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3- Transport to Lodz Ghetto & Ghetto Life

Can you tell us about the preparations that were made in terms of packing and getting your family together when moving to the ghetto?

One suitcase appear in 24 hours. You will be taken East. That's it.

What did you pack in your suitcase?

Little bit of clothing. Nothing else.

Any photographs of your father?

No, I didn't have any photographs. The photographs were sent to Palestine, with our belongings. I had no photographs.

In the last interview you said that the trains were very cramped and very stuffy, but we were wondering if we can maybe hear a little bit more about the conditions.

We got no food. The train was sealed from the outside. It had children, old people,young people. It was a mix of eleven hundred people. The trains were guarded from the outside. They moved very slowly, and nobody knew the destination. We were all wondering. The windows could not be opened. There was no food distributed, and no water. And you just sat in the train and you wondered when it would stop and where it would stop.

Where do you think it would stop?

No idea.

Did anyone have any ideas?

No, nobody had an idea. East of Germany, that's as much as we knew.

Nobody held any discussions of what might have happened or what could have happened?

Nope, no, we were so pressed into those seats on the train, that you had even trouble to move, you tried not to get up because when you came back that space got smaller. There was no point discussing, it was a total unknown, and you could not stipulate. It was the first transport of eleven hundred Jews from Hamburg, and there were nine transports or eight after us, but to different places, I think a total of roughly ten thousand people, so nobody had gone this way before us. There was no news, there was no postcard, there was nothing, we did not know.

You mentioned that you were sitting next to some people, but you never even really spoke to them. Why didn't you?

Because you were so depressed and so insecure, that you didn't talk. The lady next to me had some candy, and she gave us each a piece of candy. Whether she introduced herself or not I can't even say. I doubt it. If you are in such a situation and you are so covered with fear, you stop talking, and that's what we did.

You mentioned how the vice-president of the Jewish community was on the train you were in to the ghetto, correct?

No. No. There was no vice-president of anything.

Were there some prestigious people in the train to the ghetto with you though?

No. In another train, but not in that train.

Did your family ever consider hiding before the transportation?

We had no non-Jewish friends. We had no offers from anyone to hide us. At this point we had no money to even attempt it, and in the city of Hamburg there used to be a million people. Twenty thousand were Jewish, ten thousand emigrated, and ten thousand remained. And not a single Jew was hidden. A half-Jew yes, but not a full Jew. So that gives you an idea of how difficult it was.

We recall from your first interview that when you were assembled in the school yard to march to the trains, there was a chance that someone could have left, or someone could have gone into hiding, but no one dared.

Yes, yes, no one did, because there was really no place to go. Who would supply food, and who would supply shelter? There was not a chance.

Not even discussions?

No, no.

Tell us more about your first impressions of the ghetto.

It was a place the like of which I had never seen. Part of the streets were not paved. It was very run down, very slum like. The buildings were very very poor, very old, very. You thought they'd fall over anytime. The people that passed us wore a yellow star, just like we did, but they had seen transport like ours before, so they paid no attention.

What we did not see on this first walk into the ghetto, which took two hours, that the ghetto buildings had no running water, and it had no toilets or bathrooms. We saw an occasional pump in the backyard for water, but we really did not know what to expect. It was a place like out of a movie or out of a play. It was terribly run down. I wouldn't even know what to compare it to – like a slum of a big industrial city. Before the war, the thieves, the smugglers and people like that used to live there. They had been evacuated, and the ghetto, which was roughly three kilometers, was just reserved for Jews.

It was very crowded when we came because at the same time, there were transports from Vienna, from Prague, from Berlin, from Cologne. And the highest population the ghetto ever had was a hundred and sixty thousand human beings. The lowest was around a hundred and ten. So it took a while to get us a room, an empty room for eight people. The room had a small stove, an iron stove, but nothing to cook with. No beds, nothing.

What did your mother do to support the family in the ghetto in terms of employment?

I was the one who had the best chance to find a job, and it took me three months, and I found a job. But we were not paid in money. We were paid in monopoly money. It was worthless, you couldn't buy a thing for it. There was a black market, and there was a periodic food ration. You received, at first, a loaf of bread for a week. Then for eight days, for nine days. Towards the end, it was for two weeks. We received, maybe, a quarter of a pound of sugar, hardly any flour. We received turnips, frozen potatoes, which means the potatoes are soft, and not like a normal potato. The rations came at irregular intervals, and you never knew what you would get or when. We sold a leather purse. My mother sold a blouse, and we didn't sell it for money, but we sold it for a piece of bread.

My job lasted six months, and then the elder of the Jews decided to close the office, and I was unemployed. Being employed meant that you got a soup at lunchtime, a watery soup. It took a few months and I got a second job. I held on to that job for quite a while. And then I was transferred again to the statistical department. I stayed there quite a while. And then I had a job in an evening kitchen for a very short period in the office, and then I worked in the leather factory.

My mother did not work. She tried, but she couldn't find work. You had to have connections to get a job. You had to know somebody who knew somebody who would put in a word for you, or you could bribe.

What was a typical meal plan, or diet for a day in the ghetto?

You didn't plan, you couldn't plan.

I didn't mean plan, just what you ate on a daily basis?

You ate whatever was available, and if you had a friend who would give a bag of potato peels you would wash them at the pump until they were clean, and you would grind them up with a meat grinder. And then you would sort of make a hamburger out of it and you would eat it. Don't ask me what it tastes like. You ate what you had, and if you didn't have anything you didn't eat. So people died of hunger.

The cemetery adjacent to the ghetto has seventy thousand unmarked graves. The people died from hunger, from typhus, and dysentery. Aside from that, people were deported from the ghetto. They were either too old, or too young, or too sick. The Germans would take them out of the ghetto. We know now that they were taken to Chelmno, an hour away. They were either gassed, or shot, and buried in mass graves. And I think those graves number over a hundred thousand.

Knowing all of this, how did you go to sleep at night?

We had a wooden cot for three people, and it was very very cold. It was so cold that the upper layer in a bucket of water would freeze overnight. You wore a lot of clothing when you went to bed. You eventually slept, but on the ceiling were little animals that gather on the ceiling, and in the dark they drop down. They're really flat, they're like a bug, but totally flat.

And when these animals, when you turned around, and you squashed them, they would leave bloody streaks, and they smelled awful. And there was no way of killing them, they kept coming back. They were in the wood, in the cots, and you got used to it, you had to get used to it, what were you to do?

What did you call this insect in German?

Wanze [translation: a bed bug]. It needs a better dictionary than this, this one doesn't have it. But it's a flat animal, it's almost like a nickel. Not as big, but totally flat, and when it's dark it drops from the ceiling.

Do you ever see them here?

No. I saw cockroaches in New York, but nothing else.

Also, how did you go to sleep at night, psychologically, knowing what was happening everyday?

You didn't think much about it, you were exhausted, you were hungry, you were tired, and you just dropped. There was no point in thinking.

During this time, your mother was ill. Can you explain from what? Was it typhus?

No, my mother died of hunger. And when you withdraw from food completely over a long period of time you swell, and it is all water. And this swelling goes to a degree, and then you just die. You could see in the morning on the way to work, people that were on the street, and had just died of hunger. And my mother died of hunger.

There was a sense of knowing that this was inevitable for all of us. You just ask yourself, "How much more time do I have?" because young people died just as well as old ones. My mother was only fifty.

And how old were you?

I was seventeen.

You shared the room with eight other persons in the ghetto. Can you give a description of who they were?

Two were elderly couples, from Berlin. They did not have any children, neither one of them. They did not work, they couldn't find work. And I know that when I came home from work, food was missing. Over a long period of time, of course, nobody got along with anybody. We didn't have toilets, so we had two buckets, and it was up to my sister and to me to carry the buckets down three flights of stairs. Nobody else would do it. "You are the youngest you do it," which was not fair in our eyes.

We lived right near the barbed wires, which meant we couldn't open a window. We could not have a single bulb burning without having a curtain in front of the window, a black curtain. And we heard the boots of the German down below, walking back and forth.

So there were four, and we were seven, and then there was another man who lived with us for a while, in the same room. He had no employment. I don't know if he had family. And I'm not sure whether he moved, or whether he was taken away during one of the selections. But after the first big selection in May 1942, four people disappeared.

Can you give a description of the ghetto wall and how Poles went about their daily lives as if the ghetto was not there?

They didn't look at us, and we didn't dare go close enough to the barbed wire because there was a German guard with a gun. But we could see him go into the grocery store across the street on the Polish side. We could then see them carry a loaf of bread, but nobody paid any attention to us. They knew of the ghetto. Their streetcar ran through the middle of the ghetto under heavy guard. But we didn't exist. They didn't want to see us. And we had no underground sewers like Warsaw, so there was no contact possible.

Regarding hunger, I'm wondering when you first started to really feel like you were experiencing hunger.

I think it was during the first or second months in the ghetto when we found out that there were no stores where you could buy food. That you got a ration that had to last until the next ration, which could of been two weeks or four weeks. You had no apple, no pear, no milk, no meat, no egg. It was a totally different diet. And I remember having a loaf of bread, and telling myself I can only eat an eighth of that bread, so it would last me eight days. And I kept on slicing, and it was much more than an eighth, so the rest of the time I went hungry. I promised myself I would never do it again, but I did. It's just an impulse you can't resist.

I'm wondering if you could talk about the effects of hunger; physically and emotionally.

Hunger is not to be described, there are no words for it. You wake up with it, you go to bed with it. You go to an office and the office has twenty employees. All of them in previous lives were either teachers, professors, lawyers, educated people. The conversation for ten hours was about food. Food now, food before the war, food after the war, if there is an after the war. All these people could talk about was food. It is very very difficult to understand what hunger does to a human being. I think we become worse than an animal.

Did you feel were worse than an animal?

If I had food, I could not control how much of it I would eat, and how much I would leave for tomorrow. It was beyond control, beyond reason. The only hunger I had ever known was on Yom Kippur when you didn't eat for a day, and that didn't compare at all.

I remember you talking about the French novel, Les Miserables, in the last interview, and if this book helped you shape, in you early childhood, your initial views of what you thought misery, and pain, and suffering was?

I had never really given serious pain and suffering a second thought, because I wasn't exposed to it. It existed in books and fairy tales, but it didn't exist in reality. So when you're confronted with it, it is totally different.

I’m wondering how your view on misery changed since you were in the ghetto.

That all there was to life was misery, there was nothing else. There were people, like Jacob the Liar, who believed, or wanted us to believe, that in three months the Russians would come, or the Americans would come; the war would be over. And for a second you tried to believe that. You imagined, just for a split second, a decent piece of clothing, and a loaf of bread, not cake, just plain bread. But then you sort of woke up from a half-dream, you told yourself you're stupid. Don't even go there; it won't help, it makes it worse.

You said there were people who tried to improve ghetto life, but in a way it was like they were powerless because there was so much to do, and they had so little power. I'm curious to hear a little more about these people, who they were, and what they tried to do?

Well, there was a man, who was in the school system, and he tried to maintain schools in the ghetto. His name was Moshe Karo. There were others like him, who tried. But if you have more than a hundred thousand people, and life became so corrupt due to black market dealings, due to bribery, that to improve the ghetto was almost an impossibility. There was one man who was an engineer. He drew up plans for parks, and for trees, and for playgrounds. And Rumkowski, the elder of the Jews, at first thought it was a very good idea.

When the population heard of these plans, there were two reactions. It might be a good idea; however, if he plants a tree, or a park bench, people will steal it and burn it in the oven. And does he think that we will live here forever, that we would need a park? I mean it was not to be conceived that you would spend the rest of your life here. So to improve the ghetto could only be done with bigger food rations, and the Germans didn't send them in, and the Jewish administration did not permit strikes. So, there was nothing to be done.

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