For the last 20-plus years, I have been a volunteer at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. Here I finally learned details about the Holocaust, the enormity of it, and how lucky I am to be alive.
I lived in Poland in 1939 when World War II started. My mother had just given birth to my sister, who was only two months old when our area of Poland was first occupied by the Soviets, then by the Germans.
Eventually it became clear that we were all going to be killed because we were Jews. This was hard for me to understand since I was only eight years old. We had many close calls and experienced a few miracles that helped us stay alive, but we survived!
Volunteering at the Museum has given me the opportunity to meet many other survivors and to hear their stories. This has been a revelation, and has helped me understand what an incredible feat my mother achieved in saving her two young children.
When I started volunteering at the Museum, we were offered various tasks to perform, such as giving tours of different exhibits, speaking with visitors, or doing translation work. Some volunteers would share their stories with visitors and answer their questions.
I had never spoken in front of an audience, so at first I didn’t consider it a possibility for me. However, as time went on, I realized it was important to share every story and bear witness in honor of the six million Jews killed by the Nazis and their collaborators during the Holocaust. So I learned to speak, and now I speak to many different audiences.
When I tell my story—in English of course—I always have a problem with one phrase that feels untranslatable. I say it in English but it doesn’t have the same impact as in Polish, and I have never found a good translation. I try to explain it, but it just doesn't cut it.
In Polish the phrase is “z deszczu pod rynnę,” which literally means “from falling rain to bottom of the spout,” meaning from bad to worse. This phrase has particular significance in my story of survival.
Let me explain: In a desperate move, my mother, baby sister, and I were trying to escape from the ghetto after obtaining false papers, which gave us Christian identities. On the passenger train, we were approached by a young man who suspected we were not who we said we were. He pressured my mother very hard until she told him we were Jewish. At that point, he told her he was going to the same town as we were, where he would be turning us over to the Gestapo.
My mother knew what that meant and understood that her children would be taken and killed. She explained to me that she made a “deal” with him. She gave him our luggage tickets and all the money she had, and asked only for one favor: to have us all shot immediately by the Gestapo. She said it would be quick and better than being separated. She knew we children would not survive anyway.
We traveled with him on the train for four days and nights, and finally we arrived at our destination of Jarosław. As we started to walk down the platform I suddenly understood that I was going to die. I started pulling at my mother, saying, “Mom, I don’t want to die!” We began walking with this man to the Gestapo, and my mother turned to him and asked him if he could let me go. Perhaps I could survive, having blond hair and green eyes and not looking Jewish. But I told her I wasn’t leaving her. So we continued walking. My mother said to the man, “Look, I have given you everything I have. Keep it. But let us go and try our luck!” She added, “Why do you want to have us on your conscience?”
And then the miracle happened: The man stopped, gave my mother a few złotys back, and before leaving us, said, “Z deszczu pod rynnę!” This, as I said, meant that he thought we were going from a bad situation to a worse one.
I have yet to find a better translation.
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