I knew that my mother was not alive, because people who had been with me in Waldenburg, who had also been in Auschwitz, had told me. They said the transport that arrived on May 15th and 16th went straight to the gas chambers. I didn’t tell my father anything. My sister went through very difficult things. She barely made it through alive. She was in Auschwitz, in Ravensbrück. In terrible conditions.
At Katowice there was a train to Krakow. In Krakow we caught a coal train to Bochnia, hoping someone would still be alive. We didn’t know, but we hoped. We got to Bochnia. There was a horse and cart there, and the driver knew Father. He asked him in complete surprise, “You mean you’re still alive? They said everyone was dead.” He wasn’t too happy, but he took us to the center of town, where we met a young man who had been in the concentration camp with us, and he said that my sister was in town. There were only a few Jews there, and my sister was among them. And so for a while we lived in Bochnia, but there was nothing to do there.
My father tried to rebuild the gravestones. The Germans had destroyed them all to pave roads. Mrs. Schwimmer was there. She was the elderly Jew who had been saved with her daughter because they shot the mother of the Jewish policeman who escaped. She was a serious woman. Together with my father they set up a lot of the gravestones they found. During the war, a Polish man had found my grandfather’s gravestone in the road, and at night he came with his sons and took it and hid it in his barn. When we came back, he told Father that he couldn’t allow himself to see the gravestone of Mr. Gutfreund on the road. He gave it back to Father and it still exists today.
I was basically illiterate. I had hardly had any schooling. Father sat me down and hired a private tutor who taught in the local high school, and within six months I finished elementary school. I went through all the material. Then I took an exam at Jachowicza school, where I had gone before the war. The headmaster was the examiner. Amongst other things, he had me write about what I had been through during the war, in Polish. It was really the first time I sat down and thought about what had happened. He came into the class a few times, where I sat alone, and asked, “Haven’t you finished yet?”
I wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote.
A few days later, I came to get my grade. He looked at me and said, “You wrote this?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Are you sure?”
“No one was in the classroom, I was alone.”
“And you went through all these things?”
“Yes,” I said.
And then he said, “biedny dziecko”—poor boy. He patted my head and asked if I would be willing to leave the notebook with him. Stupidly, I left it. [I found out that the name of the headmaster was Witold Raganowitz.]
That’s it. That was the end of the story in Bochnia. [After the war, Dad raised doves on the rooftops in Bochnia. Raising doves — that was good. A symbol of freedom. Something I will be proud to tell Yariv one day. He also sold contraband cigarettes. That’s less good, but true. That’s what happened. He used to go to Krakow to buy packs of cigarettes, then back to Bochnia to sell them in the market square. Competitors harassed him, policemen chased him down, but after the war they were no match for Dad. A man who had been blessed with so much cunningness and luck and survival skills — it took more than a Polish policeman to trip him up.] We moved to Krakow. In Krakow I went to high school, a Jewish school. And there we studied two classes every year to catch up. Then they demolished the Jewish school and I moved to a Polish school. At that time I was already active in the Shomer HaTzair movement, and my head was more in the movement and in making aliya to Israel than in my studies. But I studied because Father pressured me. He opened a barbershop in Krakow. He was always sick. He had uremia, a kidney disease, and he died in 1950. My sister left for Israel, leaving me on my own. I had an aunt and an uncle, but really I was alone. That was during the period when they didn’t let people leave, it was a big problem. I went to Warsaw a few times, because the main Shomer HaTzair cell was there. Then they broke up the cell. Zionist movements were outlawed. My uncle was a captain in the Polish army, a dentist, and he was a first lieutenant in a military hospital. I lived in his apartment and I used to hold Shomer HaTzair cell meetings there. If he had known, he would have killed me. But it was a safe place, because a captain in the Polish army and all that…
The Israeli ambassador to Poland at that time was Barzilai, a member of Kibbutz Negba. He was very supportive, as much as he could be, of the Zionist issue, but we couldn’t get exit visas. One day I decided to try. I went to the Ministry of the Interior in Warsaw. It was an office of the KGB and that sort of thing. Very secured. Guards everywhere. I searched for a way in, and managed somehow. There was a guard on every floor. When the guard was distracted by talking with someone I would sneak past. I got to the fourth or fifth floor, I can’t remember, to the office of the Director General of the ministry. Getting there was…I myself don’t know how I did it. Back then I could do those things.
When I walked into the office, the secretary started shouting, “Goodness gracious, how did you get in here?”
I said to her, “Listen, I’m Jewish, I have no one here, I want to go to Israel.”
From all her yelling, because she was so afraid, the Director General came out. He asked, “What’s going on here?”
So she said, “He snuck in.”
He asked, “What are you doing here?”
I told him, “I’m Jewish, my father has died, my sister left, there’s nothing for me here. I went through the whole war in the camps, I have nothing here.”
He looked at me like this, put his arm around my shoulder, and said, “Go home, you’ll get a travel permit.”
So I said, “But you don’t know my name.”
“Give your name to the secretary.”
I gave her my name and left the building legally. Two weeks later I received my passport. I believe to this day that he was Jewish. That’s what I think. Because he…I could see that he…he was considerate. And the fact is, I got a passport.
So I made aliya to Israel. I went straight to Kibbutz Gan Shmuel. I came with a Shomer HaTzair group, part of a larger group. The Poles gave out exit permits, but only very few. We took trains through Czechia, Koshitza, Austria, Italy. In Venice we boarded the “Galila” ship, and that was how we arrived in Israel. Of course, they welcomed us by dousing us with DDT, but for some reason we did not complain. We understood. After Kibbutz Gan Shmuel, I went to Kibbutz Harel. Then I decided to join the army. I served for two and a half years, in the artillery. I finished my service. I was alone. My sister was in Israel, and there was an aunt, but…
Somehow I got a job at Ata. It was a big textile factory, one of the most famous in Israel. Getting a job there was a big deal, it was considered a good job. I worked there doing ‘dirty work.’ Before that I worked in construction and all sorts of other things. Slowly but surely, I made progress. I went through training, took courses, I was an instructor, a foreman, then a human resources manager. It took time. Thirty years. The factory closed down in 1985 and I got a job in the collections department at the municipality of Kiryat Bialik. Then I retired, and that was it.
1992: Yariv