There at the Judenrat, they said, “Yes, they are on the list.” But despite that, there was an instruction to put us in the transport, where everyone was gathered. After that, an order came from the Judenrat and we were taken back there. They left only my grandmother in the transport.
We sat in the Judenrat offices. I remember there was a baby boy there, a few months old, and they had given him sleeping pills so he wouldn’t cry and give away the people hiding in his bunker. They must have given him too much, and he was dying. My uncle the doctor said, “Give him something, milk, I’ll flush his stomach,” but there was no milk. I think that boy died eventually, I don’t know. In any case, we sat there until the afternoon, and saw how they moved all these people onto the train, all the ones who had to go, and those who couldn’t walk were shot. Then we saw that they were taking the elderly people on wagons, and we saw my grandmother on one of the wagons. Where they took them to this day I do not know. Because all the ones on the train they took to Szebnie, a work camp. The elderly ones, I don’t know. I have no idea. Either they took them somewhere and shot them, or to Belzec. We don’t know.
By that time we already knew about the annihilation. Because in the same hospital where my uncle was a director, there was a nurse there, a medic, who had been taken in the first Aktion. After two or three weeks my uncle had received a letter from Belzec, with a stamp that said, ‘Belzec.’ In his letter, the man wrote, “Everyone is dead. I am the only one left alive. Everyone was gassed. [zagazowani.] I met an old school friend.” (The man was from Bielsko-Biala, on the Czech border. The German he met was from Czechia, near the border, and he knew him and kept him alive.) But this Jew asked my uncle to send him poison because he didn’t want to live. There was a problem of what to do with this postcard. They sensed panic, and were unsure whether or not to reveal it. Uncle and Father decided to give it to the Judenrat. They handed it over but the Judenrat also didn’t know what to do with it. Then another postcard came, saying, “I am begging you, send me poison, I don’t want to live.” Then another postcard came, and that was it. Nothing more. So by then we already knew there was annihilation. That was the first time it was clear to us.
Now, after the second Aktion, they let us go back home. But first we had to collect all the dead bodies from bunkers and all that. They brought us to a kind of hilltop. First we put the dead into a wooden house, and they were going to set fire to the house and burn everything. That was the order. But there were too many, and they wouldn’t fit in. So we were ordered to tear down the house and make a pile, a layer of wood and a layer of corpses, like that in layers. Just then three German soldiers came from the army base. They had heard the shots and wanted to know what was happening. They saw the pile of bodies and asked what was going on. My father, as I mentioned, spoke good German, and he said, “Verbrecher.” Criminals.
Criminals. All right.
But then they saw a heap of children over on the side, and asked, “Are those criminals too?”
Dad said, “Yes.”
“What did they do?”
“Jews.”
Then the soldiers realized what was happening. They said, “Those dogs, the SS, what they do in our name! And we will pay the price.”
They went to the base and brought the whole division back, and they were planning to fight the SS and kick up a storm about what was going on. We begged them not to do that because it would only hurt us and make things worse. And it wouldn’t bring back the dead. We could see that the soldiers were really… They didn’t know what was going on back then. They were horrified. They simply did not know what was going on. There may have been Wehrmacht units doing all sorts of things, but these soldiers did not know what was going on, clearly. [I ask Dad, “Your father was a little impudent, no? Saying things like that. They could have done something to him for talking back to them like that.” Dad says, “Yes, but he was…at that moment I think he just didn’t care. He also…there was another time, before the ghetto, when a German Volksdeutsch harassed him on the street, and Father wouldn’t let it slide and he punched him. He didn’t leave the house for three days after that, because they were looking for him, and his hand was injured. Sometimes he wouldn’t give in, he did or said what he thought should be done or said. Maybe that’s why he answered the soldiers like that, I think.”]
We went back to our houses, and again they started bringing in Jews from the region. At some point they separated the men from the women and the place turned into a forced labor camp. Everyone worked. They set up a mess hall because there was no cooking at home. I remember once we were eating in the mess hall, and there was an execution across the way. Two brothers, Schentzer, they had a soap factory before the war. They tried to escape the ghetto and some Polish policemen caught them and beat them bloody. They threw them into the Babica, the brook. The next night, they tried again. They were, you know, macho, the two of them. The Germans caught them. I remember they shut them up in a cellar right across from the mess hall. They took out one of them and were about to shoot him, and he tried to resist. But the executioner, an older German, was quick as a fox. He grabbed the man quickly by the back of his neck, put the gun to his head, and shot. Then they took the second brother out. He saw his brother on the ground and started struggling. Again the German grabbed him and shot him. Not that he had a chance — they were surrounded by SS men with guns. And the whole time this was happening, about twenty yards from us, we kept on eating.
Then they canceled the separation between men and women. That was probably because they wanted to concentrate as many Jews as possible into one place. They had their plans. We moved into a house again, all of us together, with my uncle the doctor, who was the hospital director. We lived on Solna Gora Street. That was when they divided the ghetto into Ghetto A and Ghetto B. There was a case where the ghetto commandant, the Lagerführer, found a woman from Ghetto A in Ghetto B. He warned her once. The second time he shot her dead.
The third Aktion was in the summer of 1943. One morning they started announcing, “Everybody out, everybody out, everybody to the Appellplatz,” which was the roll-call square. “Everybody leave now, take small belongings with you.” I had a stamp collection, and I went with my friend to hide it because we thought we would somehow get through it again. I went to the cellar with my friend and we hid the collection. We wrapped it up in some rags. When we came out, no one was there, they had taken everyone. We lived not far from the Judenrat, just a couple of hundred yards across the way. And next to the Judenrat a bunch of Germans were standing around. They saw us coming out and yelled, “Stehen bleiben!”—Stop! But I didn’t really trust them and so we started running. My father had once taught me that if I was being shot at, I should run away in a zigzag. And so I did. My friend overtook me, he was about ten yards ahead of me. They opened fire on us and I suddenly saw a red spot spreading on his back. He fell down. I kept on running into an alleyway, then I ran to the Appellplatz, where everyone was gathered, and I found my family. The Germans chased me but they couldn’t find me, there were a lot of people there. [I ask Dad, “Do you remember your friend’s name?” (I wanted something of him to live on.) Dad says, “No. He was one of the kids who came to the ghetto from the outside, from somewhere else. I can’t remember his name anymore.” But a few days later he remembers. “I think his name was Salek. Salek was a nickname for Shlomo. I’m not certain. But I think so, Salek.”]