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"Fifteen thousand of our people were massacred in that particular day." | |||
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Else Rosenberg Born 1891 Hamburg, Germany 
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Else, born Else Herz, was one of three children born to a Jewish family in the large port city of Hamburg. Her father owned a grain import-export business. As a child, Else attended a private girls' school. In 1913 she married Fritz Rosenberg and the couple moved to Goettingen where they raised three children.
1933-39: With the onset of the Depression in the 1930s, Else's husband's linen factory went into decline. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, they confiscated the Rosenberg's factory. Deprived of their livelihood, the family was then evicted from their home. They relocated to Hamburg where they relied upon financial support from relatives and whatever earnings two of the children could bring in as sales apprentices. 1940-43: In late 1941 the Rosenbergs were deported 800 miles east to the Minsk ghetto in the USSR. Else was put to work cleaning snow and ice from railway tracks at night. In July 1942, after the work brigades left the ghetto for the day, it was surrounded by SS men. Else's brigade heard gunfire from the ghetto. For three days the laborers were kept at their sites; unrest grew by the hour. When allowed to return, Else saw hundreds of corpses on the ground; miraculously, her family was still alive. Some 30,000 had been killed. Else's son Heinz was taken to the Treblinka extermination camp in September 1943. Two weeks later, the ghetto was liquidated. Else and the rest of her family were not heard from again. |
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Moishe Menyuk Born 1896 Komarovo, Poland 
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Moishe was born to a Jewish family in the village of Komarovo, which until 1918 was part of the Russian Empire. At 18, he was drafted into the Russian army and fought in World War I. He was captured by the Germans, and while a POW, learned German. After the war he returned to Komarovo, which by then was part of Poland. He supported his family by farming and managing an estate for a Pole from Warsaw.
1933-39: The few Jews of Komarovo got along well with the Ukrainians. Moishe even played the fiddle at Ukrainian weddings. Germany invaded western Poland in 1939 and the USSR occupied the eastern section of Poland [as a result of the Nazi-Soviet Pact]. Moishe heard stories of German atrocities against the Jews but found it hard to believe. The Germans had treated him decently during the year he was their prisoner in World War I. The Menyuks decided to stay in Komarovo. 1940-44: Germany attacked the USSR in 1941. Komarovo's Jews heard awful rumors and fled to the forest. Returning for food, Moishe found he'd been robbed. SS guards rounded up Komarovo's Jews, putting them in a ghetto in the nearby town, Kolki, where they were forced to do hard labor. One night in 1942, Moishe and his son were among 40 men locked in a storeroom. The next day they found that everyone in the ghetto had been shot, including Moishe's wife and daughter. The men buried all the bodies. More Jews were brought into the ghetto. The Germans liquidated the Kolki ghetto in 1942. Moishe was among 600 Jews loaded onto trucks, driven five miles into the forest, shot, and dumped into mass graves. |
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Chaia Gurvitz Born 1876 Lithuania 
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From a Jewish family, Chaia lived outside Kovno, a city with a large Jewish population that was renowned for its Hebrew school system. Chaia ran a grocery store with her husband, a retired shoemaker, and their daughter Yenta.
1933-39: I'm expecting my daughter Feiga, her husband, Josef, and our grandson, Abraham, for dinner. Feiga works so hard all week in her beauty shop, I'm glad I can help out by preparing the big Sunday meal. I've baked a special cake for Abe. I hope the family get-together isn't marred by talk of politics. There's been so much disturbing news on the radio about what's happening to Jews in Germany now that the Nazis are in power. 1940-44: The Germans have occupied Kovno. They've forced all the Jews to wear the Star of David and to relocate to a fenced-in ghetto. Every day the guards take people away, never to return. This morning--a cold, drizzly autumn day--everyone in the ghetto has to report to Democracy Plaza for an inspection. We have to comply or risk being killed. Where will they take us? What will happen to us? We march to the Plaza over streets lightly dusted with snow--Yenta and I, and Feiga, Josef, and Abe. On October 28, 1941, Chaia was taken with 10,000 other Jews to the Ninth Fort, outside Kovno. There they were killed by Lithuanian guards acting under Nazi orders. |
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Pola Nussbaum Born 1922 Raczki, Poland 
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Pola was born to a Jewish family in a small town [in Poland] about three miles from the German border. Her family had lived there for generations. Pola's father exported geese and other goods to Germany; her mother owned a fabric store. They lived with Pola's grandmother in a large, single-level, gray stucco house. Raczki had a small Jewish community with a Hebrew school that Pola attended.
1933-39: In 1937 Pola began secondary school in the town of Suwalki. She excelled in math, and hoped to study engineering and oil exploration at the university. When war [World War II] began in September 1939, Pola and her father went to a town about 40 miles away to hide some of Pola's mother's valuable fabrics. Then the Nussbaums escaped east towards the Soviet border. 1940-42: By 1941 the family was in the Slonim ghetto. Pola's mother slipped her daughters Pola and Lisa out to a Christian friend in town who refused to hide them and sent the girls to the forest. There they came across Jews being shot into pits. Found by a forester, they were marched to the line of those waiting to be killed but managed to flee. The forester shot at them but missed. Then he threw his axe and hit Pola's leg. The sisters ran to town where a Christian woman hid them in a sofa-bed until the massacre ended. Pola and her sister returned to the ghetto to find their mother dead. On June 29, 1942, Pola was shot to death while attempting to escape under the ghetto fence. She was 19. |
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Steven Springfield Born 1923 Riga, Latvia 
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Thousands of Latvian and German police came into the ghetto, drunk, most of them drunk--shooting, chasing everybody out. "Raus [Out]. Everybody Raus [Out]. Schnell [Quickly]. Schnell [Quickly]." They chased everybody out. Whoever couldn't walk was shot on the spot; children, women, elderly men, on the street. And German officers were walking around and telling the elderly, and the weak, and the ones who couldn't walk very well, that they will provide transportation for them. They...it would be much easier for them and they provided special blue busses. At that time we did not know what was happening to them, but they were chased through certain sections of town into the forest, a place called Rumbula. And there Russian prisoners, prisoners of war had prepared large graves, mass graves, and when the people got there they were told to undress, put the shoe in one pile...the shoes in one pile, clothing in another pile, driven to the edges of these mass graves, and machine-gunned. It was going on all night and the next day. Fifteen thousand of our people were massacred in that particular day. | ||
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Abraham Malnik Born 1927 Kovno, Lithuania 
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And they...they they took the people on the Ninth Fort. They were...they put in bunkers, a hundred at a time...told [they were going to] be stripped in their...to their underwear, and they walked out a hundred at a time and they were machine gunned. For three days...and then they covered them up with dirt. For three days, the graves were moving up and down. They took tractors and ran over the graves in order to squeeze out the last breath. And when the front came closer and the Germans did not want to leave no evidence, they undug the graves and they found mother with children hugged together, by dying, and with parents, with grandmothers. They saw people together. And they burned them all up. We could see from the ghetto. Wasn't far from the ghetto. We could see the flames all the way to the sky. | ||
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Frima Laub Born 1936 Volochisk, Soviet Union 
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One morning, very early, we heard knocking on the doors and the windows and yelling, you know, "Get out, get out, get out." So quickly we got dressed and we walked out of the house that we were staying in. Uh, the Gestapo was there and...uh...they, they told us all to go in a certain direction. Uh...my mother put on me my...my beautiful...uh...rabbit coat that I had. My rabbit coat and a hat. And we started following the other people, and they took us to a large building. Must have been a factory and...uh...they told us to get undressed. And...uh...they would make you take off the jewelry and everything...any valuables that you had on you. They undressed...they told us to get undressed. We all did. The women remained with the underwear only, and the men in their shorts. And...uh...my mother wasn't fast enough to take off her gold earrings so she was hit by a Gestapo with...uh...the handle of a rifle. And...uh...she fell down. We picked her up. And...uh...all of us, there were a few hundred of us...we were all already undressed, and we had to form lines outside. It was a cloudy day, very cloudy, and a very fine drizzle was coming down. And all the women were so embarrassed that they were without anything on top that they all covered their...their breasts with their hands. And...uh...they made groups, and we started walking the street following the other people. As we were passing some of those streets, there were some Ukrainians who were cheering as we were walking by, and they were applauding and cheering that this...this what was done to us. We kept on walking silently without saying anything until we were out of the city. | ||
| Copyright © United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C. | ||||
