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Abraham Lewent: "Everyday you walked out in the morning, you see somebody is laying dead, covered with newspapers or with any kind of blanket they found." | |||
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Abraham Lewent Born 1924 Warsaw, Poland 
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Abraham was born to a Jewish family in the Polish capital of Warsaw. His grandfather owned a clothing factory and retail store, which his father managed. Abraham's family lived in a Jewish section of Warsaw and he attended a Jewish school. Warsaw's Jewish community was the largest in Europe, and made up nearly one-third of the population of the city.
1933-39: After the bombardment of Warsaw began on September 8, 1939, my family had little to eat. The stores had been reduced to rubble; we had no water or heat. Hunting for food, I dodged German bombs and stole seven jars of pickles from a nearby pickle factory. For several weeks my family lived on pickles and rice. Because of a lack of water, fires from the bombing raids burned out of control. Relief came when the capital surrendered. 1940-44: By April 1943 I was in the Warsaw ghetto in a walled-off forced-labor area. During the ghetto uprising we could see the flames. We couldn't believe it. To one side I saw whole streets on fire. To the other I saw Poles in Warsaw's non-Jewish section preparing for Easter. When the Nazis liquidated the ghetto after the uprising, my father and I were among those marched out for deportation. Poles stood on the sidewalk, eyeing the suitcases we carried, saying: "You're going to your death, after all. Leave it for us." Abraham was deported to Majdanek and then to seven other Nazi camps, including Buchenwald. He was liberated in transit to the Dachau camp on April 30, 1945. |
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Abraham Lewent Born 1924 Warsaw, Poland 
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We had to go carry water from the Vistula, from the river. And this is like four miles, so we took two pails of water, me and my sister took two pails of water, and we walked. We carried the pails. So when we had to pass by a Polish neighborhood, those Polish kids came out and picked up the pails of water and threw it out and make us walk back. Now this is in a time when the Germans took over the city. Every citizen was on his own, and they know they lost their country. Still the hatred. The antisemitism what those Polish people had towards the Jews. For no reason at all. Now they felt that they can do with the German help what they always wanted to do. | ||
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Abraham Lewent Born 1924 Warsaw, Poland 
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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. | ||
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Abraham Lewent Born 1924 Warsaw, Poland 
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We went to that Umschlagplatz. We were sitting three days over there, without water, without anything, for three days. And it was hot. On the third day they gave us water, and they said we're going to leave. Where we're going, we don't know. They put us on trains. I was together with my father, and with this man, and his wife, or his sister, was it? And they took us to Majdanek. Majdanek was a camp near Lublin, and over there was five fields. That means every field had eight or nine hundred people and it was barracks and there's nothing to do Majdanek. The only thing you were Majdanek you did, you sit sometime all day long, and sometime they took you out to work and a half of them never came back. They make you sit all day long and breaking up from big stones to make little stones, or digging holes, digging ditches, and covering the ditches up. That was the work. That's what you call, uh, a camp what actually is annihilation...they annihilate people, actually. Very little food. Very little food. | ||
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Abraham Lewent Born 1924 Warsaw, Poland 
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We got to Majdanek was in, in July, I think in August, 1943. We were standing in a ditch and digging, and my father was standing next to me. A Pole passes by, grabs a stone and throws it onto my father. And he was a prisoner too, you know. The stone hit his leg. I don't know what happened, if he broke a bone or something happened. He couldn't walk. In the night when we went home to the barracks, he couldn't walk. He had to hold me here, like this, and, and somehow we dragged him, me and that friend, we dragged him in the barrack. He was laying down. And his foot swelled up like this. All of a sudden it swelled up. So one guy said we should go and call a medic or a doctor or somebody. Over there, they used to call a 'Sanitaer.' Well, I didn't realize what's going to happen if somebody gets sick. I didn't realize it. I thought, well, when a man he got sick, something like this, that medic came. He wore a red cross. He came. He took my father. He says to him, "You know what, you have to go on 'Revier.'" 'Revier' means the hospital. And he took him away. And he says tomorrow he's going to bring him back. I never saw my father anymore. And he, this is for no reason at all. Pick up a stone and throw on somebody. And he was...he was just standing there. The stone could have hit me, but it hit him. | ||
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Abraham Lewent Born 1924 Warsaw, Poland 
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I remember, I was laying down. This guy says "Oh my God, what a sight." [crying]. A sight. They start picking up the people. They picked them up one by one. Most of them were dead because they couldn't...and...the less that were alive they put them in trucks and jeeps, and they took them to hospitals or they made tents and they put them in. They gave them water. They gave them packets from the Red Cross. And this was bad too because people when they got those packages, there was powdered milk, there was chocolate, there was a can of meat, and they were so hungry, they didn't care, and they ate it. So hundreds died from eating this stuff, because their stomach was not used to food. And I had a guy next to me, I don't know if he was a doctor once or something--he was half dead too... When he got that package, and I think he was Hungarian or Romanian, he says to me, "Don't eat nothing. Don't eat nothing. If you going to eat anything, you going to die. The only thing you do, if you have sugar, take the sugar in the mouth and suck on the sugar. That's the only thing you should do," he says, "the rest of them throw away. And if you want to keep it, keep it, but don't eat anything. Don't take the milk in your mouth. Don't take the chocolate. Don't take the meat"--because they used to give you a can of meat, Spam--"Don't eat it, because if you're going to eat it, you're going to die." And that's what happened. Those people, they eat the stuff, they got diarrhea and they died. | ||
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