We’ve been reworking our Holocaust Encyclopedia, and we would love for you to explore the new experience. Click the button at right to start using the new version. The version you are viewing now will remain online until June 30, 2018.
Describes the deportation of her mother and brother from the Warsaw ghetto to Treblinka [Interview: 1991]
— US Holocaust Memorial Museum - Collections
Transcript
When it was the deportation and she [Vladka's mother] was deported together with my brother, I, I was, I want to take out from the Umschlagplatz [the assembly point], you know, and I thought that maybe I will bribe one of the policemen in our house. Whatever I have, I had a little watch or some others, and the policemen sometimes were able to take out people from the Umschlagplatz. And I went to him, and nothing worked, and finally I decided I will go together with them. I told them that I will be with, together when they will be deported, and I went to the Umschlagplatz, but I, somehow I couldn't decide and I couldn't make myself go there, because I knew from the underground that this deporting is leading not to other places. If it was my youth or I didn't go to her, and even today it bothers me. And she went with my little brother and I mentioned that from the Umschlagplatz he sent out the note that they are, he is hungry and they are going, at that time they were giving before the entry to the trains, bread and marmalade for the people to make them believe that they are going to be resettled into other cities when the truth was that they were being taken to Treblinka, to the gas chambers.
Vladka belonged to the Zukunft youth movement of the Bund (the Jewish Socialist party). She was active in the Warsaw ghetto underground as a member of the Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB). In December 1942, she was smuggled out to the Aryan, Polish side of Warsaw to try to obtain arms and to find hiding places for children and adults. She became an active courier for the Jewish underground and for Jews in camps, forests, and other ghettos.
