Stories tagged "Europe": 169
Stories
Anti-Jewish Laws in Poland
"As I told you, my father was a kosher butcher… In 1936, after the death of the Polish Marshal Pilsudski, who was the de facto leader of the Polish government who tried to enforce laws protecting the minority-- after his death in 1936, the…
Growing up in Krakow
"I was born on December 20, 1922 in the city of Krakow, Poland. My house was a house of [an] observant family. My father was a kosher butcher. The laws of the Bible were observed strictly... I always wore a head covering. I attended the Jewish…
Liberation
"Well, before the liberation, there were five agricultural villages [where] the Jews worked. We decided all to come to one of the larger ones in the town of Tluste, where the ghetto was, for our safety. And strangely enough, the German Commander…
High School in Germany
"I was in high school there, in Germany, which was-- I could write another book on a Jewish kid in a German high school-- and of course none of them knew anything that was going on. But the thing I remember most about that period is that I was…
Czernowicz
"So, with a Russian army truck, we made our way across the border to Romania, and there I remember being very tired and falling asleep on the floor of some empty apartment. I remember waking up in the morning and looking in the window I thought…
Lisowce
"Lisowce labor camp-- this was a group of five agricultural villages where the Germans had a group of forced labor Jews working in agriculture, and so did my brother and I. It so happened that the commander of our camp, Mr. Frank, was a pretty…
Life in the Tluste Ghetto
"It's almost impossible to describe. If there ever was a hell on earth this was it. There were a few narrow streets in that ghetto, thousands of people were brought in from other surrounding towns and villages, Typhus was raging-- my…
Belzec
"One more time our father hid us in the mill in the attic, and I recall waking up to the most plaintive whistle of a locomotive, and I didn’t know then that my dearest friend Genia Reis was on that trip to Belzec Extermination Camp. At the time, all…
The First Akcia
"December 4, the issue was ordered that all Jews must assemble in front of the great synagogue to be inoculated against typhus. It was raging in that part of the world, but some of the people, like my father, were skeptical. Why would the…
German Occupation
"Well, the first week that they were there, they erected eight gallows in the city center and just randomly selected eight Jews and hanged them. They came to the Jewish synagogue and trashed it, burned the Torah scrolls and the prayer books, and…