- Professor Erlich, you're all set?
- Again, it's comfortable, the conversation.
- And please wait for me to finish before you start.
- Try and just make eye contact with me.
- Try not to look at the camera.
- Eddie and Mark aren't here.
- But we really want the feel of what it was like.
- We have no-- the beginning of the war, where were you?
- Where was your family?
- What was the situation?
- Why don't we go?
- So you want me to get going?
- Well, the war started in September of 1939,
- on the 1st of September.
- I was 14 at the time, and we lived
- in Krakow, which, in those days, was in Western Poland,
- not very far from the German border.
- So on the 3rd of September, our family moved away from Krakow,
- in a sense, escaped from Krakow, sensing that the city might be
- occupied, and we all went to Lwów,
- which was in eastern Poland and where my mother came from.
- And her family was from there, perfectly sure
- that we would come back very quickly because there
- was no question in anybody's mind
- that the Germans would be soon defeated
- and we would come back to our old apartment in Krakow.
- Well, what happened was that, of course, we never came back,
- and we stayed in Lwów for some time.
- My father was a judge before the war.
- My uncle, his brother, was an industrialist,
- and they were both afraid for their fate after the Russians
- moved into eastern Poland and took Lwów.
- And so at that time, they decided to escape.
- The only free country within reach was Lithuania.
- It was soon to be occupied by the Russians, too,
- but Vilnius, in Polish Wilno, was still free in those days,
- and you could get out.
- You could get some arrangements.
- And so they escaped illegally across the border on New Year's
- night, 1939 and made it safely to Vilnius,
- and the arrangement was that they would later
- send for us, for my mother and me, my aunt and my cousin
- and that we would follow.
- And this is actually what happened.
- In February, we went to a border town
- not far from the Lithuanian border,
- and we waited for the guides to come to pick us up.
- There were two women and two boys, myself--
- I was, at that time, already 15--
- and my cousin, who was nine.
- And we started in February, with the end of February.
- I don't remember exactly the date.
- It was a horrible winter, very, very cold.
- It was about 5 degrees below Fahrenheit.
- And we were not properly dressed at all.
- The ladies wore shoes that you would
- wear on the street in Krakow or any other city
- but not in tremendous drifts of snow,
- and the guide was completely unreliable fellow.
- We took suitcases, which was, of course, a stupid thing
- to do because you don't go across the border illegally
- with suitcases, but the ladies could not
- part with the things they had.
- And we took a sled and one horse,
- and we got as far as we could on the sled.
- And then he took the suitcases and said, follow me.
- And as soon as he left, he sort of disappeared.
- It was all at night.
- It was a clear night, but there was no moon, very, very cold.
- And we all fell into drifts of snow.
- The ladies couldn't move.
- My cousin and I also had some difficulty.
- So before long, the dogs began barking.
- The peasants from the village came out.
- And they said that they would have to take us into custody
- because if they don't, the Russian patrols will come
- in the morning, and when they see the footsteps in the snow,
- they will arrest the whole village,
- and all the men will be deported to Siberia.
- So they took us into that hut.
- That guide disappeared with the suitcases,
- and we never saw him or the suitcases since.
- And we waited in that hut until this Russian border patrols
- appeared in the morning.
- They took us into custody and took us
- to the first prison in a small village not far
- from the first one and then to a larger town, which
- was called Radin, which was also the famous because it had
- the oldest yeshiva in that part of the country,
- and the prison was actually near the yeshiva.
- And then we were separated.
- I was 15, and they decided that I
- was old enough to be with men.
- And the ladies and my cousin were kept together with women.
- So this was, for me, a rather frightening experience.
- I was entirely alone in a small cell with about 20 other
- quote unquote "criminals" of various ilk,
- mostly smugglers, professional smugglers.
- They asked me what I was in for.
- I told them for trying to cross the border illegally.
- And they said, well, give up all hope for ever coming back
- to Poland.
- You'll be deported, and you will spend the rest of your life
- in Russia.
- Well, that, you can imagine, was pretty
- scary for a lad that was 15 years old,
- and I had no idea what my mother was at the time,
- nor my uncle, nor my cousin.
- But it all ended fairly well.
- After about a week of this business,
- we were released and asked to return to Lwów,
- where we came from originally, and this is what we did.
- We lived, then, in Lwów until the springtime of 1940.
- I even went to school for a while in Lwów.
- And then passportization campaign began.
- We were all supposed to either choose Soviet citizenship
- or return to the original place of residence,
- in our case, Krakow.
- Since we didn't know at that time yet
- what Germany would be about--
- Krakow was still occupied by the Wehrmacht, not by the SS,
- and one could get out from German-occupied Poland
- through Italy, mainly, and then from Italy
- to Spain and eventually away.
- We'll wait for that to finish.
- Is that going to be every 15 minutes, that clock?
- That was just 10:00, I think.
- Just you want to back over the way out of Germany?
- Yes.
- Yes.
- Am I doing the right thing?
- Yeah, that's perfect, very good.
- Good, very clear.
- I'm going to go back and maybe ask
- you like, well, what were the conditions like in the prison?
- What did you eat?
- Yeah, what did I--
- it's a funny thing.
- You told me that I should say things
- which get people sort of moved.
- I don't remember those things.
- I remember only the good things, which
- is a funny thing how a human being suppresses
- the unpleasant.
- So we begin--
- Yeah.
- I guess go back--
- So anyway, yes, we went back to Lwów.
- We stayed there for a few months until
- the Soviet passportization campaign began.
- We were under the impression that, once you
- take a Soviet citizenship, this is the end of you.
- You will become a Soviet citizen,
- and you will never get out because we knew perfectly well
- the history of the Soviet Union for the past 30 years almost,
- 30 years.
- And so we elected to go back to Krakow,
- hoping that, from there, it was still possible to get out,
- and we knew of cases of people getting out
- from there through Italy or through Hungary
- onto Spain and to Western Europe.
- Well, while waiting for the permission
- to go back, at night, towards the end of June 1940,
- a tremendous campaign of deportation began.
- All those people who refused to take Soviet citizenship
- were deported inside Russia.
- This was done over three days, all at night,
- using absolutely every moving vehicle in Lwów.
- All the cars, all the trucks, all the peasant carts,
- everything that moved was mobilized.
- They did it by streets.
- They had lists of people with addresses.
- Can we stop for a second?
- That one was probably OK.
- Yeah, your-- we can hear that on film.
- Oh, I'm sorry.
- I'm sorry.
- OK.
- Can we just turn the clock off?
- We certainly can.
- And could you cinch your tie up once more?
- Just a little bit.
- Great.
- My camera's on that shirt, and they just pop out.
- I'll go back and--
- when you were in prison there, how did you communicate?
- Did everyone else speak--
- what language did you speak?
- That was a prison with nothing but Polish prisoners
- because this was a former Polish territory,
- and all the prisoners spoke Polish.
- The language in the cell was Polish.
- My co-prisoners were actually a nice bunch of people,
- and they told me that they would be deported to Siberia
- because this is what they were convinced would happen.
- This is what probably happened to all of them.
- They asked me whether I wanted my mother to know where I was,
- and I said, yes, but what can I do about this?
- And he says, oh, we can do a great deal.
- And they started tapping on the wall, and within a short time,
- there was another tab.
- And there was a communication with my mother,
- so that made me feel a little bit happier.
- What we ate--
- I really can't remember well what we ate,
- probably the Russian kasha-- that is the sort of gruel that
- the Russians love--
- and some thin soup.
- But I don't really remember exactly what
- it was that we ate.
- What I remember very well is the trip on a sled from one
- of the villages to the prison in Radin.
- This was in the morning, sort of late morning
- because the sun comes out very late at that time of the year,
- and we were on the Russian sled.
- They are very different from the sleds in America.
- They are very low, and they are built in a triangular form
- so that the horse is attached to the top of the triangle
- and the rest of the triangle acts so that the sled would not
- tip over, just to keep it on top of the snow
- rather than sinking into the snow.
- There were two Russian soldiers with us,
- and the trip took a very long time, about more than an hour.
- And after a while, they got sort of sentimental,
- and they started singing--
- they had a guitar, and they started singing Russian songs.
- This was the first time that I heard Russian, really,
- this close by and the Russian songs, which are
- extremely mournful sometimes.
- But this was an extremely unusual experience.
- There was nothing but snow around,
- these two Russian soldiers, very nice fellows,
- singing those mournful Russian songs
- as the sun was getting up.
- So that's when-- to come back to the deportations,
- when the streets that we lived on came up,
- there was a truck waiting downstairs,
- and everybody living in that house
- who belonged to that category that
- is people who did not want to become Soviet citizens
- were all deported.
- And so when we finally ended up on the train in that freight
- car in which we made our trip to Russia, we were all neighbors,
- and many people knew each other if not personally at least
- by sight.
- So that's the way we made the trip from Lwów.
- We were still convinced that we were going west,
- that is, back to Krakow because this
- is what the Russian soldiers were instructed to tell us,
- until this train started moving and when we realized that we
- are not moving west but east.
- The trip took about 10 or 12 days,
- and around the tenth of July, we came to a small station called
- Sharya on the trans-Russia railroad line running
- from Moscow to Vladivostok.
- There were Russian officers waiting,
- and this was actually-- this happened on stops before that.
- And each of them had a list of desiderata,
- and he would say three cars, two cars, four cars,
- depending on how many people they could handle.
- Well, when we came to Sharya, he wanted three freight cars,
- that is, people who were in those three cars,
- maybe a little bit more than that.
- And we were asked to get out, put on trucks,
- and then driven north, and we drove for a day or--
- First, could you tell me what were the conditions
- like on those freight--
- On the freight trains, they were pretty awful
- because we were packed like sardines.
- There were, of course, no toilet facilities.
- There was a hole in the floor in each car,
- and then by the ingenuity of the passengers,
- we covered this area with a blanket or something.
- So it was a sort of an improvised toilet.
- But normally, when there was need to do that
- and when the train stopped, the Russians
- would unlock the doors, and everybody
- went outside trying to find a secluded place.
- Food was what they gave us, very little of it,
- but we had with us some food because the Russians in Lwów
- told us, please take everything that you can with you
- because you will need everything.
- So we took clothes, and we took some bedding, even.
- And we certainly took some food, so we had enough to last us
- for the duration of the trip.
- But if we were to rely on what was given to us by the guards,
- we wouldn't be very happy, obviously.
- Go back to the trucks.
- So on the trucks--
- again, we were lucky.
- This whole time the weather was very good.
- We were in the open trucks, an usual line of trucks extending
- for about, I would say, half a mile, all of them
- fueled by wood.
- This is something which you don't know in this country.
- I don't know whether the Russians still remember that.
- They were sort of Ford-like trucks
- because the Russians had a license from Ford,
- and instead of a gas tank, they had
- two tanks attached to the trucks on two sides of the cabin.
- And every now and then, the truck would stop.
- There were piles of small, cubed pieces of wood
- along the side of the road, and they
- would put it into those tanks where there
- was a normal fire and steam.
- And this is how these trucks were moving.
- Well, we were going like this for quite a while.
- The countryside around us became more and more forested,
- and finally, we came to a road which
- was really not a road but a path in the forest.
- And we went for about 5 miles along that,
- and eventually, we saw a little brook and a few barracks
- alongside which were completely empty.
- They were called barrack number one, two, three, four,
- and five.
- And then we were asked to dismount,
- and each family was to take one room.
- And so we ended up-- my mother and I ended up in barrack
- number one, which was actually a very good barrack as it turned
- out because it was high up so that water in the fall
- and in the spring would not get in, and that's where we lived
- for the duration of our--
- we would call it, of course, imprisonment.
- The Russians called it resettlement.
- We were resettled to a different part of the Soviet Union,
- and for them, it made no difference.
- We were in Lwów, which was part of the Soviet Union.
- Now we were in a forest halfway between the Urals and Moscow,
- about 400 miles northeast of Moscow.
- And so we were living in a different place.
- They found nothing wrong with that.
- There was no sentence of any kind
- because this was just resettlement.
- I needed to cough, and fix your tie again.
- My goodness.
- What's wrong?
- What's the matter with it?
- [INAUDIBLE] down [INAUDIBLE].
- It's very slight, but it's helpful.
- Thank you.
- So did you have any contact with your father at this time?
- Well, not immediately, not immediately,
- but my grandmother, who was from Lwów--
- she had no choice about Soviet passports.
- People who were normal residents of Lwów and the areas occupied
- by the Russians were simply issued Soviet passports,
- no questions asked.
- So she was not deported.
- She stayed there together with my mother's sister
- and her husband.
- And my father at the time and my uncle
- were in Lithuania, in Vilna, and they wrote to each other.
- And we wrote to them as soon as we knew our address,
- and so, in this way, via Lwów, my father found out where we
- were.
- And we began to communicate directly.
- That is, we would write to him, and he would write back to us.
- Now, in that camp, I was 15, and under Soviet law,
- I did not have to work.
- You have to work when you are 16,
- and I was still about six or seven
- months before my 16th birthday.
- My mother, though, had to work.
- The work was in the woods.
- We were all-- practically all of us became lumberjacks.
- Nobody knew how to handle an axe.
- Nobody knew how to handle a saw.
- There was no mechanical tool whatsoever, no power saws.
- Everything was done manually.
- And we were totally out of it.
- Well, the Russians were aware of that, and they attached to--
- they divided us into brigades, and to each brigade
- they added a native peasant from those areas.
- And he was teaching us how to do it.
- But before it came to that, I told the commandant
- of the camp-- there was one commandant and three militiamen
- under him.
- That was the whole contingent of the guards--
- and I said to him, what's the point of taking my mother
- to work because she will never do anything for you because she
- is simply unable to do anything like that?
- Why don't you take me instead and let her stay
- in the barracks since I don't have to work?
- He liked the idea, and so I, before I was supposed to work,
- began working.
- And later on, when I turned 16, they
- got so used to the sight of my mother
- at home, that is, in the barracks rather than at work,
- that she never worked for the length of our stay
- in that camp.
- And after a few months, I became an experienced lumberjack,
- and trade which I still love and which I practice at home.
- That is, whenever there is a tree to be felled
- or a branch to be cut, I do it with a great deal of relish,
- always with manual saws, never using any power saws.
- So that's essentially how we got into that camp.
- The kind of work--
- I would say 90% felling trees.
- There was a stream running through the camp emptying
- into a larger river which again emptied into a larger river,
- and eventually, all of this emptied
- into the river which was called Northern Dvina, which
- goes north to Archangel, the city of Archangel,
- where there's a port, and you could then
- move whatever you could because from that time
- you couldn't move anything by land.
- So our job was to fell trees, cut them
- according to specific measurements.
- Every kind of tree, every kind of wood
- had its own requirements.
- We were supposed to measure it all and then stack it,
- and some of us were then, in the wintertime, given sleds,
- brought sort of the front part of the sled with a tiny horse
- that they had there.
- And these wooden logs would then be taken out of the woods
- and stacked alongside the first big river, which
- was about 5 miles away from the camp--
- from where we were working.
- And then in the springtime, when the snows
- melt, these small rivulets become
- mighty rivers, and for about--
- there is a window of opportunity that
- lasts no more than two weeks.
- During that time, all that water has to be pushed into the water
- and floated downstream to the Northern Dvina.
- Well, there was an immense amount of wood,
- and the river, even though it swelled,
- it was still a fairly small river, so tremendous--
- what's the English word for that word?
- Logjams?
- Logjams, exactly.
- Tremendous logjams would form, and in this country,
- as I know from movies, what you do is, when there is a logjam,
- you dynamite it.
- There was no question of that.
- First of all, there was no dynamite.
- Secondly, anything that would injure
- a piece of wood, which was valuable property,
- would be considered sabotage.
- So we were issued long sticks, which sort of looked
- like harpoons in a sense, and we were
- supposed to jump onto those logjams
- and push, manually, the logs away until, eventually,
- the logjam became free and everything floated away.
- But you were supposed to sense when this moment was coming
- and jump off from log to log until you came to shore.
- This was a fairly tricky operation.
- Of course, all the time you were drenched completely in water.
- But in the woods, we were--
- cutting itself began with cold weather, which means
- mid-October or even earlier.
- Later on snow fell, and the more snow the better because it's
- easier to move around.
- It's easier to move the wood around.
- So we would start from the barracks in our brigades.
- There were five men in my brigade.
- The senior wood cutter in the brigade
- was an engineer from a small town in Poland,
- and we would march at--
- when it was still dark, we would get out of the barracks.
- By the time we reach the place where
- we were supposed to cut our trees,
- it was just slowly getting light so
- that the sunrise we would always meet at the place of work.
- We would leave just before it would get dark,
- and the trip back was basically in darkness.
- We would come home, that is, to the barracks, to the camp,
- when it was totally dark.
- What was life like in the barracks?
- Did you make a call?
- Yes, and it looks like--
- if we could do it [Background talking]
- OK, great.
- So what was life like in these cabins?
- Did you feel like you had a hard life?
- Well, it was a hard life.
- The worst part of the whole thing
- was a sense of hopelessness.
- That is, the war was going badly.
- We had some news.
- There was some kind of a local newspaper that eventually
- would find its way to the camp.
- So there were no radios.
- Well, actually, there was a bit of a loudspeaker radio,
- on which we could get Moscow official news, which
- was good enough.
- But it was quite clear that the war was not going well.
- The most heartrending time, for me at any rate
- and I think for many others, too, was the defeat of France
- because--
- that was May 1940--
- because somehow-- the camp was all Polish, basically
- 50% Jewish, 50% Catholic.
- And we were all raised on this myth of great France,
- Napoleonic France, which the Poles considered, at least,
- the friend of Poland, and that the French would certainly
- be able to deal with the Germans as they managed to deal
- with them in World War I.
- We did not think much about England
- because people simply did not have any ties with England.
- America was completely out of it,
- far away and not interested in the war, and in the meantime,
- Hitler was doing fairly well.
- And the defeat of France and the defeat
- in such a fantastically quick way--
- before you could know what was going on,
- France was already occupied.
- It made us feel that this is really an end of an era,
- that Europe will forever be divided between these two
- dictatorships, on the one side Stalin,
- on the other side Hitler, and that the--
- especially since they were very friendly in those days
- because this was before the war between Russia and Germany.
- So the Germans who happened to be in our camp-- there
- was a family of Polish citizens but who were of German origin
- and who declared themselves German.
- They were treated much better than we were simply
- because they were German.
- And so all the rest of us were convinced
- that this is the end of the line, that we would never--
- I would never see my father, and I would never
- see my home and any freedom that you can speak of because there
- was really no running away.
- First of all, it was really impossible to run away,
- even though the guards were not numerous.
- There were only three guards in this commandant.
- But where to run to?
- This was running from a small prison to a larger prison,
- and eventually you do get caught.
- And people did run away and were returned to the camp,
- and a big deal was made of their return.
- So this was it.
- My life, from then on, was to cut timber,
- and the hopelessness was the worst part of it.
- As for food, until the break out of the war between Russia
- and Germany, that is, until Hitler attacked Russia in June
- 22, 1941, we had parcels of food which my grandmother from Lwów
- would send us.
- So this would reach us.
- My father would help out from Vilna as long as he was there,
- and locally, we would be getting our rations, which
- included a little bit of bread and a little bit of--
- and in the evening time, there was
- some kind of soup and sometimes some meat.
- But at any rate, the countryside,
- the forests were just--
- you could pick mushrooms, and Russians and Poles
- are mushroom eaters and are not scared
- of mushrooms the way people are in this country
- and know mushrooms so that my mother sometimes
- would pick a tremendous basket of mushrooms.
- And that was very good food.
- In the summertime, there were berries of all kinds,
- which we could eat.
- I could not lie down during our lunch break.
- We had a half an hour break to eat what
- we took along with us to work.
- In the summertime, I couldn't lie down
- because I would be completely smeared with blueberries.
- You would have to pick your blueberries first.
- In summertime, the greatest scourge during working time
- were the mosquitoes.
- The country was-- those forests were completely infested with
- mosquitoes so that sometimes you would--
- if I wanted to sort of sit quietly,
- I would have to put a sack on my head.
- Otherwise, you'd be eaten alive.
- When I joined this brigade, in my first days there they said,
- well, I was too young to work with an axe.
- That is, my colleagues in the brigade
- said that, not the Russians.
- The Russians thought that I was as good as anybody.
- And so they assigned to me a job which they thought
- was the easiest, and that was burning branches.
- Now, these were all coniferous trees,
- and they burned like firecrackers.
- We were all issued typical Russian clothing,
- which was sort of cotton jackets with quilted cotton inside
- which burned on contact with any spark.
- I was supposed to drag--
- well, they would chop off the branches,
- and I was supposed to drag them to this big bonfire which
- was built when we came to work in the morning
- and burn them there.
- Well, you had to be careful not to stand too close
- and not to stand against the wind
- because then everything blew on you.
- So there was smoke, and there were sparks.
- And every now and then, I would see
- smoke coming from my jacket.
- At the end of the year, I probably
- had more holes in the jacket than any clothes left.
- And it was tremendously hot by the fire and very cold
- away from the fire, so I thought, at the end,
- that this was much harder than anything
- that they were doing because they were simply cutting
- their trees, chopping branches.
- And so finally, when I learned to do the same thing that they
- did, we decided to share the duties,
- and I then was assigned to the normal tree felling detachment.
- Did you develop any lifelong friendships?
- And how long were you in this camp?
- Well, I was there for a year and a half.
- That is, we arrived in July, I think
- around the 10th of July, 1940, and my mother
- and I left on November 7.
- I remember that well because this
- is the Russian holiday, the Soviet holiday, of 1941.
- Now, everybody else had gone by then.
- Everybody was released.
- It's a long story.
- I don't know whether you want me to go into it,
- but if you are interested--
- well, I have to backtrack a little bit,
- and this is the part of the Sugihara involvement in this.
- My father and his brother, my uncle,
- were those who were issued the Japanese transit visas, that
- is, first of all, the terminal visa to Curacao,
- which was a Dutch position, then a Japanese transit
- visa, and then a Soviet transit visa to get to Japan.
- So towards the beginning of--
- I'm sorry.
- In the early fall of 1940, about half
- a year after we got imprisoned, my father and his brother
- completely legally left Lithuania
- with the Soviet transit visa to Vladivostok, which
- is the Russian port on the Pacific, and from there
- to Japan on those visas issued by Sugihara
- against the instructions of his government.
- This was a most unusual story, sort of like the Schindler
- story in Krakow.
- And so they arrived in this country
- a couple of months before Pearl Harbor,
- in the spring or early summer of 1941.
- How did your father feel leaving you and your mother
- back in Russia?
- Well, I can only imagine how he felt,
- but he must have felt awful.
- But for us, for all of us, I told you
- that our main concern and our main fear
- was that this would become a permanent situation,
- and having a father and the husband
- outside in the free world was the only ray of hope.
- So we were actually very happy that he got out
- because eventually we knew that Lithuania,
- as it did, eventually, would become part
- of the Soviet Empire anyway, so he
- would fare no better than me.
- And besides, having been a judge, that is,
- a civil employee, in Poland, he would be really treated
- very roughly by the Russians.
- So when they left, we knew perfectly well
- how they were going.
- We knew that they would pass within 160 kilometers
- of our camp because they would pass through the same railroad
- station, Sharya, where we ended our railroad trip from Lwów
- because this was on this main line between Moscow
- and Vladivostok.
- They came to Moscow.
- They bought a tremendous amount of clothing still in Lithuania,
- and from Moscow, they sent us two very large sacks
- full of stuff.
- And that kept us going for a long, long time.
- Instead of referring to them as "they," can
- you say "my father"?
- Yes, I'm sorry.
- My father and my uncle did that, the two families
- because we were separated.
- To come back through our deportation from Lwów,
- as I told you, we were deported by streets.
- My aunt, and my cousin, and my grandmother
- lived separately on a different street than my mother and I,
- so we were deported in different ways.
- We were deported on the same day,
- but we made it into different trains.
- And they ended up in the Ural Mountains,
- and we ended up in this camp, I would say 400 miles northeast
- of Moscow.
- How'd your mother respond to that?
- Well, this is the way it worked.
- We had no idea until we ended up that we--
- of course, we were deported separately,
- so we knew that we would be separate.
- But we didn't know, actually, that they were deported.
- Everything, you see, was done via Lwów, that is,
- writing to my grandmother.
- They wrote to my grandmother.
- My father wrote to my grandmother,
- so the grandmother became the hub of all this communication
- network.
- And from her, we learned where they were, where my father was,
- and this is how we communicated with one another.
- So they were in the Urals.
- We were in this district called the Vologda District, and--
- sorry-- when I say "they" I mean my aunt, her son,
- and my grandmother.
- And after the outbreak of the Ruso-German war in June '41,
- the Russians developed, all of a sudden, friendly ties
- with the Allies, and Russia, from being an ally of Germany,
- overnight became an ally of the US and England
- and resumed normal diplomatic relations.
- And at the same time, they had no choice
- but to resume and to recognize the Polish government-in-exile
- in London.
- And one of the conditions imposed upon the Russians
- by the Poles, presumably with the help of the British,
- was that all Polish citizens imprisoned in Russia--
- and there were literally hundreds and hundreds
- of thousands, if not millions in Russia--
- would be allowed to join the Polish Army
- and released from camps.
- This was called the amnesty.
- There was no sentence, but still, there was an amnesty.
- This amnesty came out in late August of 1941,
- and around September time, a man came from the local NKVD
- district, that is, the Russian secret police,
- with an edict that all people detained in the camp should
- be freed as long as they can prove
- that they were Polish citizens.
- Now, again, to backtrack a bit, my father, when
- he got to Japan, decided that the more foreign documents
- he sends us the better for us, and he sent us
- at first an Argentinean visa which
- did us no good whatsoever because we had no passport
- to put it on.
- All of these things were obtained probably
- in an illegal way.
- I don't know how he did it in Tokyo.
- And the last document that he sent us
- was an actual Chilean passport.
- That is, my mother got a Chilean passport,
- and I got a Chilean passport, completely valid
- Chilean documents, for which he must
- have paid some sum of money.
- These documents came through official mail.
- The Russians opened the mail regularly.
- And so the commandant called us in, and he said, what is this?
- Well, we said we didn't know, but I
- could read what it said, that these are Chilean passports.
- He requisitioned the whole thing.
- We never saw them again.
- When the amnesty was announced for Polish detainees
- in the camp, everybody was allowed to go.
- When our turn came, he said, you stay.
- We said, why?
- That is, my mother and I. And he said,
- because the amnesty is for Polish citizens
- and not for Chilean citizens.
- Well, this was the last thing that we counted on.
- But there was no way out, so we started
- bombarding the Polish embassy in Kuibysheva-- at that time,
- the foreign embassy from Moscow were already evacuated
- because the Germans were very close to Moscow
- to Kuibysheva, a city on the Volga.
- Today it's called Samara--
- and eventually established some contact with them
- and eventually managed to let my father
- know, again through the Polish embassy in Kuibysheva,
- that we were not able to get out,
- that something had to be done for us
- to prove that we were polish citizens.
- Well, it took a long time.
- There was September, and we started doing it immediately
- when everybody left because it was an absolutely eerie feeling
- to be in this camp for 300 people, in which there were
- just my mother and I and the German family who were detained
- also because now they turned out to be enemies of the Soviet
- Union.
- So there were four of us living there.
- I had to go to work, except that now I
- had to go to work with the Russians and not with the Poles
- because there were no Poles left.
- And so it went through October, and November came.
- November 7 was the big holiday, the anniversary
- of the October Revolution celebrated in November.
- And I told my mother, listen, there
- is nothing we can do here.
- We will spend the whole winter here otherwise.
- Let's go without telling anybody to Nikolsk,
- which was a town region center, a small town, 5,000
- people, where there was the local NKVD headquarters.
- And so very early in the morning, my mother and I
- set out on foot, and we went to Nikolsk,
- and we made it eventually by afternoon.
- It was holiday.
- Everything was closed, of course,
- but we waited until the following day
- and went straight to this NKVD office
- to tell this guy what was going on, that our commandant was
- completely in the dark.
- He knew nothing what to do-- he knew nothing
- about those Chilean passports and that we
- were a normal Polish citizens and should be allowed to leave.
- He gave us a tremendous lecture for leaving the camp
- without permission, and there was
- a moment when I was afraid that they would really imprison us
- for this whole thing.
- But then he softened, and he said, well,
- it's your luck that just two days ago an order
- came to release you, and so you go right back to the camp,
- and you can come back to Nikolsk whatever you are able to do so.
- So this was already-- there was plenty of snow all around.
- We got on a sled with some collective farmers who
- were going in the same direction,
- and eventually we made it back to the camp.
- I guess it was on the 9th of November.
- By that time, they were convinced in the camp
- that we had escaped completely.
- When we appeared, first of all, they were shocked to see us,
- and secondly, they were immensely angry
- that we got away without telling anybody
- because the commandant was afraid that he
- would be responsible for this.
- So when we came, he removed from our room everything that
- belonged to them, to the camp.
- That is, all the beds were removed, all the mattresses,
- the mattresses filled with hay, everything
- to make our life as uncomfortable as
- possible without actually imprisoning us,
- for which he had no authority because we
- came with this piece of paper from the NKVD in Nikolsk.
- We stayed there until we could put whatever
- we had left together, and then we went back to Nikolsk, again,
- partly on foot, partly--
- there was some collective farmers who were going there--
- and wanting to go out, that is, to leave this whole area
- and move towards those places with the Polish Army
- was forming.
- Well, to our great dismay, we found out
- that there was simply no way, in wintertime,
- to get out of there.
- The place was completely snowbound.
- There was no transportation available whatsoever,
- and if one wanted to, I suppose one could go on a sled.
- But going on a sled 160 kilometers in this winter--
- this was not anything that we wanted to try.
- And so we were forced to spend the whole winter of 1941
- and the beginning of '42 in this small town of Nikolsk,
- where I found work as a janitor in a local school.
- And my mother wasn't doing anything.
- We lived privately in a family of very lovely Russians,
- a couple who had three sons, and of three
- of them were killed in the very beginning of the war.
- They.
- Were drafted, and so they almost sort of adopted me
- as their fourth son.
- And there we--
- I don't know whether I'm not going with too much detail
- into all this.
- Well, you'll do with it what you want.
- Right.
- So then you went and caught up with your grandmother, correct?
- Well, then what we did-- we tried
- to get out in the springtime.
- In the springtime, the only way to get out is by boat.
- The small river that runs through the city,
- again, becomes big enough to allow boats to come to Nikolsk,
- and this is the time when they can ship out whatever they have
- manufactured over the winter.
- And we went on one of those ships
- to the first railroad station, which
- is in a town called Kotlas, a horrible town which
- was the main town for resettlement
- of prisoners coming from the extreme Russian North.
- So what you saw there were truly scenes out of Dante,
- these emaciated corpses walking around completely starved,
- looking for some way out without any money whatsoever.
- The Poles were actually doing better than the Russians
- because, by that time, the Polish government-in-exile
- in London organized a network of--
- they were called delegaturas, but they
- were sort of minor consulates all over Russia
- for Polish citizens who were released.
- And not only were they helping these people
- to get out and join the army, but they also
- had things to give them, food and clothing.
- Clothing was very important because even
- if we did need that clothing it could be sold,
- and the money could be used to buy food or exchange
- because barter was the main form of trade in those days.
- And in the camp, you see, in order
- to get some potatoes, I would go on Sundays,
- when we didn't work.
- I would take a small sled, and I would
- go with some shirt or some article of clothing
- and go from one hut to another of a collective farmer,
- asking whether they would trade some potatoes for the shirt.
- And occasionally you we lucky enough
- that somebody would do that, and this is how we got potatoes.
- But they were exceedingly poor themselves, cows--
- should we take it, or not?
- [PHONE RINGING]
- [Background talking]
- Were you surprised by the attitude of this Russian family
- taking you in?
- Weren't they supposed to be your enemies?
- No, no.
- That is the great difference between Russia and Germany.
- We had the feeling that we were--
- of course, we were mistreated, but the Russians around us
- were mistreated as well.
- And to the Russians, we were a novelty.
- We were, in many ways, a breath of fresh air
- coming from what they considered the West,
- and they were hungry for stories how
- life was there before the war.
- They were tremendously friendly throughout.
- My personal experiences in Russia
- and my personal relations with the Russians
- are invariably excellent, and I love going back to Russia.
- Did you speak Russian at that point?
- By that time, I began learning Russian.
- You see, this was the--
- in the camp, I learned nothing because we were all
- using Polish to each other.
- We learned enough to understand those Russian guides
- who were with us and who taught us how to do this or that,
- but our normal conversations were in Polish.
- So I knew no more Russian at the end of this detainment
- as I did when I started.
- I started learning Russian when I came to this town of Nikolsk,
- speaking with the old man, the Russian,
- the father of the family, a charming family.
- They would share with us their food,
- and really, I was sorry to leave them
- when we were actually going away to that railroad station
- in Kotlas.
- So this was just one of the many very happy experiences
- with the native population, not necessarily Russian.
- They could be of any Soviet ethnic group.
- For instance, later on, when we lived in Central Asia,
- in Tajikistan, the Tajiks were awfully nice.
- They are related, at least linguistically,
- to the Afghanistanis.
- And we lived in an Armenian family,
- and these Armenians were--
- you couldn't imagine a nicer family.
- Again, both my mother and I were completely sort of adopted
- into their families.
- Whenever there was a family holiday,
- we were involved in it, and this is
- quite a story, those Armenians.
- If there is time, I would be happy to talk
- to you about that.
- [INAUDIBLE]
- Yeah.
- [TEST TONE]
- Do again, when we're rolling and stuff, about memories
- and how you've forgotten all the bad stuff.
- OK.
- So what were you going to tell me?
- Well, I was going to tell you that in--
- I haven't taken you to Central Asia.
- And this is a story in itself.
- But when we finally ended up in Tajikistan,
- which is the southernmost republic--
- was the southernmost republic in the then-Soviet Union,
- we ended up in a city called-- which
- then was called Stalinabad.
- Today, it is called Dushanbe, which
- was also its original name.
- And there, after a while, we lived
- in an Armenian family that was absolutely our own family.
- That was, we really--
- I felt that I had a new family and that I was the son of them.
- I became the greatest of friends.
- There is a little boy who became my good friend
- and used to read fairytales to me when I was sick.
- My mother had a friend in his wife.
- So this was just another experience
- of tremendous friendship.
- All of us had basically the same feeling,
- that we are all victimized by the Soviet regime.
- Those Armenians were deported themselves
- to Central Asia from Armenia.
- The Armenians, you may know, are people
- who are extremely skilled in business.
- This Armenian about whom I'm telling you
- was a watchmaker back in Armenia.
- And in Central Asia, he also went back to the same trade.
- But he also became a jeweler.
- And during the war, most trading was illegal in Russia.
- It was barter, it was buying and selling, money had no value.
- So people were trying to accumulate as many real objects
- as possible.
- Not big, so diamonds, of course, were very valued.
- My mother still had some from back home.
- And when we needed money, we sold them
- slowly to whoever was willing to buy.
- And he was our best customer, that Armenian,
- and eventually, he had a private house in Stalinabad.
- And he said to my mother, listen, why don't you
- move in to me?
- Because I'm about to lose one room because our house
- was declared too large for our family.
- So I would love for you to stay with us
- and we can continue our financial relationships.
- Well, little did we know at the time
- that we were moving in with the biggest trader in Stalinabad.
- He was the richest man around.
- His son was an NKVD official.
- He had most of the NKVD on his payroll.
- And whatever one wanted to do, one could do through him.
- And the irony of it all was that one of his side businesses,
- in a sense, the business which was
- the cover-up for everything, was a booth with soda
- on the main street of Stalinabad.
- At that time, sugar was in an extremely short supply.
- This drink was simply colored water, rose-colored water
- with sugar in it.
- And some foam.
- I don't know how he got this foam into it.
- Some gas that he pumped into it.
- And people would line for miles to have
- a glass of this sweet water because everybody
- was starved for sugar.
- He would buy sugar by carloads at the same time
- when we couldn't get rationed sugar at all.
- So he had enough fantasy to call this drink Curacao, which just
- so happens that this Curacao--
- I have a picture of it, actually--
- this Curacao was the destination of my father
- and my uncle when they were leaving Lithuania
- on the Sugihara visas.
- So my mother worked there as a clerk selling
- this soda, this Curacao.
- Amazing.
- Well, let me ask you now.
- Going back to being packed into the freight trains
- and being taken from your home--
- and you talked about memories.
- Yes, well, you know, now, I find out--
- was to my surprise that I know, and as I think hard trying
- to recall those images--
- because there was some solitary confinement for a while,
- even in the camp--
- that I retain in my memory only the brighter
- scenes and sort of erased from it the darker scenes.
- I have difficulty finding the tragic--
- in my memory-- to find the tragic moments.
- But have no trouble at all recalling the pleasant moments
- or the funny moments.
- So it's a curious mechanism, you know,
- sort of self-defense mechanism that we have,
- trying to erase what is unpleasant
- and retain what is nice.
- And one other general remark, you know,
- is that I'm convinced now that in life, everything
- is a question of luck.
- We were immensely lucky in all kinds of ways
- throughout the war.
- I mean, considering the place where we found ourselves
- in that is at the very vortex of this horror.
- To get out of it in the shape in which we got out of it
- took an immense amount of luck.
- And you know, luck is really a question of coincidence.
- You happen to choose to turn left when you have a choice
- to go straight and to go right.
- You don't know why you are going left,
- and yet, the turn left turns out to be the lucky one.
- And this was with us throughout this whole experience.
- In the camp, which was a light camp
- compared to so many other camps, where people did not really
- die except of natural causes.
- Of course, some died because they
- were malnourished, but no more so than the Russians around us.
- I'll tell you a funny story about Stalinabad.
- When we finally got out with my grandmother to Central Asia,
- where the Polish Army was forming,
- we came two weeks too late.
- By that time, the whole army of General Anders,
- that was the first Polish Army in Russia,
- was evacuated to Iran.
- So we came to the small railroad station between Samarkand
- and the Caspian, Krasnovodsk, on the Caspian Sea,
- where there was nothing.
- There were a few mud huts and the railroad station.
- This was all there was there.
- And that was one of the places where
- the Polish Army was forming.
- And this is where we found out that we would not
- be joining them because there was
- no Polish Army left in Russia.
- And one of us-- there was a group of Poles
- who were in the same situation-- had a map of Russia.
- And he looked at the map and he saw
- a city called Stalinabad, which in Tajik means
- the city of Stalin.
- But we didn't know that.
- And he didn't know it.
- And he said, you know, Stalinabad,
- that sounds a little bit like Marienbad and Karlsbad.
- Now, these were Czech resorts before the war.
- And so he says, maybe it is also some kind of a resort place.
- Why don't we go to Stalinabad?
- Well, for this idiotic reasoning,
- we got to an extremely nice place.
- Because it was the end of a railroad line.
- It was very difficult to get things out of it.
- It happened to be in an extremely fertile part
- of the Tajikistan.
- A great deal of fruit, a great deal of vegetables, some meat.
- We happened to land with this Armenian family, which
- helped us enormously.
- There was a Polish [POLISH],, which helped us
- with clothing and with food.
- And I began my higher education there in a very odd way.
- I was selling--
- You know, I finished only nine grades in Poland
- because I was 15--
- 14 when I entered school in the spring of 1939.
- I was supposed to go into my second--
- as a sophomore into high school.
- And so all I had there was nine years.
- I was at the bazaar in Stalinabad
- trying to hock a dress, which we got through the Polish network.
- And the woman, good-looking, pleasant woman came up.
- At that time, Stalinabad was full of Russian refugees,
- or evacuated people from Moscow, from Leningrad, from Kiev.
- And this woman turned out to be from Kiev,
- a Jewish woman, a professor of French
- at the local institute, pedagogical institute.
- At that time, there was no university.
- And we started talking to each other.
- By that time, I knew Russian fairly well.
- And she says to me, well you seem like an intelligent boy.
- What are you doing here selling dresses in this bazaar?
- So I told her more or less my story.
- And she says, well, you know, come over to my office
- tomorrow, I'll see what we can do for you.
- And I went to this institute, and they said, well,
- is there anything you would like to study?
- Now, studying was like having a job because every student had
- a fellowship there.
- This was the Soviet system.
- So I said, yes, I want to study English because my father is
- in America.
- And I hope that eventually, I will go to America, too.
- And she said, well, I'll see what I can do about this.
- And the group of people from the English department
- came, they gave me books to learn,
- to study from, to make up the high school which
- I didn't have.
- And they said, come back in two months
- and we'll give you an exam, which they did.
- And this exam I passed.
- And I was all of a sudden admitted
- to a local university in a sense,
- to the faculty of English.
- That is what they called the faculty of English, which means
- the department of English.
- And I stayed there for two years and a half.
- And my beginnings in English go back to Stalinabad.
- The year was 1942.
- So this is what I mean, the luck which--
- now, I didn't go to Anders.
- That is, I didn't join the Polish Army.
- This was considered a tremendous catastrophe and a tragedy
- that we were left behind.
- And all our friends and everybody else
- moved to Iran with Anders's army.
- Well, if I had gotten into Anders's army, who
- knows where I would be today.
- I could be rotting in the deserts of Northern Africa
- or at Monte Casino, where this Polish
- Army was completely decimated.
- So one never knows what is lucky in one's life.
- That's right.
- And there are hundreds of stories
- like this I can tell you.
- So when you left the camp and you went to try and--
- To join up with--
- yes, when I left the camp, I tried to join up with.
- You see, let me start a little bit earlier.
- My aunt and my cousin left that place
- where they were in the Urals to join the army.
- And they made it in good time.
- Their commandant was not dismayed by it
- because they had the same documents that we had.
- But somehow, Polish citizenship was not questioned,
- and they were released early.
- They made it.
- They joined the army.
- She joined the army.
- And the boys went along as her son.
- And they went to Iran.
- But they left a grandmother in the Urals all alone.
- And actually, her own, my aunt's parents were also there.
- So what we did before going down south to join the Polish Army,
- we went to the Urals to fetch my grandmother.
- She was sick at the time.
- And so we lost three months waiting for her to get better.
- And during those three months, we lost the Polish army.
- So she left and she came to this country with her son in 1942.
- And we, my grandmother, and my mother, and I stayed until '46.
- And how did you--
- could you fix your tongue on the tie?
- Sorry.
- And then how did you finally get out?
- From Russia?
- Yes.
- Well, we got out.
- You see, the problem was that we had no documents.
- Everybody who was in those resettlement camps would
- receive, upon amnesty, would receive the sheet of paper
- saying that the so-and-so is a Polish citizen who
- was released from the camp.
- That was our only document.
- There came, in 1943, or no, actually the whole thing
- began in 1942, when the advancing German troops came
- to the Smolensk region in Russia and uncovered graves
- of 10,000 police officers in a camp called Katyn.
- K-A-T-Y-N. Which they dug up.
- And they discovered unmistakable proof
- that these 10,000 officers were shot by the Russians.
- They were all shot, all in the same way,
- in the back of the neck.
- The Russians said, this is all nonsense.
- This is all Hitler's propaganda.
- This was all done by the Germans.
- We left the 10,000 right there.
- We could not evacuate them because we had no time.
- And they were shot by the Germans.
- And the Germans are simply planting false evidence.
- All evidence was pointing against them.
- There was a Red Cross delegation that came from Switzerland,
- and that examined these graves, and also found
- that the Germans were innocent in that.
- The Polish government in exile had no choice
- but to accuse the Russians.
- And the Russians used that as an excuse
- to sever all diplomatic relations
- with the Polish government in exile.
- They announced that all the Polish documents issued
- before the war were invalid.
- The documents issued to those who came from the camps,
- those sheets of paper, were invalid.
- And therefore, these people were without documents.
- And in order to survive, they had
- to accept Soviet citizenship.
- So this was the second time that we
- were faced with the choice of accepting Soviet citizenship.
- Those who did not, who decided not to,
- and there was some of those, were imprisoned very often.
- And they had a very, very tough time.
- Most people did accept it because they simply saw no
- choice, knowing what would happen if they don't.
- And there again, a small piece of luck.
- Or a large piece of luck.
- My father and my uncle, when they were in Vilna,
- went to Kaunas, which was at that time
- still the capital of Lithuania and where the embassies were.
- To the British embassy, which at that time
- represented Polish interests in Lithuania.
- That is, the Polish embassy was no longer there.
- Poland did not exist.
- The Lithuanians did not recognize the Polish government
- in exile.
- But the British embassy took over.
- And I'm sorry about this.
- Do you want a glass of water to have right here?
- Well, no, I'm all right.
- I'll just try to control it.
- So to come back to this story in Lithuania.
- Since my father and my uncle were there,
- they went to the British embassy in Kaunas.
- They got themselves proof that they
- were Polish citizens issued by the British embassy
- as the representative of Polish interests in Lithuania
- on British stationery.
- It was a piece of paper, which I still have here.
- I think I sent it to the Holocaust Museum,
- with a British official stamp, the rampant lion.
- And the wording was also in English.
- He got the very same documents for my mother and me.
- And they were sent to us in the camp.
- And for some reason, they were never requisitioned,
- so we had them.
- When the Soviets, in 1943, decided that no Polish document
- was valid, we went to the police, to the NKVD,
- and we said, but we don't have any pre-war documents.
- We don't have any documents issued by you
- after we left the camp.
- What we have is a document issued by the British.
- Let's see it.
- So we showed them this document.
- And there, they were completely taken aback.
- Because England was a great ally.
- There was a document there was a British lion on it.
- And they were not going to get into trouble over that.
- So after some going back and forth,
- we eventually received a so-called permit
- to live in the Soviet Union for people of foreign nationality.
- Not saying which foreign nationality it
- was because we had none at the time.
- So it was kind of a Nansen passport.
- Maybe I should take a drink, a glass of water.
- I'll bring some here.
- Set it right here.
- Yeah, I'll have it right here, you know.
- So where were we?
- You were.
- So we were on those documents which were
- issued by the Russians to us.
- Tell me again the response of the Russians
- to seeing the British lion.
- Well, when we brought them these documents,
- they really were completely dumbfounded.
- They had no idea what to do with them.
- They never saw a document like this before.
- Nobody of our friends had anything like it.
- What they saw was the English writing
- and the British officials stamp.
- And so they decided that they could not
- issue us Soviet citizenship, I mean Soviet passports.
- But that they would give us those special documents
- called a permit to dwell in the Soviet Union
- for people of foreign nationality.
- What we were supposed to do is to register with the police
- every three months and to notify them of any change of address.
- But other than that, I was not--
- since the Polish army was gone, I
- was not drafted into the Soviet Army
- even though I was already of age.
- And I was not drafted into the Polish Army, which
- was formed later on by the Russians themselves, which
- was the Communist Polish Army, which entered Poland together
- with the Russian troops.
- And which also saw a great deal of life loss en route.
- So this is why I keep harping on this question of completely
- unforeseen coincidental circumstances, which
- really amount to nothing else but pure, sheer luck.
- And as a result, not only did I survive
- this war coming from this hell, which was the place where
- it all started, but I also never served in any army from the day
- was born until the day I die.
- You know, it's very unusual.
- When did you find out about the Holocaust?
- Well, that was really not until much later.
- We didn't know much about it.
- Except, you see--
- Sorry.
- There's--
- Once we get rolling, we have to take that glass.
- Where were you?
- And when did you find out about the Holocaust?
- And how did you respond?
- Well, I found out about the Holocaust in all the details
- only after I came to this country, which was in 1946.
- But as I begin telling you, we developed a habit
- of not trusting Russian press and not
- trusting Russian stories.
- And the Russian press was reporting much of it.
- Not all of it, but much of it, they did report.
- I don't remember any Russian mention of Auschwitz,
- for instance.
- I don't know whether they knew about it.
- They must have known about it, but they did not
- write about it, specifically.
- They wanted the war to be their war,
- to be what they call the Patriotic War.
- And this was the important issue.
- And the Final Solution, the killing of the Jews,
- was absolutely secondary.
- Because this-- they probably felt
- that this would diminish their role in that war.
- They saw themselves as the central power
- of fighting Hitler.
- And in many ways, they were because they actually
- defeated Hitler.
- I mean, bombing helped from the West.
- But you know, we know very well that bombing until now doesn't
- do very much to help the cause.
- So the Russians were dying by the millions.
- And they were fighting the Germans
- throughout the length of the Russian front.
- Immense lengths from up north from Leningrad
- down to down to the Caucasus.
- So part of this was not that they didn't know,
- but they simply didn't want to divert attention from their war
- to somebody else's war.
- This was a war against a beast, Hitler,
- who did not make any distinction between a Russian, a gypsy,
- or a Jew.
- Everybody was scheduled for extermination.
- And they would not play up the Jewish angle for any money,
- you see.
- And this is probably the reason why it was not reported.
- And what was reported, we took with a grain of salt.
- Because we were sort of inured to the propaganda, which
- was constantly being printed in Soviet press.
- So even when they wrote true stories,
- we tended to disbelieve them.
- Especially stories of the Holocaust,
- which tended to be fantastic.
- So when we came to America in 1946,
- my father and his brother, my uncle,
- already knew all about it.
- But they didn't want to let us know earlier in Russia.
- My father knew that my mother's family
- was exterminated in Lwow.
- And well, all our families.
- That is, the Schenkers and my mother's family,
- suffered immensely.
- But especially my mother's family.
- And all this came as a total surprise to us
- as we came to this country.
- What was your reunion like with your father?
- Well, we came-- the reunion with my father.
- We came in an odd way for reasons which perhaps
- are too long to explain.
- We ended up coming on an American liberty
- ship, a freighter that happened to be in Odessa in February,
- 1946.
- We boarded that liberty ship.
- We were the passengers.
- There was a couple of Ukrainians on it,
- and a very young Jewish boy, who was picked up by the Soviet
- Army somewhere and whose father happened to be an American.
- So the seven of us--
- there was some other person, too--
- made this trip on this rather large freighter.
- The trip took one month, through the Mediterranean,
- the Atlantic.
- Lovely weather throughout.
- And we landed.
- We were supposed to land in New York.
- Then it was changed to Virginia.
- And then eventually, we landed in South Carolina,
- in Charleston, South Carolina.
- We docked on April 7, 1946.
- Charleston was like a bouquet of flowers.
- Every Magnolia tree, every tulip tree, everything was in bloom.
- Cherry trees.
- And my first impression of America
- and my expectation for America was
- that it would be nothing but a big bouquet of flowers.
- Well, we went to lunch-- my father was waiting along
- with my cousin.
- There was a reunion.
- You can imagine what kind of reunion it was.
- And we got on the train and went to New York,
- where my father was living.
- And of course, then I realized that not all of America
- is an immense garden.
- --then the reasoning that could soften the blow.
- All right.
- So you see, as far as the separation between my mother
- and me and my father, we had several separations, so to say.
- The first one was caused when we all left Krakow and went
- towards the Eastern frontier hoping that the Germans would
- not get there--
- would not catch up with us.
- Actually, they did not, but the Russians did.
- Then, since my father was a judge,
- he felt threatened under the Russian occupation.
- And he felt that he had to try to get out.
- And this is why he and my uncle left us alone in Lvóv and they
- went to Vilna illegally.
- Let's hang on one second.
- --the separation.
- With a separation, that's right.
- OK.
- The first and the most important separation
- was when my father decided to go to Lithuania with his brother.
- My mother was absolutely beside herself.
- And forever-- you know, I have letters from her
- to my father where she keeps harping on this.
- "I told you that this would be a separation
- and that we would never see each other again."
- Well, it turned out that he was right and not she.
- That if he acted on emotions alone, he would be with us
- and God knows what would have happened to him.
- This way it was better for us because we
- had the certainty of a better life in Russia because of him
- and his brother being already in America.
- And he certainly escaped a great deal of discomfort
- and, who knows, maybe even he would have lost his life
- if he had stayed in Russia.
- So rationally speaking, of course,
- it was the right decision, especially
- knowing with hindsight how it all ended.
- But at the time, it was very difficult.
- And knowing that he was, of course,
- in Vilna and we were in Lvóv, which is not very far.
- There was a border between us, true.
- But we were not too far from each other.
- I have my postcards which I wrote to him at the time from
- Lvóv, and they are perfectly--
- as if he were traveling in some foreign country.
- When we were deported to Russia, then things
- became looking a little bit more hairy.
- And this was sort of the second separation that we had.
- Because we realized that we were now separated, really,
- by hundreds and thousands of miles.
- And especially when they left Lithuania and went to Japan
- and eventually to America--
- well, that was really a separation.
- For us, in those days, this was an unbridgeable gap.
- America was the end of the world.
- And so these were all difficult times.
- And as I looked through my mother's mail to my father,
- I can see every now and then a note of bitterness.
- That we have it-- that's it's so difficult, et cetera.
- And that we should never have done it.
- My father, with all his love for us,
- pretty soon lost the memory of what Russia is like,
- and he would share with us moments of life in America.
- Which made her angry because he was obviously having
- a good time here.
- And so all this was part of those pains,
- what families have to go through when they are separated.
- Little did we know at the time that the whole family--
- all surviving family-- will be reunited in this country.
- So that my two grandmothers came and died here in New York.
- Of course, my mother and I, my aunt and her son,
- who is now a physician in San Antonio, Texas.
- And all other living members of our family
- who happen to be in Europe, they all eventually came.
- So this is why I'm saying that, yes, separations
- are difficult at the time.
- But if you are lucky, it all works out for the best.
- Tell me why your father got Sugihara visas.
- Well, this was all hope that we might
- be able to leave one day in the same way that he did.
- Could you start with my father got to Sugihara visas?
- I'm sorry, yes.
- My father and my uncle got Sugihara visas,
- like so many other people who were living--
- the refugees living in Vilna.
- And he got the same papers for my mother and me
- and from my aunt and her son.
- Because he hoped that eventually we
- would be allowed to leave in the same way
- as my father and my uncle left.
- That is that we would be released from the camp
- and allowed to go to Japan, and then from Japan to America.
- Well, this was a pipe dream.
- But one lived on pipe dreams in those days.
- This is why he got us this Argentinian visa.
- This is why he got us the Chilean citizenship.
- All this ended without any success.
- But it was all part of the same pattern--
- to do everything, to leave no corner
- unturned in order to help the families which were
- in this situation in Russia.
- How do you--
- I mean, obviously your life in America
- has been very successful.
- How do you reconcile the life you had?
- Well, you know the thought of the six
- years of the war and my experiences there
- and my existence in this country and my career in this country
- make me feel completely like a schizo.
- That is, I have lived to absolutely separate existences.
- And, very often, I feel that I am two persons.
- That my existence in Russia is something which I cannot
- connect in any way with what I'm doing now.
- That is, my existence in Russia-- note,
- I have used my Russian experience in my profession.
- But I mean on a personal level, my life in Russia
- and my life in this country are two entirely different things.
- Not just different settings, but different actors,
- Two different persons in these two different settings.
- So it's an odd-- it doesn't make it difficult for me.
- I mean, I'm not a schizo in this sense.
- But it is a funny feeling when you think of yourself
- as somebody else.
- [COUGHS] I'm sorry.
- I've got a cold.
- Any questions from you guys?
- I think that was--
- You rolling in?
- I am.
- Room tone for Professor Schenker.
- End room tone.
Overview
- Interviewee
- Mr. Alexander M. Schenker
- Date
-
interview:
1999 June 21
Physical Details
- Language
- English
- Extent
-
4 videocassettes (Betacam SP) : sound, color ; 1/2 in..
Rights & Restrictions
- Conditions on Access
- There are no known restrictions on access to this material.
- Conditions on Use
- No restrictions on use
Keywords & Subjects
- Personal Name
- Schenker, Alexander.
Administrative Notes
- Holder of Originals
-
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
- Legal Status
- Permanent Collection
- Provenance
- Firstlight Pictures, a film production company contractor for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, conducted the interview with Alexander Schenker on June 21, 1999 in preparation for the exhibition, "Flight & Rescue." The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives received the tapes of the interview from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Exhibitions Division in June, 1999
- Funding Note
- The cataloging of this oral history interview has been supported by a grant from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.
- Special Collection
-
The Jeff and Toby Herr Oral History Archive
- Record last modified:
- 2023-11-16 08:57:00
- This page:
- https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn508240
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Contains oral history interviews with twenty Holocaust survivors and witnesses recorded in preparation for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's exhibition, "Flight and Rescue," which opened May 3, 2000. The interviewees discuss their experiences of their journey from Lithuania to Shanghai, China, via Japan
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