Persecutions and Segregation from "Testimony of the Human Spirit"
Transcript
Speaker 1
The Holocaust is, it's the darkest it's most terrifying, the most horrendous, horrendous mass murder of all time.
Speaker 2
I was born in the little town of Zaleski in Poland and the Romanian border. I used to love to climb trees and pick the fresh fruit right off the trees and eat. In the summer, I remember we would go to the beach. They had a band and my father loved to dance, and my mother didn't. So I was my father's partner. And I loved that he used to dance with me.
Speaker 3
I was the only son. And we did have a lotta cousins. And that's our uncles and aunts. And we live very, very closely to my cousins. They were just like brothers. They were family. And when somebody try to hurt me in school, all what I had to say, I'm going to tell my cousin and you know him. We were very well known as people who would not let anyone of our family get hurt.
Speaker 3
The German invaded Poland on September 1st, 1939. I was 16 years old, I say. Oh, how can the German invade Poland? Poland is so strong. Six days later, through our window, we saw the German patrols. The anti-Semitic pogroms started immediately whenever they saw a Jewish person with a beard. They used to take him right in the middle of the street. Sometimes with a knife, sometimes with scissors, sometimes pulling it out by hand.
Speaker 4
Less than two weeks before invading Poland, Hitler and Stalin secretly signed the German Soviet Nonaggression Pact. Germany and their new Russian ally would now divide up Poland. The western portion going to the right, the eastern to the Soviets.
Speaker 2
We were living in a little town on the Romanian border. Which had the tallest bridge in Poland I set to my parents. I was nine years old and I said, “why didn't we go across the bridge?” Why didn't we run away to Romania?” I don't know how I realized that that would have been a good thing to do. Like, no, people don't want to face reality. That it was the inability to realize that something horrible is about to happen.
Speaker 4
In the spring of 1940, Germany invaded Western Europe. Leaving a path of unprecedented death and destruction. Within six weeks, Belgium, Luxembourg, Holland and France had fallen to the Nazis.
Speaker 1
To the 10th of May 1940. With some beautiful morning sky was blue where I remember, and the parachutes were all white. It was a kind of wonderful panorama over blue with white. Half spheres. They were very peaceful, drifting down, except for the machine gunfire that was incessant coming from the Dutch soldiers in the street. And I saw was exciting. I climbed out of my window, opened the roof. Jesus. My father almost got a heart attack. “What are you doing? Come out of there. You're going to get killed. There’s shooting going on.”
Speaker 4
I.
Speaker 1
You didn't know they were Germans by the way in the beginning. We thought it was sort of a Dutch exercise. The German troops started marching through the streets and life, life went back to normal. It starts so innocently, you know, it starts so like a tiny little step. There was the International Jamboree of Boy Scouts in Holland. I joined them as a Jewish Cub Scout group. All Jews, the leaders, the Boy Scout, they have everywhere. I had a wonderful time with the scouts. Then the Germans came, and then the scouts was one of the first things the Germans disbanded. Anything that smelled of organization was destroyed. None of them came. My Cub Scout troop, they're all gone except one man all of them and all have been killed. All been murdered. There was absolute evil. And we had never seen it before.
Speaker 3
An order came out as all the Jews have to wear an armband. No Jew can ride in a streetcar. We could not go to school, we could not go to the movies, we could not go to a theatre. We could not buy food. If they like your apartment. They took your apartment. They like your house. They took your house. Everything at all belong to the Germans. They were the Masters of life and death. There's too many Jews in the city of Krakow. It's half of them have to be deported. The Jewish community, some of them escaped. Some of them stayed. Two of my cousins were going to Russia and at the time, they said, “Stefan, come with us”. They look at my mother. And I was ready to go. My mother was ready to let me go. Where the tears were coming out through her eyes because I could not leave her.
Speaker 1
And announcement appeared in the papers that people of Jewish descent had to go to town hall. To register as Jews. We went there and registered. Not realizing it was the measure that put the noose around our necks. The Dutch were highly organized. Everything was set down on paper. It was a very meticulous society. It's all there. And it killed most of Holland's Jews.
Speaker
Hi.
Speaker 4
The Nazis imprisoned the Jews in sealed off ghettos. Gathering them for eventual deportation to slave labor and death camps. Hans Frank, Nazi Commandant of Poland, declared I ask nothing of the Jews, except that they should disappear. In one year alone. In the ghettos of Lodge and Warsaw. Over 110,000 people died of starvation.
Speaker 3
On March 13, 1941, order came in. All the juice of Krakow. Have to move to a section of town which were actually the slums of the till. 35,000 people moved in to a place where 3000 people. Used to live before. They allowed us to have about four square feet per person. Everyone of us was a slave laborer. You couldn't refuse. We had an order to build a 12 foot concrete wall. We got 72 hours to build the wall. We didn't finish the war in 72 hours, so some of the Germans came down and started counting, and every ten person was shot.
Speaker 4
On June 22nd, 1941, the Germans broke their non aggression pact with the Soviets, attacking their troops in Poland and sending them fleeing back into Russia.
Speaker 2
When the journalist came, I remember this horrible news. If you heard that. 400 Jews were rounded up, and among them was unfortunately my grandfather. This was a Saturday and he was walking back from the synagogue and he was surrounded up among the first foreigner Jews who were taken to the outskirts of the town and slaughtered all killed. It towards the beginning of the end. Really.
Speaker 4
Nazi mobile killing squads known as Einsatzgruppen followed the advancing German army into Russia. Rounding up and murdering every Jew they could find. Entire towns were emptied of Jews. They were marched to desolate killing areas. Forced to undress. Led to the edge of a pit. And shot. In less than one year, the Einsatz group and slaughtered over 1.3 million Jewish men. Women and children.
Speaker 2
I remember hearing Hitler's speeches, and one in particular, where he pronounced that Poland will be unified. Meaning that there will be no Jew left in Poland.
Speaker 4
For the Nazis, shooting the Jews was too slow and public. They needed a more efficient method to rid the world of Jews. Ivan say Germany in January 1942. S s General Reinhard Heidrich gathered top ranking Nazi officials to coordinate the final solution. All of Europe's 9 million Jews were to be systematically removed from their homes. Deported to death camps. And gassed.
Speaker 2
Was inconceivable to realize that Poland could be left without Jews and that Hitler was going to do what he said was going to do.
Speaker 1
The decree came for the Dutch Jews that they would have to go to something that the Germans called work relief in Germany. The Jewish Council gave us good advice, saying that. We should prepare a backpack with warm clothes. For our stay in the camps in Germany, because uh. It would be unpleasant. If we didn't have those. And so were my parents got backpacks? When my mother. Put all the warm clothes in that you could get. I remembered a. Pieces of blanket that my mother had cut from a big blanket so that they would fit in the backpacks. And my father painted our names on the backpacks and we were ready to go. You didn't go. You were sent to concentration Camp Park Harrison, which was inevitably death.
Speaker
Right.
Speaker 1
We're Khalifa in Germany. That's what they said. Every week a train would go with at least 1000 Dutch Jews. Little babies, little mothers and fathers. Grandmothers, aunts, uncles. And so they went, almost Jews. Out of the 140,000 Dutch Jews. 110,000 went to their death. My parents were all set. To go. But my grandfather Isaac came from Amsterdam and he lived right in the Jewish section.
Speaker 4
We sell it all.
Speaker 1
My grandfather saw. The trucks come at night. When the Jews didn't go voluntarily anymore and drag people screaming out of their apartments, those streets were cordoned off from both sides and whatever was in their Jewish with a star registered by now. In the trucks and off. To fill those trains. My grandfather said this. Don't go on those trains. You must not go on those trains. He said you, you must try and go into hiding. I'll try and help you.
Speaker 2
The Germans had big notices up everywhere that all Jews had to move into this small restricted area. Hey. That they were running yourself. To exterminate us. We knew we just didn't know how it was going to happen until the 1st action occurred. We were all asleep and we heard horrendous noise trucks coming in, shouting, Yudin, youden and. Marching and running. My father pushed us into a cellar and he shoved us in there and everybody was panic stricken. My father then stayed outside and he camouflaged the entrance to the cellar by. All kinds of articles on it like. Feather beds and boxes and cartoons. And I said to her, my worst. Father. I had no idea what he was up to. He was going to sacrifice himself for us. I was frantic. My father wasn't there, and my mother was absolutely in despair. And we hear all these noises and the drummers are rampaging through the upstairs. The boots could hear the noise of the boots and we thought that that was the end, that they were going to discuss. But then this miraculous thing happened. We hear instead of them opening the door and getting us, we hear them laughing. We hear laughed upstairs. And then everything stopped. They went away. What my father had done is to put a lot of liquor in conspicuous places in the kitchen. They found it. They drank it, they got drunk and never found it. So that was the first action. We had no idea whether the next section was going to be. So you you think, OK, what's what's tomorrow? Tomorrow's another death day. Today after is going to be a day of death. And it was a indescribable. Way to live from one always in fear of death, every moment of the day and night. Pretty rough.