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"My mother and several other women organized a clandestine school." | |||
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Charlene Schiff Born 1929 Horochow, Poland 
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In the very beginning, my mother and several other women organized a clandestine school for children who were below the age of work, and it was a wonderful thing because we had something to look forward to. It made us forget about the hunger and about all the, the inadequacies of living such a primitive life, and this school existed for several months. Several of the ladies, including my mother, would barter on the outside and they came home with crayons, with writing paper, with some books, and I mean they would tell stories, we would sing and we would color, and it was something to look forward to. It was really, uh, if it, if it only could have lasted, but it didn't. It lasted a few months, and pretty soon there was not enough, uh, uh, jewelry or money to barter with, there were no more supplies, school supplies, and the morale sort of sagged in the ghetto. And the women came home, and they were too tired, and too hungry, and too beaten up to be able to go and, and put on a happy face for us kids. So that disintegrated into nothing also. | ||
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Dorotka (Dora) Goldstein Roth Born 1932 Warsaw, Poland 
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You know in the ghetto there were schools for children. What we did--we didn't learn much in the schools, we were, um,...we learned how to sing. I know all the Yiddish songs from the Vilna ghetto. I sang them. I have a record with all those songs. I have done it in London. So I knew all the songs. But you have to understand that the Jewish children did not have the right to live, so a few times in the week they came to...to take out the children, so the schools had bunkers, and we were given brown paper and pencils to...to keep quiet. So, if you can call it a school--I wouldn't call it--but it, it was a place were they, the children came, and every day less and less children came, because the children were taken out of the ghetto and put in...and killed. So less and less children were in those classrooms, if you call them classrooms. But I was lucky, and I stayed until the end, and, uh, during some days, my mother did not send me because we had to eat and there was...and horse meat was very expensive. There was no other meat. So, uh, she would send me to sell cigarettes and matches on the street. And as I was a good looking child, people had pity on me, so they bought. | ||
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Lore Heumann Born 1931 Hellenthal, Germany 
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The younger of two girls, Lore was born to Jewish parents in a village close to the Belgian border. The Heumanns lived above their general store. Across the street lived Lore's grandfather, who kept horses and cows in his large barn. When Lore was a year old, her family moved to the city of Lippstadt. The Lippe River flowed beyond the large garden in back of their house.
1933-39: When Lore was 6, her family moved to the nearby city of Bielefeld, where she entered public school. A year later, she and her older sister, Margot, were expelled from school. One day they were suddenly kicked out of class. Not understanding why, they stood outside, crying. Then they walked home. After this, their parents sent them to a Jewish school where they had teachers who also had been kicked out of the schools by the Nazis. 1940-44: A few months after Lore turned 11, she was deported with her family to the Theresienstadt ghetto in Czechoslovakia. When the Heumanns arrived at the station, they were met by Lore's thin and sickly-looking grandmother, who had been deported there some six months earlier. She told them that Lore's grandfather had died a few weeks earlier from starvation. In the ghetto Lore attended the classes clandestinely organized by Jewish teachers, but she found it hard to concentrate because she was almost always hungry. Thirteen-year-old Lore was deported with her family to Auschwitz in May 1944. She and her parents are believed to have perished there. Her sister, Margot, survived the war. |
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