his evacuation, they gave him a special passenger car. He didn't go 1n a cattle car, and he expected that they were going to take him on an inspection of camp and he's going to help them in Auschwitz. And there are three theories what happened to him. One was that some people from Lodz Ghetto killed him when he arrived. Some of them he was gassed or some German killed him. So, we don't really know what happened to him. Now, once they evacuated us, the evacuation --see what happened, they were having more and more lists and more and more evacuations and they would grab people on the streets. I was afraid to go anyplace. And I had some money coming to me and some vegetables coming to me because the vegetables all of a sudden were ripening, and I was afraid to go by myself to the place that I was working. And this friend of mine, the policeman, he said he'll take me, because at least we hope they won't grab me on the street when I'm being escorted. At that time, we knew something was going to happen, so we made this big out of some fabric back packs and packed all our valuables and some food. That was sitting ready to be taken in case they evacuate us. We never knew in the last few weeks of August, this was the beginning of August '44. He was late, and that in a way helped me and Mom be together, because by the time he arrived, they took us by that time they just blew the whistles everybody out. That's it. So, we went down, and downstairs he was there. He just came. If he would have been 15 20 minutes before I would have left and I would have never been with my family. I would have gone with him. So, he helped us to go to the train station and that's where they put us in the cattle cars. There were about 80 people in the cattle car and one bucket, one slop bucket. I don't even know if there was anything to drink. We all had something to eat, I mean whatever we grabbed. As I said, we had an extra bread which we never allowed ourselves to eat the whole bread. We're saving it because what happens tomorrow. We were so conditioned to it that you have to save something for tomorrow. And Grandma was embarrassed to go in the bucket. She couldn't -- and we tried to cover her with the coat and so on. People were dying on the train. This was one night when I --

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I'm sorry to interrupt you but did you have any idea where people were being sent?

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No, there were all kinds of rumors but no one knew.

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Had you heard about this before?

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We didn't hear of Auschwitz. We heard about bad things happening, but the only time that I knew something was happening when those boys told us that the people were taken to cattle cars, the old people and the children, and those boys were never heard of again. Back track, one of my friends was hung in Lodz Ghetto. He was found, he was trying to escape from camp. And this was a boy I saw him when I was 15, I gave him my photograph, and then somebody told me that he was hung, and they found my photograph with him. Since that time, I was going up the ladder. I had boyfriends who were much older than him, and I became obsessed to get that photograph back, because I felt if that boy felt that way that he had my photograph, it was taken when I was 12 or 13, before the war. I finally tracked that photograph down and had it, and I told you that the people from Ghetto some of them were hung. The ones who were in charge of the Ghetto at one time, which I mention it in my book. So, when we got -- what were we talking about?

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The cattle cars, going to Auschwitz.

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Yes, the cattle cars, going to Auschwitz. We arrived at Auschwitz, and it was dark in the cattle cars. All of the sudden the light was kind of blinding. They lined us all up in fives. We had my grandmother with us. They told us to leave this stuff whatever we had. I just had like a little lunch bag, and I had my photographs there, and I had some money there, and a couple of rings and things like this. Mother, I think had probably instruments. If anything, aside from anything else she had was instruments. She had a red cross arm band, because in Ghetto everybody was identified by something. They had caps and they had bands, and they had different hats with different 1.d.'s and so on. was big on uniforms but couldn't afford uniforms, so he was giving people hats. As we were approaching , there were a lot of Polish couple, like trustees working there, the ramp, and I didn't realize until later what this Pole did. He saved our lives. What he did, is pushed me into the line first and separated me from my mother and my grandmother and put some people in between. Then he put my mother in, again, put some people in between, and then put my grandmother. He knew where she was going. He wasn't sure where my mother was going. He knew where I am going. And the family was together. Very often they's say let me go with that loved one and they would oblige. So, naturally they send me in and then he asked my mother where she is going, and she saw the sign and she said I am going to work. The sign was , SO She said I'm going to work. He looked at her, clapped her on her behind and let her go. And naturally, they send Grandmother to the left, and my mother had nightmares because it was so confusing that we didn't have a chance to look what happened to her. It was so fast, and so unbelievably confusing, and I think that the Pole by separating us, knew what he was doing and he saved us, the two of us.

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Was there a general hysteria?

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No.

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People just weren't --?

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There's a by word of Auschwitz "shnell (ph)" Everything they did you had to do fast, fast, fast. You had no time to regroup, you had no time think, you had no time to do anything. Get off the trains, line up, fast. That's all you could hear "Shnell, shnell," When they finally regrouped us on the other side of the table, again they formed us in fives. There were groups of prisoner girls, and they started driving us, practically driving us, fast, running, and while we were running, we encountered a group of subhumans, to us at that time they were subhumans, they wore tops of men's pajamas, but they were not the regular prison garb. They all had their hair shaved. They had the wooden lace shoes on. Their doppers (ph) were plastic or fabric or whatever, or no, they were wood sabits (ph) like Dutch shoes, because it was muddy around. There were sent in another direction, and they started yelling give me your bread, give me something, they'll take it away it from you. Give it to us, and they were supervised by the Germans, but basically they were smacking them, and we were shocked seeing that group, and naturally wouldn't give them the bread. I mean, God forbid, we had to hide the bread for us. We'll need it. And finally they brought us into an area where the baths were. This was a real legitimate bath, a processing area. By that time it was getting dark, and they warned us to turn in all the gold and all the diamonds and all the valuables that we have because they'll be taken away. And rumors were going that they were going to do very personal inspections. Well, Mom had a bridge with two diamonds in. She had it made in such a way that she could take it out. The diamonds were taken out of the things and she had it in her mouth. This was like a final ration in case we need anything. And I was very upset. I got panicky and I said I don't want to give these Germans absolutely nothing. Let's bury them. And I also had a couple of rings, old rings. And in the dark, my mother says "Are you sure?" And I said Mom, I don't want you to give it to them and they are going to look in your mouth and they will find it and they will get, and I don't want them to have it. And there we put into the ground, ground it with our heels, and got rid of the diamonds and got rid of the gold. There were a couple of other things they took, but this, it's like a feeling, like great we didn't give it to them. Anyway, they took us to this shed --.

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What happened to the diamonds?

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She ground them into the ground.

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Was that the end of the story with the diamonds?

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Yes, but we wouldn't give it to the Germans. That was fun --, when I think about it now, this was fun, because they didn't get it. Maybe somebody eventually found it, maybe not. I don't care. They were sewed in a little plastic thing -- well, we didn't have plastic. Anyway, they took us to the shed. We had to get undressed, get the clothes off. They took everything away from us and they sent us to the sauna and lucky for me, I don't know why, they didn't cut my hair. They did shave our hair and they give us tattoos. It was very late at night by that time. They were getting a lot of transports. Rumor was that they wanted us to -- eventually would have gassed us, but they were so busy, the crematorium was so busy that they felt maybe they can do something with us, the able bodied people. And, they gave us some clothes. I wound up with a skirt, my mother wound up with a mini, So we switched and the wooden shoes. Then the last act was they painted a stripe, a red stripe down our backs and that broke me up. Talking about panic, and we walked naked in front of the guys, in front of the Germans and in front of Polish copos. Somehow, I took this whole thing without shedding a tear, but when they painted that stripe on my back, I started crying. Again, one of the Poles walked over to me, hugged me and said, "Don't worry, you'll survive. You'll be okay." I mean, I spoke Polish at that time fluently, and I was a pretty girl at that time, and he felt sorry for me so he said, "Don't worry, you'll make it, just don't cry." So, they sent us out, by now it's late at night. They didn't have a barrack for us. They'll send us to the latrine. I don't know if you know what the latrine in Auschwitz looked. They were concrete benches with holes that could accommodate 500 people at once. There were benches on both sides and then in the middle there was a long bench from back to back there were holes with a pit underneath. And that's how we were using as toilets. Well, that's where we spent the night, in the toilets. Well, I don't have to repeat Auschwitz stories. We stood up from 5:00 in the morning or 6:00 in the morning and then they put us in the barracks and we had 14 people, 12 to 14 people to one six by six or seven by seven bed. They gave us a can of whatever they gave us was in a metal can, no spoon, no nothing, and five people had to eat out of it, so everybody's watching how many swallows you did of that. And one of the first nights there, once we got into the barrack, they were burning, the crematorium was going night and day.

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You knew what it was?

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We didn't. But someone woke up and those barracks, like you see in the Museum how they look, they had little windows on top and someone must have woken up and saw this red glow in the sky and someone started crying all of a sudden 1,000 women started crying and people who were in charge of it, group of Hungarian girls, they started yelling to be quiet because the Germans would come in and so forth. We still didn't know what happened. We knew something bad had happened, but we didn't know about the crematoriums, what's happening.

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You didn't know what the crematoriums were? How many people were in your barrack?

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About a thousand.

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From all over?

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This was probably mostly Polish group run by the Hungarians. The girls who were in charge had short skirts and they for some reason they all like polka dotted blouses and they had their hair. They cut my hair some more. They didn't like my having hair, so they shaved it a little -- they didn't shave it, but they cut it completely. And Mom developed, we were afraid, because she developed from the wooden shoes a wound on her ankle and that was festering, and two weeks later they had the selection, luckily they put us through a shower again, and the paper bandage fell off, so when they selected her, they didn't see her with the bandage. As much as that was festering and messy, they didn't do anything.

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Was your day fairly controlled?

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Extremely. We had to get up, I don't know, 5:00 or 6:00. It was cold in the morning. You stood on that for hours. They counted, and counted first from the barrack, then they counted from the section, then they counted -- they had to count the whole camp through and had to tally. If someone died, they had to tally. If someone died, they had to tally. If they couldn't find someone, they were looking for them.

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This is the whole camp, not just your barrack?

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No, no, they started with counting the barrack, then there was a whole section, then they had to have it to one person, and if they couldn't find her they were looking for them. Somebody was maybe hiding. Maybe someone died, maybe someone couldn't get up. It started over and over and over. And the morning was cold. Then they would give us five minutes in the bathroom. Sometimes they put us in one of the other barracks was like a washroom. I don't know how many spigots, but again, it was fast, fast, fast. There was no toilet paper, there was nothing. You couldn't wash, you couldn't do anything. If you managed to put your hand under the spigot and get a little water, they gave us something in the morning, I don't know if they gave us bread at night or in the morning -- no, I think we used to get the bread at night and save a piece to have it for the morning, and they gave us some soup during the day and some kind of a liquid during the day, in the morning. Once we were standing in the , and one of the girls, whatever she had she had some kind of a jacket with patch pockets, and I said, "Gee, that would be nice to have for bread." And she ripped out the pocket and said, "Here." She knew my mother from her town, because we would save the piece of bread to have it for the morning, and you were afraid to put it down. You slept on top of the bread so God forbid someone shouldn't steal if from you. So, that pocket was a great thing to put the piece of bread. I mean, you know, such little things can mean so much to you. Anyway, luckily for us we only stayed only two weeks there. This was hell.

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Did you work?

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No. Yes, I offered -- I couldn't sleep. Mom was doing something, checking some things. You know they asked who was a medical thing, so she would go down, and they made us sit in those beds and you couldn't lay down. You just had to sit. Fourteen people in one of those platforms. Well, I couldn't sleep at night with all the noise and at night they had the slop bucket at the door and somebody had to go, they had to go to the slop bucket and when the slop bucket was full, had to be taken to the latrine. Well, I volunteered. And one of the escort from one of the other girls, from one of the workers, but they felt themselves above carrying a slop bucket, and at least I could get some fresh air. Walk, when the bucket was full, I could go walk out.

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Did you see anything strange when you'd walk out at night?

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Nothing, it was just dead. Nothing was seen, no one was walking, except as I said, figures taking the slop bucket. That's about all. No one was allowed to go to the bathroom. But, I was waiting for that occasion.

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It just sounds sort of eerie.

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It was very hot in the afternoon. This was still August. So during the day, it got hot, and in our camp they would send us out again for another count, and by that time it was hot, and we stood there for hours until they tallied. It was a way of torture. They were just cruel and people were fainting and people were dying in the lines and you were not allowed to help them. You had to leave them the way they were. If someone passed out, they passed out. That's it.

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You went out a night, did you see the crematorium flames or smell them?

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There was a small and there was dust, but we didn't -- there was some white stuff floating, but we didn't know what it was. The first night the glow was unbelievable. And we were afraid, I don't know, we were afraid to do anything. You were not allowed to. Once I was in the bathroom, maybe I wasn't moving fast enough, there was this famous Erma , She later came to Bergen-Belsen, blonde, gorgeous cool and she had this big whip and she smacked me with a whip. Because as I said, the whole ward was fast, whatever you did. You had to line up fast, you had to go to the bathroom fast. They gave you five minutes in the bathroom. Five minutes maybe not even five minutes to get some water to wash up, wash up, maybe you could wet your face maybe take a sip of water and wet your hands. That's about all. Conditions were awful.

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How were the other guards, the copos, your block elders?

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I don't know. It's hard to say. They lived very nicely, especially the block elders. They had little rooms with quilts and they had little stoves. And one with the block elder she would help and then they had a whole bunch of lesser girls and -- our group was Hungarian so there was a communication gap. Some of them spoke German, some of us spoke German and some of us didn't. I didn't speak too well German, but I understood. So, you were afraid of them.

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Were they nasty?

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Sometimes, like I said with the hair. They couldn't stand the fact that I had hair. I mean I didn't. I had short hair, but they couldn't stand that. They didn't have a razor, so they clipped it and said that's to prevent lice. Because they saw some workers working on the roof, again Polish workers. I talked to them once. I don't know how I managed to say something, and I said I could use a stick, and he said fine, tomorrow we'll work on the roof and I'll make you a stick for the soup. It's like a tongue depressor and he dropped that stick for me, so I could dig into the soup. They didn't like it. So, the following day, they called me down to the bottom of the thing and said, "We have to cut the hair." So, they cut some more. I had no choice. Because except for the block elders and their assistants the rest of them had shaved heads. How they got there, how they became them, I don't know. There was a woman who came along, she was a dentist from Poland, and she kind of asked my mother and said, you know, I can get you a job and so on and she was hinting that my mother has anything she should give it to her and she could arrange for her to get a job as a dentist. At that time we didn't have anything, and my mother was upset. She said, if I had the diamond, I could have given her the diamond. I could have gotten a job. Lucky for us, we didn't have the diamonds and they sent us out to Bergen- Belsen.

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Why don't you tell me how that came about?

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About two weeks after we were in Auschwitz, they lined up, had another selection. They took us to the showers, gave us some clothes, and they took aware our clothes. I mean if I had a little -- I had a little skirt and a tank top, they took the skirt away. The tank top was so short, I had a ribbon in the tank top and I had to tie it between my legs otherwise my whole behind was showing. And they ran us out, and again they had a selection and they were supposed to send us out. Then something happened, the trains were not there, and they put us in some temporary barrack. The following day, they ran another selection. They gave us a bath, and they put us on the train. This was the time I really don't know if Auschwitz had two stations or not because this is the only time and I went back to Auschwitz, I remember, we went through the main camp of Auschwitz, because we were in and this was, I saw the red buildings, the permanent buildings. I saw the band playing. So, I had a feeling they had some other station in Auschwitz proper which they loaded us. They unloaded the cars somewhere else, and they put us there. They put us in cattle cars again. They give us a piece a bread and a piece of cheese. There was one water bucket with water, and there was one slop bucket, and they put us on the trains. I think we were there either two nights or three nights, and one night they stopped somewhere and they brought a fresh bucket of water, and assigned someone to distribute the water. Brought a little cup and we were supposed to have a sip. One woman got so frenzied, she grabbed her shoe and dipped it in there and drank from the shoe. When they give us the clothes, by that time, I've got those laced up shoes with wooden soles. One was white and one was black, and I had this men's shirt, long flannel thing, blue satin, significant later, I'll tell you about that story. We stayed, and as I said the train was on and off and on and off. At night it would stop. I remember once we were next side there were real cattle making cattle noises. This was an absolute nightmare. Later on when I had my typhous fever, all I had I kept on saying, take the train out of my head, get the train out of my head. That's all I could hear is that. It took me years before I wanted to take a train anyplace, because even when I was in Europe and we traveled later, I was very reluctant to take a train. We finally arrived at Bergen-Belsen about maybe the third day. All the passing and stopping we passed, I think, Dresden. We saw someone tried to climb up. We could see the bombed out cities and we were very happy to see those bombed out cities. I think it must have been the third day. We felt that another night on the train we will completely lose our identity and it was confusing. We were getting confused without food, without drink, and with the total darkness for so long, no knowing where we were going, what we're doing. Anyway, they took us, we came to Bergen- Belsen, and until that time Bergen-Belsen was not a concentration camp. They had various camps of various entities, prisoner of war camp, but there was no camp concentration camp as such. Again, they asked people who can't walk who would like to go by truck, and I think one or two people who were very sick, they went. Otherwise, my mother with the bad leg, she would not go on the truck. She was afraid, because we knew by now, by that time, when you are sick something bad is going to happen to you. We finally got into the main camp. It was a long, long street. The front of the street, the beginning of the street, there was administration places, there was a bath, there was a little crematorium which they could burn two bodies. But this was done for bodies. It was never done to use it for killing people. If people died, they would use it. They gave us a bath and we put our clothes in a little basket, and when we walked out from the other side of the bath, we got the clothes. They marched us down to the end of the street of the town, the very end of the camp, and there was this big tent that could accommodate about 1,000 people. It was clean. We all got a blanket each. On the floor of the tent was wooden shavings, bales of wooden shavings, clean, never used. There as a latrine in the back right under the guards tower, big pits and there was a couple pieces of wood where you could kind of lean against, but you could use it any time you wanted. There was a wooden trough with pipe. We could use the water any time we wanted. They nominated one lady, she was from Germany, she spoke German, as camp director, and her assistant, she was originally from Germany, so they spoke fluently German. They counted us once a day. This camp is located on the , So It's like heather. At that time there was fields in back of us, later on they build more and more and more but at that time it was just us and the fields. So, we could sit in the sun. We could drink when we wanted, we could go to the toilet when we wanted. Even at night, if you wanted to go to the toilet, -- if the guards heard something going on, he would put the light on, the spot light on, if he heard a movement. So, maybe they eliminated you when you were using the bathroom. When the girls were sitting there, they would just look. After a while, you lose all inhibitions, and if they want to look, let them look. That's what we're going to do. At that time we didn't have any doctors so the first day, the second day, they brought a big chest with some first aid things and some pills, some equipment. Mom became the doctor. There was a head dentist, I don't know his name, but he was until the very end, a very, very decent guy. So, one of the first questions he asked me is "How come your head is shaved?" They couldn't understand that. There were SS but they had no idea about the horrors of Auschwitz or the other camps. They were just half way decent people in the beginning. The food we got was paradise next to Auschwitz. Fairly decent soup, we got some kind of coffee in the morning and a nice piece of bread and at night very often they had something, a piece of cheese or some artificial jam or something and Sundays we'd get red cabbage and there was some meat in it and potatoes with jackets and this was the first few weeks. The next few days they put another tent up. We got a big group of Hungarian women another tent up. So, about that time there was 3,000 people in that compound, because there were other groups.

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