Again we were left behind, among those who were supposed to stay for the ghetto liquidation. At the time we didn’t know it would be liquidated. Father got a permit to stay. We all got permits to stay. They took us aside. All the others, they started putting in the transport. Then we saw the family that had lived with us, and the father was wearing a large backpack, and we knew that inside that backpack was little Etinka. We saw how the Germans hit the backpack with a stick. They hit everyone. We saw them hitting and poking, and that little girl kept quiet, didn’t say a word. He managed to get her through and they went to Szebnie.
I learned later that when they were in Szebnie, the work camp, they found the girl and killed her. Etinka’s father found out who the German was who had killed her, and during one of the roll-calls he broke out of line, attacked the German and strangled him. They shot him on the spot, but I was told that he managed to strangle the German who had killed his little girl. [From the list we got when we visited the ghetto with Dad on our trip to Poland, I copy his full name down: Noah (Noe) Marsend. Even though he was murdered long ago, and the details of his life have become insignificant, I document everything I know. His date of birth, 8/31/1904. The name of his wife, Manya. Her date of birth, 7/26/1904. And the name of his only daughter, Beata, known as little Etinka, who was born on 6/2/1938 and murdered in 1942 at Szebnie camp. She was four, exactly the age of my Yariv, who was born in 1988, and who now comes out of his room and sleepily asks me to check his buttons. “My pj’s are all twisted.” He can’t sleep.]
That was a bit of a digression. In any case, a whole group of us sat and watched as they sent the other people to Szebnie. Then we saw a Jew running away from the transport. We were sitting next to a Jewish slaughterhouse, a kosher one. The Jew broke in there and the Germans chased him. We heard shots, then we heard him shout, “Shema Yisrael!” And then everything went silent. After about ten minutes we heard him shout, “Water…water…” He was still alive. But no one could go to him. Then there was silence.
After that they took us to the house where the Ordnungsdienst lived. It was a house on Kraszewska Street. There were supposed to be a hundred and sixty Jews left out of all the ghetto, and what happened was that there were two hundred and sixty left. So they took everyone. They called it the ‘bloody roll-call.’ They decided they had to kill a hundred people. They told the Judenrat head, Simcha Weiss, to give them the list of everyone who was left. So he said, “I have no list.” He was hoping, you see, that without a list they would be able to save more people. For some reason, the camp commandant, Müller, also said he didn’t have the list. In that respect he was pretty decent. The Aktion commander, a colonel, said, “You don’t have a list? All right. Shoot the whole pile of them!” He got into his car and started driving away. Then Weiss ran after the car like a puppy and started begging, “Listen…we’ll do something.” The colonel stopped and said, “You choose who goes.” So Simcha Weiss said, “I cannot choose, but I will go first.” I remember that.
The Germans had a discussion and they started taking out all sorts of people from the group. At first we were convinced they were choosing the ones who would stay, because they took out all sorts of people who had connections with the Germans. But it turned out that every German who had an account to settle with a Jew took him out to kill him.
Then they said, “All the children stand in the front row.” So I ran out, but Father grabbed me and wouldn’t let go. He lifted me up behind his back and stood in front of me, holding me, and someone from the row behind held me up by my pants so I would look taller. [“How long did he hold you like that?” “Oh, it was a roll-call that lasted several hours…” “And all that time he held you like that?” “Yes, with his hands behind his back, holding me by my belt.”] They went back and forth, searching. They didn’t notice that I was a kid. They picked out a hundred people, took them aside and shot them on the spot.
Then they took us to the Appellplatz, where they put us into these kinds of shacks. We were ordered to start liquidating the ghetto. But first they took us to cover all the…to get rid of all the dead people…and there were lots of them. Lots of dead people. I can’t give a number, but there were hundreds. We were left to liquidate the ghetto. A lot of Jews had been hiding, and the way it went that time was, whenever they found anyone, they killed them. Before that, whenever they found people after an Aktion they had let them live. But not this time. Whoever they found, they killed. There were some that they threw into the Judenrat cellars, but mostly they killed them.
I remember once I was with Father and they found two children. The girl was maybe thirteen, and a boy of seven or eight, something like that. Father called me and showed me a tiny suitcase, and inside were a few carrots and radishes and potatoes, because there was nothing to eat. They must have been hiding for a long time. Father started crying when he saw that. Of course, they shot those children. They took us to light a fire. They put the children in a straw basket. In Poland they had these big straw baskets. They burned them in the basket, but the basket fell apart and I saw how their bodies spilled out onto the pile with their arms and legs to the sides. Then they scattered the ashes. [“Dad, how did you turn out so normal, Dad?”] My father was the head of a work group, and there was a woman who came out of her hiding place and joined his work group. She wasn’t legal, but Father covered for her and helped her get in touch with the other side, the Aryan side, and she was able to escape.
At a certain point, they had another Selektion during the ghetto liquidation. There were a hundred and sixty of us and there were only supposed to be a hundred left. The truth is we were in a bind, because at that stage Father was ‘in a spat’ with the Lagerführer, Müller. One day some Gestapo men had come from Krakow, and without asking any questions they burst into the ghetto hospital and seized a whole treasure of gold and silver from under the bed of a Jew who was lying there. There must have been an informant, because they went straight to his bed. Müller was very angry that the whole treasure went to someone else, and he blamed my uncle and my father, insisting they had known about the treasure and helped hide it. He didn’t exactly accuse them — I shouldn’t even use the word ‘accuse’ because it’s not like he had to say anything. He simply gave an order that Father should stop coming to shave him every day, as he had done up to then. He was the ghetto barber, and that was his great ‘privilege.’ [“What sort of a character was he, this Müller?” “You know. Nothing special.” “You once told me he used to shoot out of his office window.” “At bottles, not at people. He had one obsession, about women with makeup. He would personally supervise, and if he caught a woman with makeup on he would force her to remove it. That was at the beginning of the ghetto. Later, he didn’t have to do that anymore — who walked around with makeup? He collected stamps, and he kept a Jewish expert to get hold of whatever he could find for him in the ghetto. Apart from that, nothing special. He wasn’t even an officer, he was a sergeant or a sergeant major, a Scharführer. I don’t know what their ranks were.”]
Anyway, the Lagerführer was in a ‘spat’ with our family, and then came the Selektion announcement. We were worried, of course. But something that had happened two or three days before saved our lives. My father was the head of a work group, and he was a hard-working man. It was in his character to get the job done, and for some reason Müller, who used to ride around on a horse, saw that he was working hard and he must have liked that a lot. He called Father over, took out a cigar and gave it to him. It was a Saturday, and my father didn’t smoke on the Sabbath. Go tell a German that you don’t smoke on the Sabbath. So Father said, “I don’t smoke while I’m working. I’ll smoke it after work.” And he liked that even more. So when the Selektion came, two or three days later, he let us go again. Gave us a permit. Our whole family was part of the remaining hundred. My mother and sister too.