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"And then we were being marched down the streets where there was the small ghetto." | |||
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Emanuel Tanay Born 1929 Miechow, Poland 
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One day there came an announcement that there will be a Jewish quarters, which has come to be known as the ghetto. But they, the Germans called it the Jewish quarters, essentially, in, in German. And, uh, it gave you a perimeters where Jews could live, which was a tiny portion of the town, and I'm speaking of the town where I lived, but it was similarly true in other towns. And, uh, the Poles who lived in that area had to evacuate, but there was no problem because there was, the area that the Jews left was a much wider one, so whatever Pole was displaced from the Jewish...designated area for Jews, uh, they got much better quarters anyway, but not the other way around. Uh, in terms of, uh, the Jews moved in, few families into one room, two families, maybe one family in one room in the beginning. Because the ghetto, the area, the Jewish area, the Jewish, uh, part of town would become smaller and smaller and smaller. But at first it was open, so you could get in and out in certain hours. For example, there were, a Jew could not be in the street after seven o'clock. But all the other times you could get out and mingle, be outside. One day there was an announcement: the ghetto is closed. And there were gates, there were walls built, built, and you couldn't get out. So you see there was this ever-increasing, uh, level of persecution. | ||
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Nina Kaleska Born 1929 Grodno, Poland 
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They had two ghettos in in Grodno. The upper ghetto and the ghetto in..not very far from where we lived. And very shortly the entire, the entire Jewish population of Grodno was being uprooted from their home. And that I remember very distinctly and with great pain. We had some beautiful china. We had a very lovely home. Wasn't rich but it was beautiful. The Germans would come in and simply at the whim of a wisp, just like that [snaps fingers], remove the most beautiful china and just throw it against a wall to break it, for fun, and started to taunt and tease. And you didn't really have to be old or young to recognize that this was the devil in the flesh. | ||
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Rochelle Blackman Slivka Born 1922 Vilna, Poland 
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In '41...right before...they used to...the Jewish holidays. They...the SS decided to make a ghetto in our town, in Vilna. And there was a poor section where a lot of Jews used to live there. And, uh, the Jewish home for the aged was there, and the biggest synagogue of the city of Vilna was there. The orphanage. The Jewish hospital was there. And a lot of poor Jews lived around this section. And one night, the SS, with the help of the Ukrainian police with the Lithuanians, they came in and took out all the Jews from there and they drove them to a place, Ponary, outskirts of Vilna there, and they shot them all there. We heard screaming and yelling and crying during the night, but we weren't allowed to look out of the window, because those who looked out were shot. We didn't know what was going on anyway until the next day our neighbors told us what was going on. We had a lot of relatives there. My mother's cousins lived...all of...all of my mother's relatives lived there. And a couple of weeks later they rounded up all the Jews from the city and the suburbs and they put us all in this ghetto, in this...and surrounded us with walls, and with guards, and we had to live in one...in an apartment, two to three families in a two-room apartment. | ||
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Nesse Galperin Godin Born 1928 Siauliai, Lithuania 
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Now to go into the ghetto you just had to show the certificate. If you had the certificate, they let you in through the gate. So about five thousand people got into the ghetto. We had ten thousand Jewish people into the two ghettos. The people that did not got the, get this yellow certificate, I believe it's about 3,500 of them--the orphanage, the old-age home, the elderly, the sick, the children from many families, and many, many people that they came to their home last and there was no more room in the ghetto. They were put into the city synagogues, in the shulen, as we called it, in the shul. With hunger, no water. They were begging for food, they were begging for them to be saved. People were trying--our Jewish community council, who were wonderful people, they tried so hard to save. They were saying already, "Okay, take them to this little city of Zagare." They thought at least they will live, because we had already the thousand men experience. These people were killed just like the thousand men, in another forest, 3,500 of them. So by the time the ghetto was formed, I don't know exactly whether it was August or September, I don't remember. But I know [by the] High Holidays, we were already--my family--in the ghetto. Half of our population was killed. | ||
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Madeline Deutsch Born 1930 Berehovo (Beregszasz), Czechoslovakia 
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Little by little, it became just worse and worse. But within weeks...it was...as a matter of weeks. We were in April...it was the beginning of April. I think we were invaded around the end of March, and, uh, in April already we were in the ghetto. And what was the ghetto? Now what happened here was the German SS in cooperation, with total cooperation of the Hungarian police and the Hungarian gendarmes came to our homes very early in the morning at dawn and knocking real hard, and "Jews, get out of your house. Get out and line up in front of the house." We couldn't imagine what was happening. I mean it was just a horrible, horrible thing. The children were screaming, and all of us were...were afraid. We didn't know what was happening and what was to come. And then we were told that we'll be allowed back to the house for just a few minutes to get a little suitcase or a little handbag in which we could put a...a change of clothing and maybe some food, just dry food like a piece of bread or something that we had, and then we were to come out again and line up in front of the...our homes. So we each got a little bag and put just the bare minimum in there. And then we were being marched down the streets where there was the small ghetto. | ||
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