|
|
|
 |
 | ||||
|
"The hunger in the ghetto was so great, was so bad, that people were laying on the streets and dying." | |||
|
Channa Morgensztern Born 1896 Kaluszyn, Poland 
|
|
Channa and her husband and five children lived 35 miles east of Warsaw in the small predominantly Jewish town of Kaluszyn. Channa's husband, Jankel, was employed as a clerk in the town hall. After Channa's children reached school age, she helped her mother run a newspaper kiosk in town.
1933-39: Germany has invaded Poland, and our hopes that Kaluszyn wouldn't be in the line of fire have been shattered. First, a German plane flew over our town and dropped a bomb on people waiting in line outside a bakery. Then, a few days later, German forces fought Polish troops in a battle here. Half the town, including our house, has been destroyed by bombs and fire so we're moving to nearby Minsk Mazowiecki where Jankel's family lives. 1940-44: The Nazis have forced all the Jews in Minsk Mazowiecki to relocate to one small area in the town. Many of the houses here have been destroyed by shelling and more than 5,000 of us are living in the few houses that remain standing. Typhus, carried by lice, has started to spread throughout the ghetto, and very little medicine is available. My oldest son Josel managed to escape to the USSR in 1939 and is now living in the Far East. But what will happen to my four children still here with us--Duvid, Esther, Dobcia and Faiga? In 1942, 46-year-old Channa and her family fled to Kaluszyn to escape deportation. Soon after, however, most of the Jews in Kaluszyn were deported to the Treblinka extermination camp. |
||
|
Nanny Gottschalk Lewin Born 1888 Schlawe, Germany 
|
|
Nanny was the oldest of four children born to Jewish parents in the small town of Schlawe in northern Germany, where her father owned the town's grain mill. Nanny was given the Hebrew name Nocha. She grew up on the mill grounds in a house surrounded by orchards and a big garden. In 1911 Nanny married Arthur Lewin. Together, they raised two children, Ludwig and Ursula.
1933-39: My widowed mother and I have moved to Berlin. We feared the rising antisemitism in Schlawe and hoped, as Jews, to be less conspicuous here in a large city. We live downstairs from my sister Kathe who is married to a Protestant and has converted. Shortly after we got settled, the Germans restricted the public movements of Jews, so that we no longer feel safe when we're out of our apartment. 1940-44: My mother and I have been deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto in Bohemia. We've been assigned a room on the second floor of a house that is dirty, crowded and infested with lice. The stove is fueled with sawdust. As the youngest in our room--and I'm 56--I've been lugging in the bags of sawdust on my back. I've been getting increasingly weaker, am now hard of hearing and need a cane to walk. Early this morning I learned that I'm on a list of people to go to another camp. I don't want to go but have no choice. Nanny was deported to Auschwitz on May 15, 1944, and was gassed immediately upon arrival. She was 56 years old. |
||
|
Abraham Lewent Born 1924 Warsaw, Poland 
|
|
The hunger in the ghetto was so great, was so bad, that people were laying on the streets and dying, little children went around begging, and, uh, everyday you walked out in the morning, you see somebody is laying dead, covered with newspapers or with any kind of blanket they found, and you found...those people used to carry the dead people in little wagons, used to bring them down to the cemetery and bury them in mass graves. And every day thousands and thousands died just from malnutrition because the Germans didn't give anything for the people in the ghetto to eat. There was no such thing. You can't walk in and buy anything, or getting any rations. It's your hard luck. If you don't have it, you die, and that's what it was. | ||
|
Beno Helmer Born 1923 Teplice-Sanov, Czechoslovakia 
|
|
Wherever you went, you saw bodies dying. And this becomes part of, you know, [the] first two, three or four, you find them as a shock. But later, you find them...it's...you get quite used to them. It's...it's...it's like part of your nature. I mean, you just see a body and then you disassociate yourself completely from it. It's...it's...it's...it's completely somebody else. It's...it has nothing to do with you. Filth was also tremendous. Filth. It was filthy. It was filthy even in the building where we lived. I mean, in the winter time. I mean, the toilet was...it was...it was ice. It was all ice. And then the feces and the urine all over, was overflowing...overflowing there. And..and sometime, they took you to forced labor. I mean, one incident happened. They..they took us into a home. The German came and they, they lined everybody up. They lined everybody up. And there was...you know this was like in a semi-circle. You were standing in a semi-circle. And there was a lady there with a child. And, uh...[sighs] And he ask, "Whose is this child?" And the woman who was the mother says, she did not admit the child. So he took the child by the legs, and he swung it against the wall. And he killed the child. And I looked at the mother, and it was like somebody else's. It wasn't her child. She completely cut this child off out of her emotions. She cut this child off completely away. And I realized at that time that self-survival is, is the most...more primary in your life. It's more than...than even your own child. | ||
| Copyright © United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C. | ||||
