Signed testimony of Doris Fedrid
Transcript
- We're going right now.
- The Surviving Generations of The Holocaust
- based in Seattle, Washington, has
- taken on the project of videotaping eyewitness accounts
- of the Holocaust from those individuals who survived
- the Nazi reign of terror.
- Millions of people were annihilated
- just because they were Jewish.
- The goals of this project are first to educate
- the current and future generations about the Holocaust
- with the hope that those who learn what happened
- will not allow it to happen again,
- never again, to any group of people;
- second, to refute false allegations by neo-Nazis
- and revisionist historians that the Holocaust never occurred;
- and third, to refute the commonly held notion
- that the Jewish people offered little, if any, resistance
- to the Nazis.
- The voices of the dead are silent.
- The voices of the survivors must live on forever.
- My name is Carl Berkenwald.
- Today, I am interviewing Mrs. Doris Fedrid,
- a Holocaust survivor who was born in Tarnopol, Poland.
- Mrs. Fedrid is deaf and blind.
- Sitting to her left and to the viewers' right
- is her daughter, Eleanor Fedrid, who will
- interpret by tactile signing.
- Both Eleanor and her mother use American Sign Language.
- Mrs. Fedrid, in order to put your experiences
- in some perspective, I would first
- like to ask you some questions about your life
- before World War II.
- Where I lived in--
- Before World-- as far as where I lived, in Tarnopol?
- Yes, we'll start by me asking, what is your full name?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Dora Rosenstrauch.
- That was your given name before the war.
- Is that right?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Yes.
- When were you born?
- And so then we moved to the United States.
- I changed the name, and we shortened it.
- I see.
- When were you born?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- June 26, 1927.
- And in what city and country were you born?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Tarnopol.
- In Poland.
- Is Tarnopol still part of Poland?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- No, it's Russia now.
- Could you say what part of the Soviet Union it's in now?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Gosh, I can't spell right.
- It's near Kiev.
- That's right.
- That's a sign for it.
- That's the Russian sign for Kiev.
- I see.
- Do you happen to remember your home address?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- It's 13.
- S-I-E-N-K-I-E-W-I-W-I-C-Z-A [INAUDIBLE] Street.
- That's a street.
- Could you describe Tarnopol a little bit,
- what you remember of it?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE].
- It was a real nice town.
- There were lots of parks.
- There was a church that was near us.
- It was a small street.
- You know, it's like Fifth Avenue.
- It was Main Street.
- It's Mickiewicz Street to Third May.
- And that was the downtown areas.
- It was very fancy shops.
- But it was a small town, just small shops.
- And there was a market that was further south.
- There were many people who were there in the summertime.
- There was vegetables and clothes,
- lots of different things.
- In the wintertime, it was clothes because the rain, snow,
- and it's frozen.
- Was there a large Jewish community in Tarnopol?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- There were some Jewish people.
- Mostly Catholics.
- Mostly Catholics.
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- There was different people.
- Some people hated the Jews.
- They would harass and tease and break the windows and--
- Were the Gentiles in the community
- mostly Polish or Ukrainian, or was there a mixture?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Both.
- It was a mixture of both.
- I see.
- What were your parents' names?
- Mother, [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE].
- Mother's name was Leah Rosenstrauch.
- Father's name is David Rosenstrauch.
- What occupations did they have in Tarnopol?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- He was a grain merchant.
- Bubbe was a homemaker.
- She was a housewife, actually.
- She did all the baking and all the cooking.
- She worked very hard.
- I had servants take care of me as I was growing up.
- "Bubbe" is a Yiddish word for grandmother.
- I take it that when you refer to Bubbe,
- you're referring to your mother and to Eleanor's grandmother?
- Bubbe, [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE].
- Yeah.
- That's right.
- OK.
- Do you have any brothers or sisters?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- I have one sister.
- Her name's Esther.
- Was she born before the war?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- No.
- She was born during the Nazis.
- It was very bad then.
- It just happened.
- Had your family lived in Tarnopol a long time?
- My family, [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE].
- I was born there, and I grew up there.
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Bubbe lived in a small village.
- That's where she grew up, [? Zavoz. ?] And my father--
- and they lived in a farm before, and then they
- moved into the town.
- They built the house there.
- Did you have many other relatives who lived in the area
- when you were growing up?
- I have [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE].
- Yeah, I had lots of cousins.
- I had Sala, who now is in Canada, and I had other family.
- And Uncle Abraham.
- That was my father's brother.
- And Uncle Itzik.
- They lived in Tarnopol.
- And they escaped.
- And they were killed by Russians.
- My father wished they had gone [? with ?] them to the Russians.
- But his father said no.
- They were wanting to take care of the house, so we stayed.
- It was too late.
- And how many of your grandparents
- were living there at the time?
- Live [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE].
- My grandmother and grandfather, we all lived in the house
- together.
- And we had the servants.
- Everybody lived in the house together.
- There were separate bedrooms.
- Family stayed.
- We had the cousins that lived with us.
- And it was just the whole family was with us.
- About how many people were there living in the house?
- Let's see.
- There were four of us.
- There was me.
- There were eight of us.
- How would you describe your family's standard--
- And we had servants.
- Excuse me.
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- When we didn't go to school.
- When I went to school, they stopped.
- But there was still the other servant to help clean.
- Family.
- Family [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE].
- We were middle class.
- You anticipated the rest of my question
- about your family's standard of living.
- OK.
- You know, we had to split everything
- up as far as the profits that they received from the grain
- business.
- They split in the family.
- Did you have any leisure activities or hobbies?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- I learned how to knit.
- And summertime vacation, we'd go visit my mother's mother
- and her farm.
- And I'd be on the boat.
- And we enjoyed doing those kinds of things in the summer.
- And when I was in Lwow, I liked that better.
- I mean, there were problems there, certainly.
- But that was interesting, too.
- What was the level of religious observance in your home?
- My grandmother--
- Yes, my grandmother, my mother and father, yes, they
- were Orthodox.
- The family practiced, and they were Orthodox.
- They kept kosher, then, I take it?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Yes.
- Uh-huh.
- Mm-hmm.
- What language was spoken in the home?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE] family.
- Family spoke Yiddish, Polish some.
- They both knew a bit of both.
- Not me, though.
- I didn't know anything of Yiddish.
- Yeah, you know that I don't know Yiddish.
- But we spoke Polish at home.
- Have you been deaf since birth?
- I really don't know.
- I mean, they think that I was sick when I was two.
- I mean, we really don't know what it was from.
- Were there any other family members
- that you know of who were deaf?
- Family [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE].
- There was one, grandmother's uncle.
- Well, grandmother's brother.
- He was deaf.
- Let's see.
- What kind of education did you receive?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Yeah, I went to a Polish school.
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Yeah, we learned Hebrew and English--
- I mean, Polish together.
- Mostly, it was Polish.
- They changed things.
- We didn't learn Hebrew itself.
- What they taught us--
- you know, they taught us about the holidays and about Passover.
- And they translated things into Polish for us
- because that's the language that we knew.
- Was that a school for the deaf?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Yes, we were all deaf.
- Where was the school located?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- It was in Lwow.
- I see.
- What years did you attend?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- 1934, when I was seven.
- Started in the fall.
- September 1 and 2.
- That's when we always started school.
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- We'd always come home Passover, then go back, and then go back
- in the summer and winter.
- Last year.
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Till 1939.
- That's when the Polish lost the area,
- and then we had to go through with the Russians
- because they took it over.
- And so they took it over 1940.
- But then after a while, I couldn't take it anymore.
- I had a real bad rash, and I was just real sick.
- I just couldn't handle the stress.
- The Russians were very dirty.
- They didn't wash.
- I didn't like it.
- I got real sick.
- And it was safe that I did get sick
- and had to go back home, because after that, the war really
- broke out with the Germans taking over.
- But it was really bad.
- It was really bad with my body.
- It was May 5 I went home, 1940.
- 1941.
- Before the Russians took over the school, was there a name?
- Did the school have a name?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- [? Kohane. ?] That was the name.
- It was a building.
- It was like a yeshiva.
- And the deaf kids were upstairs.
- The yeshiva was in the main part of the building.
- There were only a few of us.
- There were 50 Jewish staff, 30 to 50, somewhere in there.
- And they had the younger kids move in.
- Mostly it was about 50.
- What kind of communication--
- They were all from different countries, too.
- Some of them lived at home.
- Some of them boarded in the city, and they shared rooms.
- Just different.
- What kind of communication were you taught there?
- By that, I mean, was it lip reading or sign language
- or some other method?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- It was all lip reading.
- We couldn't sign.
- We were punished badly.
- Our hands were hit.
- And they would sometimes-- if they caught us signing,
- they would hit our hands with wood,
- or they'd tie our hands behind our back.
- Sometimes the teachers would tie them, our hands behind our back.
- It was very harsh.
- When you did that kind of signing with other students,
- was that something you had just developed on your own
- with each other?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Yeah, it was just some home signs.
- So it wasn't really a formal language.
- Yeah, we had different signs.
- We also had some of the Russian signs.
- When the Russians came in, I could learn more signs.
- But that wasn't for very long, and I
- had to learn all over again.
- That's A, B, C. Oh, I can't remember them.
- With regard to the lip reading that you were taught,
- were you taught each sound on the lips
- or what a whole word would look like?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- OK, so it's every letter, every sound.
- But it wasn't words.
- And that was a B. And they made us work with a mirror
- and showed us how the different sounds were
- in different parts of our face.
- And they had to show us that the G was down below and the B and--
- those were so hard to do.
- They made us do it over and over and over again.
- Then I had a tutor at home on Saturdays.
- And I just didn't understand.
- It wasn't clear.
- I tried to work on it.
- It just wasn't clear.
- I just had no patience for lip reading.
- With the lip reading that you were taught,
- how much did you recall or do you
- think you were able to understand of what
- you were trying to read?
- Half of it or--
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Well, it was kind of hard.
- I mean, if people would speak clearly, that would be fine.
- But if people exaggerated their mouth, that was hard.
- But if men had beards or mustaches,
- I couldn't understand.
- Or with some of the rabbis, when they came visited,
- I couldn't understand anything they
- were saying because they had the hair all over their face.
- It was really hard.
- Were you also taught to vocalize?
- Yes, uh-huh, with our voice, too.
- We had to.
- Teacher said we had to.
- And we didn't want to.
- They would watch us, and they'd be sure
- that we were using our voices.
- And did you say that religious instruction was
- included in your studies there?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Yeah, they taught us about the different holidays.
- Oh, and geography.
- They taught us about the Torah a little bit
- and history and about biology and math.
- And I loved math.
- That was my favorite.
- Do you happen to remember--
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- And there were lots of sentences.
- I mean, I had a hard time with doing language.
- That was hard for me.
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Do you happen to remember the names of any particular teacher
- that you may have had?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Rebecca Tomas.
- That was our sign for her.
- It's like she was mad, because they said she was always mad.
- So that was her name sign is that she was always mad.
- Shh.
- The mad person's coming.
- That's how we would sign to each other.
- Among the deaf students, were boys
- prepared to become bar mitzvah in your school?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- The hearing were, yeah.
- Yeah.
- My cousins.
- But not the deaf.
- I don't understand.
- We never understood why they never taught the deaf.
- They said, eh, you don't need to.
- They told us we didn't have to.
- Many of the boys who grow up, they get older,
- and they never had the opportunity.
- I saw my hearing cousin.
- There was a party for them.
- How did you and members of your family communicate at home?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Lip reading.
- Lip reading.
- But see, my father would tell me to lower my voice, lower it.
- The teachers never told me.
- They never corrected me.
- And Eleanor, you tell me, too.
- And my father told me, too, to lower it.
- And then I'd understand because my voice
- tends to be pretty high.
- I don't feel it.
- I can't hear it.
- I don't know.
- It's hard.
- The teacher didn't explain things.
- They were so dumb.
- Did anyone who lived at home, any of your cousins
- or extended family, know how to sign at all?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Esia, Rusia, yeah.
- We signed together.
- Those are my cousins.
- The three of us would sign together.
- But nobody else.
- Not Grandmother?
- No.
- No.
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Grandmother Esther, before I went to school, she would sign.
- And she would show me different things.
- And she would have the sign for Bubbe
- as far as, this is Grandmother.
- And they'd have different signs.
- And this is Zayde's sign because he had the cigarettes,
- because he used to smoke.
- And this was the sign for Grandfather
- until I went to school.
- Then she stopped.
- She was much happier that I learned lip reading.
- The cousins that you mentioned, were they deaf?
- Or they just learned signing because you all lived together?
- No, they were hearing.
- No, they were hearing.
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- They would tell me all the gossip.
- What kind of relationship did your family
- have with Gentiles in your town?
- Family [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE].
- Yeah, they talked with some people.
- My father was friends with a lot of different farmers.
- He was good.
- He was nice with any of his friends.
- It was for the business purposes.
- Was there any antisemitism in Tarnopol in the pre-war years?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Yeah, a little bit.
- Some.
- I mean, there were some problems sometimes.
- When I was in Lwow in my home, my cousin's home,
- there was problems there.
- They would harass, and they would tease Jews.
- It was a problem more in Lwow than in Tarnopol.
- I remember seeing that when I was a little girl.
- It was pretty bad.
- Do you remember any incidents?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- You see, sometimes at night, I'd hear different things,
- things like shootings or--
- people would have shot a Jewish person.
- They would be against some of the people that might be rich.
- There might be apartments next door.
- There might be shootings.
- This is the area my cousin lived in.
- I was small.
- I'd get so scared, my heart would start shaking.
- I mean, I would hear these shots, and I wouldn't know.
- Did you feel any discrimination as a deaf person
- growing up in Tarnopol or when you were living in Lwow?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- People didn't like deaf people.
- They didn't like the way we acted.
- They would tease us, and they'd harass us.
- And it was hard.
- I'd be afraid of that, too.
- I had to be careful where I went.
- And sometimes I'd worry.
- I'd see if my hearing friends would help.
- I'd play with the nice hearing girl that lived next door.
- And they'd say, oh, that she'd heard that somebody else
- hated deaf people.
- And I'd say, oh, I feel kind of bad, and I hold it in.
- It didn't feel real good.
- The girl, my friend's name was Aida.
- And she told me.
- She was real nice.
- She was a Catholic.
- I'd like to move now to the war period.
- When the Germans invaded Poland in September of 1939,
- did they come to the area where you lived?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- No, no.
- The Russians were there in 1939.
- They were there first.
- The Poles lost our part of the country.
- It was September, the first or second week of September.
- That's when the Russians took it over.
- How did the Russian takeover affect your family?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- They took the things from people but--
- your family, the Russians.
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- No, our family was OK.
- But the wealthier families, the people who were really wealthy,
- yeah, from my grandmother's brother, they took his things.
- And her last name was Berger.
- They took their possessions.
- It was her brother.
- But for us, no, they left us alone.
- Was your father allowed to keep his grain business?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- No.
- The Russians didn't let the-- so we lost that.
- So he changed.
- He did something.
- He was working in a warehouse putting things together.
- The Russians took that all over.
- They took their things and took the horses.
- Yeah, it wasn't good.
- That was the first time that they started taking our things.
- They took our furs and all of our different possessions.
- It was bad.
- It was bad.
- And did you say you did continue your schooling for about a year
- after the Russians took over?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Yeah, just a year.
- That was it.
- When did you finish that schooling and move back home?
- I got sick.
- I was sick so many times.
- I was so nervous with the Russians
- because they were so strict.
- And I keep coming back and forth home from school.
- I stopped in 1941.
- See, that was when the Germans were coming in.
- And the Russians had lost.
- And so it was safe.
- I mean, I came home.
- I had been sick before.
- And then shortly thereafter, the Germans moved in.
- After that, from '41, I haven't been in school.
- Nothing like that anymore.
- I lost all my education.
- I never finished school.
- Were you in Tarnopol when--
- [CLEARS THROAT] excuse me-- when the Germans invaded the Soviet
- Union in June of '41?
- Tarnopol.
- Yes, uh-huh, that's right.
- It was June.
- It was the end of June.
- That's when the Germans came in.
- That's right.
- Mm-hmm.
- What happened to your family after that?
- Family, [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE].
- That was 1941.
- June.
- It was the 29th.
- That was a Sunday.
- That was a Sunday night.
- My father told me.
- He heard that the Germans were coming in,
- that the troops were marching in.
- And we were afraid.
- So we stayed at Silverman's home for a while.
- We couldn't stay in our own home because the water was flooding
- the basement, so we stayed at our neighbor's house
- to hide because of the bombs.
- We heard that the Germans were coming.
- So then Monday, things seemed quiet.
- We went home.
- And then my grandfather was afraid, didn't know,
- felt kind of bad.
- And my family really didn't know what to do.
- Silverman was kind of mad.
- See, that was Monday.
- Then Tuesday, we stayed in our house for the week.
- We were home.
- We could still see the troops coming in, see from the window
- that they were still coming in.
- Boy, there were so many.
- And so Grandfather's pretty nervous.
- He was not comfortable.
- He was kind of restless.
- There was a bedroom right there.
- We could see from the window.
- I didn't feel comfortable there.
- So I moved into the kitchen, sat on the bench
- by the window on the west side.
- I was doing my work.
- And I saw nobody was around.
- I looked around, and everybody was gone.
- So I went around and looked towards the hallway,
- and I told Grandfather to move.
- And he said, ah, don't worry about it.
- He was kind of mad.
- He said, nah, they're crazy.
- Leave them.
- I don't care.
- And so I went back.
- And then the Nazis had their gun at me.
- And Grandfather said, no, don't shoot her.
- Instead, they shot him.
- And then another four of the SS came in.
- And they were wanting to hurt me, but they all came in.
- So there were lots of women.
- They made them line up, all the neighbors.
- Let's see, one, two, three.
- All together, there were eight women and me.
- We were all lined up.
- And they were saying something.
- They were listening to something that was being said.
- So they opened the basement door and looked down.
- There was the water that was flooded in there.
- And they took me, and they threw me and pushed me in there.
- And then Bubbe held me.
- And we all went down there.
- They pushed us all in, so all the people went in there.
- And we got all wet.
- We were all soaking wet.
- We had to go underneath it.
- We thought that it'd be safer.
- So there was a woman with a baby that was crying and screaming.
- That wasn't going to work.
- So they let them know that the Nazis were gone.
- So then we all got up, and we walked out
- and changed our clothes and thought, we better leave.
- We were just too afraid.
- We were afraid that the Nazis were going
- to come back and come in again.
- So my mother and I, we went out.
- We left.
- And we jumped out into the back.
- We didn't want to see my grandfather.
- He'd been shot and killed.
- So we went out.
- So we went to a friend, a neighbor.
- She was Catholic.
- Bubbe and I went in there, and we asked them.
- We could see that she didn't like Jewish people,
- that she was afraid.
- So we didn't stay.
- We left.
- We tried another friend.
- We said, please, could we stay with you for a while?
- And they said, OK, that's fine.
- You can come in, sit, sit for a while.
- So then we stayed there for a day,
- and then they changed their mind.
- They said, I'm sorry.
- You need to leave.
- So we left.
- And we walked.
- And then we saw a good friend of my father's.
- I remember that was Saturday.
- That's right.
- And we were visiting.
- We went to see Silverman again.
- And we saw that there was problems,
- that there were all these people standing around.
- We didn't know what was wrong.
- Bubbe didn't feel good.
- She was asleep.
- She was very tired.
- And so I saw that people were standing there.
- So I woke Bubbe up and said, what's going on?
- I see all these people standing around together.
- What is it?
- They're talking about something.
- So Bubbe got up.
- She went around, and we talked.
- And then we decided we had to leave
- because we didn't know where Bubbe's mother was, where Miriam
- was.
- She was gone someplace.
- We didn't know.
- So Bubbe was afraid, so we went out.
- We saw that friend, my father's friend.
- We stayed there overnight until Sunday.
- Then we thought we had to leave again.
- We thought we better go home.
- Bubbe just changed her mind, didn't want to stay,
- didn't know where her mother was, couldn't find her mother.
- So I thought, maybe she went back to their own home.
- So we went back into the house.
- I saw that Grandmother Miriam was there, and Wolff was there.
- So we talked.
- That's right, it was Monday.
- And then Zayde, my father, was very sad.
- And he sat because they saw that his father had been murdered.
- They put him in the garden for a while
- and buried him just for a while.
- So my father was very sad.
- So we stayed at Silverman's house.
- And we just heard that there was still war,
- and there was bombing.
- That was really hard, and we were so afraid.
- There was a hallway.
- And we didn't want to bother Silverman because she
- was feeling kind of impatient.
- So we decided we'd stay at Silverman's house for a while.
- I remember that was Thursday by now.
- Bubbe kept saying, you know, where's my mother?
- So I thought, OK.
- So Miriam wanted to see what was going on.
- So I'd go back to the house.
- So we went back, went down the steps, went down.
- And suddenly I felt somebody pull me.
- The Ukraine and the army, they grabbed me.
- And we had to go back up.
- And then I saw Wolff, and they got mad,
- and they hit me very badly.
- Oh, Wolff hit me.
- He thought that it was my fault, that I told them, showed them
- where we were.
- And I said, no, I had just gone downstairs, and they caught me.
- What are you getting mad at me for?
- It wasn't my fault. But he got mad at me.
- Bubbe was in bed.
- And my father saw.
- He knew that it wasn't my fault. He knew not to blame me.
- So they called all the men.
- They called Wolff and my father, and there were the two neighbor
- men and Silverman.
- There were five men.
- And I got scared.
- I thought, oh, no.
- I told my mother, they're all going.
- And Bubbe saw.
- They thought, why?
- What is this?
- They said they have to take them to work.
- So Bubbe was upset.
- So we got dressed, and we went home and told Grandmother Miriam
- that they all went out to work.
- We don't know where they are.
- They came home in the afternoon.
- Father came home.
- He came home alone.
- We were relieved.
- They wanted to know where Wolff was.
- Where's Bubbe's brother, whose name is Wolff?
- Where is he?
- We were there for a week, two weeks.
- They said that he was working moving furniture
- because they were just taking people's possessions.
- I mean, there had been all these young men
- that they lined up all the men.
- They selected the younger ones.
- There were so many that they separated them out.
- I didn't know what happened with them.
- And then we found out.
- There was the gossip, and people talked.
- Grandfather's sister, who was a stepsister,
- let them know that he was killed,
- let them know that her son was killed.
- It was very bad.
- They already buried them.
- And my mother's brother, Wolff, him, too.
- They lied.
- They said, oh, that they're over there working, that they had
- to deliver food and clothing.
- But it was for nothing.
- It wasn't true.
- It was bad.
- Then my father's niece, Sala, went with them.
- And so they didn't want to go alone,
- so they went and saw that he was buried.
- It was sad.
- At that time, we were ordered to move into the ghetto.
- And then we had to take out my grandfather's body.
- He alone did it all by himself.
- There were all these people who were standing and watching.
- And I was so afraid.
- I was in the bedroom.
- I was so afraid.
- I was so nervous.
- Bubbe was afraid, too.
- They didn't want them to see.
- I just didn't want them to kill my father because they were--
- I wanted to help him, but we couldn't help him.
- He had to do it alone.
- He had to take out the body from there, dig it out, take him.
- And he was just in material and cloth.
- It wasn't in an actual casket.
- There was no way to keep him comfortable.
- We felt so bad.
- So we put him in the cart with the horse.
- And they took him away.
- So I felt relieved.
- Then when my father came back home,
- we saw that he was all dirty, just very wet, soaking wet.
- I just felt so bad for him.
- So he took him to the cemetery and buried
- him next to his mother.
- And then a couple of weeks, we had to move.
- October 22, we had to move into the ghetto.
- Could I ask a question just before we discuss the ghetto?
- What was your grandfather's name?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Shulem.
- And in English, it'd be Sheldon.
- But in Hebrew, we'd call him Shulem.
- About how old was when he was killed?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Let's see.
- Grandmother told me that he was--
- he must've been 74, 75.
- He was four years younger than Grandmother, his wife.
- Grandmother was older than him.
- So about 74.
- I wanted to ask you just a couple more questions
- before discussing the ghetto.
- Were any special rules prior to the ghetto
- imposed on the Jewish population,
- such as wearing of any clothing or anything like that?
- Yeah, we have the couple bands.
- Oh, fast.
- There were armbands.
- There was a white one with blue and yellow, and there was the--
- we had to sew them on there.
- Bubbe sewed them on there with the Jewish star.
- Some people didn't have nice ones,
- but Bubbe made us a nice one.
- It was a nice Jewish star.
- Some people just took it off and would go around without it.
- A lot of people did.
- A lot of times, when we were the three of us
- and we weren't allowed to go in some place,
- we didn't know what to do.
- So I would just go in.
- We'd just have one at a time.
- Did any of the Gentile population
- help the Nazis during the period before the ghetto was set up?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Do you mean the Polish or the Ukraine?
- Yes, the Ukraine helped them.
- The Polish, no.
- The Poles hated the Germans, too.
- But the Ukraine helped them.
- What kind of help do you mean?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Oh, they worked for them.
- They were with them.
- They joined up with them.
- They were collaborators.
- They honored them.
- They had respect for them.
- You mentioned the ghetto.
- Did the Nazis establish a ghetto in Tarnopol?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Yes, that's right.
- Oh, and there are so many people who came in
- from all different countries.
- We didn't even know who so many of those people were.
- So many people.
- When was the ghetto set up?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- October 22, 1941.
- Then they put up the fences.
- And where was it located?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- No, it wasn't near my home.
- It was far.
- It was at the south part.
- It was near where my cousin, who now lives in Canada--
- it was near her home.
- It was in the south part of the city.
- What is your cousin's name?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- It was very far.
- We had to go very far.
- Yes, Sala [? Trzewinski. ?] But I
- wish she could come and tell her story.
- But her name is-- she changed her name to Mary.
- How were Jews brought into the ghetto?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Need clarification.
- Do you mean how did they physically move into there,
- or how did the Nazis find out who was Jewish to move in there?
- Actually, may as well cover both.
- But first, how physically were they brought in?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- We had to switch with the Catholics.
- We had to go into their homes.
- And they came in.
- So they used to have those small, little houses, these row
- houses with gardens.
- There was a lot of food there we got to take.
- It was really nice.
- There was potatoes, carrots, cabbage,
- lots of different things.
- And in asking for clarification, you
- mentioned the identification of Jews.
- So how did the Nazis identify Jews?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Well, mostly by our faces.
- They'd see the rabbis, if they have the payots.
- They'd see with the faces.
- A lot of the Catholics would tell, some who hated them.
- They wanted to help the Nazis.
- They'd show off.
- And they would tell them who was Jewish.
- There was a neighbor there on my street.
- They didn't like Jewish people turned out, and then
- in their church, their priest.
- He told the Nazis who the Jews were.
- Do you remember the name of the neighbor, by any chance?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- No, mm-mm.
- I would see them all the time.
- I'd see them when I was growing up because the church was right
- there, and that was his church.
- With his collar, black, it was very impressive.
- And how did you and your family--
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE] family.
- Go ahead.
- OK, how did you and your family go into the ghetto?
- And where did you live?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Well, see, our name was on the list.
- And so the government had our name on the list.
- And so we had to switch.
- Yeah, we had to move our things.
- We had to take them.
- We had to pack them up.
- And we had to move into the capital.
- So basically, we switched.
- Same thing happened with our neighbors.
- A lot of Jewish people around, they
- had to switch into the smaller Catholics' homes.
- What were your living arrangements in the ghetto?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- What do you mean "living arrangements?"
- Well, what kind of building or house did you live in?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- It was myself, my mother and father,
- and there were three of us.
- Grandmother Miriam and Sylvia, so there was the five of us.
- And then later, when we moved to the second place in the ghetto,
- Sala got sick.
- And so she had to stay for a while,
- and we had to comfort her for two or three months.
- Then she left.
- You mentioned Sylvia.
- Who was that?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- She had been living with Grandmother Miriam.
- And then when Grandmother Miriam came in, Sylvia followed.
- There was three of them.
- Cohen, Laurie.
- There was three of them.
- So they lived there for a while.
- The other two, they became military.
- They were collaborators.
- And they knew.
- "Military" means help Nazis?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- For who?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- OK.
- They were in the Jewish council.
- Oh, and they would punish any Jews who would escape.
- They didn't kill them.
- But some, they would help on their friends.
- They would help their friends out.
- So they helped Sylvia.
- So they would let her know.
- She would see through the night and watch through the night
- and see what was happening.
- It was my turn to watch during the day.
- And Miriam watched during the night.
- And Sylvia helped us watch, too.
- I couldn't see anything at night,
- so I couldn't do at night.
- Were people allowed to leave the ghetto at all during the day
- or at any time?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- No, uh-uh.
- They weren't allowed to.
- You had to get a special permit--
- not a passport, but a permit that the government
- said that you're actually working, that you
- could work back and forth.
- You had to go directly to your destination.
- Some people would pocket their armbands.
- And a year later, when they made it into the camp--
- and Father alone went to work, and then I went later.
- And they would separate the valuables
- and give it to the Nazis.
- We would give them.
- We wanted to stay and work in the camp,
- and they let us do that.
- We bribed them to let us do that.
- It was so hard to hide in the ghetto all the time.
- It was really hard.
- What was life like in the ghetto in terms of the amount of food
- and work, things like that?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE] food.
- Oh, it was really bad.
- There was straw in the bread.
- It was really bad.
- The fish was just dry and so hard.
- And potatoes weren't any good.
- And we had to take carrots.
- We would steal things from people's gardens,
- and it was really bad food.
- We just had the same thing.
- But we heard that the meat was from horses,
- and we weren't going to eat that.
- We just wouldn't.
- We didn't have any meat.
- Some people did, but we wouldn't do it.
- The hard, dried fish, and Bubbe would just
- come up with all these different things.
- She'd come up with potatoes, you know?
- We'd bake the potatoes or put them with carrots.
- But we had no eggs for a long time.
- They were brown.
- The oil was black.
- It was no good.
- And oh, I got such bad cramps.
- And many times, I got very sick.
- It just upset my stomach.
- Did you or either of your parents
- work while you lived in the ghetto?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- He worked outside.
- He worked for the Nazis, for the chief service for the--
- oh, coal.
- He delivered coal.
- He took the coal up, brought it in pails.
- And he had to polish the boots, make them real nice.
- He worked real hard.
- And then later, he changed.
- And he had to work with the water to--
- what was he doing with the water?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Oh, to purify the water for drinking water.
- So it was near the train station.
- They did this by hand.
- They had no machines, no electricity, no nothing,
- no anything to do.
- I mean, if they didn't do that, they'd get mad at them.
- And they'd hit them and punish them.
- So my father would go there.
- But sometimes I'd go, and I'd help.
- Just a man on his own, he had to help and do that.
- And I saw that.
- I went and saw that sometimes.
- And I saw that it was really hard work just
- to keep moving the wheel.
- And another man watched him, from the army, watched him,
- made sure that he did his work.
- I worked in the garden with the different vegetables.
- And I had to water them.
- I had to take water pails up and fill up the pails
- and pour it over.
- And men would get-- the Nazis would get mad at me
- and say I wasn't doing it right.
- And I would just take my time.
- And if it rained, I just stayed inside
- and had to go clean up the potatoes.
- And sometimes I'd get sick.
- I'd get a high fever.
- I wouldn't know what was the matter.
- So I'd sleep on the floor.
- Mother would wake me up, and I'd have
- to see if it was time to go home.
- We couldn't go home alone.
- We had to always go in groups back to the ghetto.
- We'd have to go with the girls.
- We worked with the girls.
- Sometimes the girls would say, oh, she wanted to go home early,
- 2:30.
- Really, we didn't leave until 5:00.
- One time, a girl went on her own to go home early.
- And they killed her.
- So I thought, no, we have to stay with the group.
- So it isn't OK just to go on your own.
- And sometimes, if they said they went home early and maybe
- they told them it was OK to do that, then it wasn't right.
- They were tricking them.
- They would kill them if they left early.
- They were just all--
- basically, what they were doing is
- they were liquidating the ghetto,
- making it smaller and smaller until July.
- And that was when they cut the wire.
- Did the Germans that you came into contact with--
- did any of them know you were deaf?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE] No.
- No, no, no, no, no.
- No, Bubbe helped me.
- I would have to--
- the servants would know.
- Yeah, we would just have to keep constantly
- in touch with each other because I would have to hide and see
- in the-- we did all kinds of things
- to be sure that they would never know that I was deaf.
- They would ask questions.
- There was one time when I hid in the bathroom
- so that they thought that they would find--
- that they didn't find me.
- Sometimes we would tip over the water or something, anything
- to distract the Nazis.
- And we would clean up the water.
- We would do anything.
- I mean, they would ask so many questions.
- I couldn't hear, and I wouldn't know.
- There were so many times Sylvia would help me,
- another woman would help me, Bubbe would help me.
- Do you know of any situations when
- a deaf person was discovered by the Germans in the ghetto?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Yeah.
- There'd be sometimes that they'd call the person.
- Maybe the Nazi would call a person.
- The person turned around, and they talked, and then
- they'd leave.
- But sometimes the person just--
- if the person didn't answer them,
- they thought that the person hated Nazis.
- And so then they killed them.
- That was just the way they were.
- They always had to ask questions.
- Sometimes it would happen that, yeah, they just
- would harass the people.
- There were many deaf--
- I mean, there was one time when it
- happened that there were many deaf women that they killed.
- And there's one time with the older Jewish men.
- They'd pull off the face.
- They'd pull their hair off.
- And it was just very bad.
- Was medical care available to residents in the ghetto?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Oh, no, no, no, no.
- There was nothing.
- I mean, sometimes you'd go and ask a friend.
- One time, Bubbe was very sick with the baby.
- She was in labor.
- When she had the babies, it was like, how
- are we going to do-- there's nobody to help.
- There's no midwife.
- There's nothing.
- There's nobody to help, so we didn't know.
- They'd say didn't worry, that she could just take hot water.
- It was like, hot water?
- We were so surprised.
- We didn't know what--
- I was afraid they were going to kill the baby,
- that they wanted to put the baby in hot water.
- But they just wanted--
- it was just so tight.
- They had no anesthetics at the time.
- Rarely.
- After the war, we found out that there
- was a person who was a doctor-- that our doctor was still alive.
- But not during the ghetto.
- There was no doctor.
- Yeah, we saw that doctor afterwards.
- They saw Esther was Jewish.
- You mentioned a baby.
- Did women have babies in the ghetto?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE] had baby,
- women had baby.
- Yeah, yeah.
- Some, they died.
- Sometimes they were stillborn, though.
- And there were a lot of women who got pregnant.
- Was it permitted by the authorities to have babies?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Well, they wanted to wait and see.
- And then they killed them.
- They'd say, OK, you just have to keep working.
- If you don't want to work, then you have to be killed.
- You still must work even though you're pregnant.
- You still must work.
- You have to do it in the garden, or you
- have to clean up from where the bombs were, the garbage.
- It just awful things that they had to clean up.
- Oh, it smelled so bad.
- I had to work, too.
- I had lots of different jobs with Bubbe.
- Oh, we'd get so tired, such heavy, heavy bricks, just rocks.
- Earlier, you mentioned that your sister was born in the ghetto.
- Would you describe the circumstances?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- She was born in our home.
- She was safe.
- She'd thought she was going have the baby on Saturday,
- didn't work.
- Monday, Tuesday.
- Finally, she was in her room.
- And then Sala told me that they heard that the baby was born.
- Bubbe fainted three times.
- And they took the sheets, and they tied it around and tried
- to keep pulling the baby.
- And they pulled her.
- And they put it around to try and pull.
- And finally, finally, my sister was born.
- Grandmother Miriam and Sylvia, they stayed.
- And they just had a hard time.
- Sala and I stayed apart in a smaller room.
- And then when the baby was finally born, we were happy.
- And it was a girl.
- And that's the sign for "girl."
- What was the date?
- I'm sorry?
- When was she born?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- December 22, 1942.
- Did she live with you and your family
- for the remainder of the time that you were there?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- She was born in the ghetto.
- January seemed OK.
- But February, we had to hide her.
- Bubbe forgot and left her in the bed
- when we went to hide one time.
- I thought, oh my gosh, we forgot Esther.
- And I saw her, and I thought we were locking everything up.
- And we have to open it up.
- I mean, we had to leave the door open to show that we had left
- and we escaped.
- But if we closed the door, they'd be suspicious.
- So we just left it open.
- Bubbe heard people walking.
- She took a pillow, and we put it on top of the baby's face
- instead.
- Miriam just comforted the baby, gave her a little bit
- of medicine to help her sleep.
- Miriam, Bubbe, and me, there's four, five--
- actually, there were 14 people.
- Sylvia never hid.
- My father never hid.
- They never hid.
- I'm going to ask you a few questions in a little bit
- about that, about the hiding.
- But first, I wanted to ask if you were ever
- personally mistreated while you were in the ghetto.
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- At my father's work, the people asked him to do some--
- they had to wash the military's clothing.
- So I went in there, and I--
- in our first ghetto home.
- So there were a couple of them, myself and Sylvia and Miriam.
- We were all washing clothes.
- Oh, a lot of times, that we'd do that.
- And then we'd have to hang the clothes
- on the line for the Nazis.
- And then the next day, we'd have to have an iron, press it.
- Bubbe asked if I could help.
- I said, OK.
- I went up.
- It wasn't stairs.
- It was a ladder.
- And then there was nobody there because I had gone
- to take care of everything.
- And when I got back where the women were supposed to be,
- nobody was there.
- So I went back down.
- And I saw that the roof was totally open.
- And so it was easy.
- They'd just come in.
- Yeah, they'd come in.
- And I told my mother, there's nobody there.
- I just thought, oh, no.
- So Bubbe fainted.
- And Miriam tried to get her up.
- We didn't know what to do.
- So Father came home.
- We didn't know what to do.
- Somebody stole our things, all of our things--
- oh, all the uniforms, all the Nazis' clothing and everything.
- So we didn't know what to do.
- So the next day, my father let them know.
- The police came in with their dogs, and they came in to look.
- And they came all the way around.
- And I went outside to go look to see where they were going.
- They were going up inside the roof and everything.
- And they found-- it was on the very top--
- they found a hat.
- And they went across to the lake.
- And the dogs stood there at the lake.
- That was where it was.
- And I thought, oh, so they went through the lake.
- And they'd gone that way.
- So they probably went across.
- Oh, the dogs were so smart.
- So they didn't blame us that we stole.
- So they stopped bringing it there.
- So then we had to go work over there.
- So we couldn't bring it to our home anymore.
- We had to bring it there.
- So we had to bring the bathtub there.
- We had to stand and kneel.
- And it hurt our backs.
- And there was one time Bubbe didn't feel good.
- So I was helping her.
- She was pregnant during that time.
- And a man came in.
- There was another man, a [? Nazi ?] man.
- And they let my father knew that they
- were going to hurt the Jewish people again.
- Eleanor, we're going to have change tape in order to--
- yeah.
- We'll finish but after we take a very brief break to change tape.
- I'm sorry to interrupt.
- OK.
- Yeah.
- They have to change the tape.
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- OK.
- OK, before we took the break, you
- were discussing mistreatment of yourself.
- I'm wondering, did you ever observe mistreatment of others
- while you lived in the ghetto?
- Oh, yes, uh-huh.
- And we were all afraid.
- If we saw them coming close to us-- and they
- would always be looking at us.
- And I'd go with Sylvia but--
- mostly, I would go with Sylvia.
- I couldn't go alone, but we knew that they hurt people.
- Did you see it any time?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Oh, they would hit the people.
- They'd hit them.
- They'd kill them.
- They'd push them.
- Threw their bag.
- People would fall over.
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Oh, I would run home if I saw that.
- I would just hurry and want to go home.
- I didn't want to be there anymore.
- Was it particularly dangerous for religious Jews?
- Oh, it was bad.
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Well, they killed them.
- They killed them right away.
- They'd make them go to work and have them come out,
- and they'd go into their homes every day.
- People were afraid.
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Sometimes they would actually just pull the payots
- off their face, and so the hair had been pulled off the face.
- So they'd be bleeding, or they pulled the hair off their head,
- and it would just bleed.
- Were there any-- do you remember any incidents
- when Jews were rounded up and killed
- or wounded while in the ghetto?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- What they'd do is they'd surprise them.
- You wouldn't know that it was going to happen.
- First time, we didn't know, but we were safe each time.
- But they kept taking things.
- They kept taking our places and our possessions.
- But they would round the people up,
- and then they would kill them.
- Did the Germans have any help in policing the ghetto for many
- of the Jewish inhabitants?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Well, the military, that was what they'd call--
- they told people that they had to work,
- and if they wouldn't work, then they would be killed.
- I mean, they have to do that.
- So if they didn't do their part, then the Nazis would kill them.
- But the same thing with us, though, until the very end.
- That was it.
- Were people who were forced into that kind of work,
- was that the type of work that the two friends of Sylvia
- did that you referred to earlier?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Yeah, that's what they did.
- Mm-hmm.
- That was Kolb and Lauria.
- And then there was another man too,
- but I don't remember his name.
- What was the--
- And he was red.
- I mean, he was part of the red group.
- It was the three of them.
- They worked together.
- Where we're Kalb and Lauria from?
- Do you know?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- They were from Belgium.
- And how about Sylvia?
- Yes, she also was from Belgium.
- They all escaped from Belgium.
- I see.
- What was Sylvia's last name?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Fischer.
- I see.
- You described some situations where
- Jews were taken and killed.
- During those times or at any other time, for that matter,
- did you or did your mother or any of your family
- have to hide or decide to hide to avoid
- being caught up in that?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- We hid 22 times, all--
- some places in our own home, sometimes at work.
- Mostly at work, we had to hide, and some in our home.
- We would-- different places.
- But it was too late and Bubbe had to work
- and I didn't know what to do, I was stuck.
- And I was with a neighbor, so I hid there, and Bubbe was afraid.
- We didn't know what was going to happen,
- if something was going to happen to me.
- But I would stay there--
- I stayed there one time.
- It was a real small little passageway,
- and there was a door down and around.
- You had to go through the door into--
- there's a small-- there was a wall.
- And you had to pull the door and go behind the wall,
- and then you could hide behind there.
- What were some of the other kinds of places that you hid?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Yeah.
- Sometimes I hid in the applez.
- Where I was working, the place with the apples for the Nazis,
- I had to hide there, like in a storage room, the cool room.
- I'd stay there, but Zayde was in a different place,
- and Zayde had a different lock for the key.
- And so we switched it, so we made it look like that was
- the key to that storage room area, but it wasn't.
- He put a different key on there, the Nazis wanted to go in, they
- couldn't.
- And we heard that the Nazis were banging, banging,
- banging on the door, trying to break into that area.
- But it was really a strong door.
- It was a metal door.
- The Nazis had very valuable things in their.
- They had their food, their storage, their guns,
- and we were hiding in there.
- So we decided we shouldn't hide there anymore.
- That was too scary.
- So we hid there once or twice, and that was it.
- And Zayde slept on the other side with the [? Kolb. ?]
- And the Nazi--
- that's where he had the bed.
- But the Nazis were trying to force the key,
- and it wasn't the right key, [? because ?] Zayde
- had switched the keys.
- And Bubbe kept squishing my arm, and I was--
- I didn't know.
- And so it was just very quiet, and I
- had to be very quiet so they wouldn't know we were there.
- And oh, finally they left.
- And then the next day, my father tell, oh, I
- don't know what happened.
- There was the wrong key there.
- I just don't know.
- So then they put the right key there,
- so we didn't hide there anymore.
- How old were you during this time
- that you were in the ghetto?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Let's see, 14?
- Let's see, that was 1942.
- I was 15.
- 15, 16.
- I hadn't had my birthday yet, so that happened when I was 15,
- 15 1/2.
- Pretty big.
- I was pretty big too.
- You'll see in the pictures there that I was pretty big.
- They thought I was 18.
- The Nazis thought I was 18.
- When you hid on these occasions, how long typically
- would you be in hiding?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- At home, sometimes it was for a day, a day and a half.
- But my father never hid.
- He'd stay at work.
- [?
- The men ?] will let them know.
- Max, see that was the second in command.
- He would let them know.
- And he'd tell them, no, no, don't go back to home.
- Stay here.
- And when everything's safe, then I'll let you know.
- And so then he would have a knock
- to let us know to come into the house so [INAUDIBLE].
- My father never hid, though.
- But most, he'd stay at work, or sometimes we
- hid at work, but not at home.
- [?
- Go to ?] other place.
- Sometimes it was [? cold. ?] Sometimes we hid in the attic
- up near the roof.
- And who would warn you to hide in these times?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- See, Max would hear.
- That was the second in command.
- And he would let my father know, and he would let
- us know that we have to hide.
- Thank god he saved us.
- What was Max second in command of?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- So he was-- what did he do?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- He was responsible for Tarnopol and for the train station.
- It was real close to the trains.
- My father worked as far as doing the luggage for the army,
- for the military.
- They see, many girls, many Jewish girls,
- the young Jewish girls, 18, 20, 15, they took them,
- and they made them go to work.
- And some, even the Poles and the Catholics too,
- they would take things.
- Sala wanted to go with them.
- That was my cousin.
- And so she went.
- She walked with them, but she got caught, so.
- Was Max Jewish or Polish or--
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- No, no, he was a Nazi.
- He was a Nazi.
- But it so happened he was nice.
- See, because my father was very good.
- He did very good work.
- And he made everything very nice.
- He'd polish his boots.
- He made his clothes very nice.
- Sometimes he'd scrub his back.
- He'd take a bath, and he'd have to take care of him.
- When did the liquidation of the ghetto take place?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- June, 1943.
- 22nd or 24th.
- And I saw that they were moving--
- I thought that the military were taking off their bands.
- I saw that they were returning their boots.
- I knew that it was from the military.
- I saw.
- And so I saw all of them, looked them over, saw their things.
- And we had suffered.
- Did you-- was there a hospital at all that
- existed in the ghetto?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Yeah.
- Well, actually, it was in the camp, not in the ghetto itself,
- but in the camp.
- See, it had been built before, and it was connected to--
- oh, see, it had been a factory before, a meat factory, and then
- they changed it over to a hospital.
- The actual real hospital was very far.
- It was in the East.
- So instead, they used that building.
- And who staffed the hospital?
- Who worked there?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Jewish people, each person.
- But they killed them.
- They were all killed.
- They thought it was easy, but then they just--
- the Nazis just took--
- capped it and then put gas in there and kill them all.
- Did you ever have occasion to go there yourself?
- No, no, no.
- No, my father did one time, because of his brother
- Abraham was very sick.
- And he stayed there a long time, and he died there in December.
- I think it was 18th, 13th, something like that, December.
- What --
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- 1942.
- December '42 he died.
- Oh, he suffered a long time.
- He was sick.
- He was only 52.
- [? Eh, ?] he was born in 1891, right, so he was only 50.
- At the time that the ghetto--
- going back to the ghetto being liquidated, at that time,
- were any residents trying to escape in order
- to avoid being taken?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Some people did.
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- It was July 13, 1943 was when we actually
- escaped from the ghetto.
- I wish I could see that calendar.
- That would help me.
- But anyway, see, what happened is we saw after work,
- there were a lot of people.
- They were all standing.
- They weren't in their homes.
- All the people were standing outside,
- and I didn't know what was wrong.
- And Bubbe told me any time that they
- were planning to kill all the people in the ghetto,
- so we got scared.
- So we didn't know, so we were trying to figure out what to do.
- We went into the home, tried to-- pacing,
- trying to figure out what to do.
- And then all day and into the night--
- nobody-- there was food that they offered,
- but we weren't hungry.
- [INAUDIBLE] late into the night.
- And we saw people were standing.
- My father heard that some people late in the night,
- that they were cutting the barbed wire fence,
- and they were going to escape.
- And so people were pulling each other,
- and they pulled with our back, and they pulled us
- through the fence.
- So I had to hold my father.
- I had to hold him.
- And so that's how we escaped, through the fence.
- And we heard that the Nazis were shooting the guns
- and shooting after us, and some people did die.
- You had to lay flat, real close to the ground, and then escape.
- And you couldn't stay next to a wall,
- but you have to go further away and run
- about three or four blocks.
- And then we did, into the building
- that had water flooded in the basement.
- We stayed there for a while, because Bubbe, Zayde,
- and me, we stayed there.
- And Sylvia was also with us.
- It was the four of us.
- We stayed in that house.
- What did you do after that?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- We had to wait till all the people were gone.
- We didn't want to go with them.
- It was Friday.
- We didn't want to wait for the nighttime.
- We waited till Friday late at night.
- My father told me to stay there, just to wait a while.
- The father would go alone and go and ask
- a man if he could call Mrs. Zulman to come and see us.
- So he said, OK.
- So then we decided we should do it late at night, not too early.
- Wait till it was very dark, not 7:00 or 8:00,
- maybe 9:00 10:00 or 11:00.
- So we waited.
- And so we walked with Sylvia, and nobody could see us.
- There were no lights or anything.
- It was just, everything was bombed out.
- So we walked to that man, stayed in his basement.
- Then it was dry.
- Oh, we were so wet.
- Oh, we were soaking wet.
- Our shoes were ruined.
- [?
- But we ?] had to take our shoes off, our feet were so tired.
- It was so hard.
- We couldn't get our shoes back on.
- They didn't fit anymore.
- And they were hard.
- They got so wet that the leather got all crinkled up and turned
- up on the sides.
- And they just were messed up, so we couldn't walk.
- So then it was Saturday morning, and Mrs. Zulman came,
- gave us a change of clothes.
- And then the three of us, with my mother, Sylvia, and I,
- went, and my father stayed.
- And so we went with Mrs. Zulman, went on the horse,
- and we stayed there.
- And we walked there, and then that's how we got to the--
- Sylvia had to stay.
- She wasn't patient.
- She stayed in Tarnopol.
- She didn't stay with us.
- What happened to her?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- She was waiting for-- she was supposed
- to be waiting for her sister to get a permit,
- to a paper, because she was going to become Catholic.
- She was going to change her name.
- She was impatient.
- She waited one or two weeks, and then she left.
- She went on a train.
- And they heard from her voice on the train-- they thought that--
- they knew that she was Jewish, just by listening to her.
- The way she spoke German, they knew she was Jewish
- when she was on the train.
- Was that the last you heard of her?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- That was the last time.
- Her sister came, and her sister was sad,
- because she had all the paperwork.
- Everything was ready to go, but it was too late.
- She came three or four weeks later.
- Sylvia should have stayed there.
- She should have been-- waited for her, but instead, she went.
- Do you know if she survived?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- I don't-- I just imagine she's dead.
- If she spoke Polish--
- they could hear, though, that she had a very strong Jewish
- looking face.
- She had chubby cheeks, and [? then ?] they knew
- she was Jewish.
- She had such short hair, and she was fat.
- I mean, we didn't think she survived.
- You have been referring to Mrs. Zulman.
- Who was Mrs. Zulman?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- She had a business that she sold grain and chickens
- and butter and milk and eggs.
- And that's what she [? had. ?] So we
- asked if they would hide us, and we gave them
- money for them to hide us.
- And then when the money was all gone,
- we promised them after the war that we would send them.
- They told me a short-- they kept saying that in a short time,
- the war would be over, but it wasn't.
- 1945, finally the war was over.
- Did your family know Mrs. Zulman before the war started?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- My father knew her because he used to sell things for them.
- Since he was a grain merchant, there
- were many times when he sold things for her.
- And also, she had a brother, they sold things [? too. ?]
- So she was real nice, and the brother's wife
- was also real nice.
- But so they hid us.
- The daughter didn't know that we were--
- daughter?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Oh, no, Mrs. Zulman's niece didn't know that we were there.
- So her brother was also in the business.
- His daughter didn't know that we were there,
- because she was very young.
- And she had a sweetheart with the Nazis,
- and we were afraid that she would say something to them.
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Yeah, there were all the neighbors around.
- We were afraid that somebody might say something.
- When did you go into hiding?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- When we left the ghetto, that was July--
- let's see, 22nd, [? 20-- ?] Saturday.
- So we started Saturday morning.
- It was a summer, so we were up in the loft of the barn
- for two or three weeks.
- And then the people were gossiping.
- They were telling the neighbors there
- that they saw me and Bubbe walking into the house,
- that they saw us.
- And they thought that we were Jewish.
- And Mrs. Zulman said, no, there's no Jewish people.
- Here, come, look around.
- But they were suspicious, and so they kept looking.
- And it was that neighbor, that woman, that neighbor's husband,
- who had killed the Jewish people that were staying with them.
- They hid that family, but they went ahead and killed them
- anyway.
- So because of them, we had to find a different place to hide.
- Where did you hide?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- So my father had some straw.
- He made some straw, and he opened up an area
- underneath the chicken coop.
- It was about the length of this little couch right here.
- So the three of us--
- it was maybe-- well, maybe a little bit more than that.
- But the three of us--
- there was just room for the three of us
- to lie side by side each other.
- And we put ground, put [? a little air ?] so it would secure
- it.
- And there was a wall behind it, and it went down.
- It was sloped down.
- I have a drawing here that they showed with the chickens.
- And so the-- it was at night.
- And so we didn't want to-- we couldn't go out during the day.
- And so it was right behind where the chickens were.
- The chickens were on top, and then we were back behind.
- Who did you hide with at that point?
- Who were you with?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- It was me, my mother and father, just the three of us.
- Where was Esther?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- See, before, my mother sent her 1943--
- gosh, it was about June, May, something like that.
- I'm not sure.
- Anyway, when we were working in the camp,
- Grandmother Miriam was taking care of Esther for a while.
- So [? we ?] kept asking different people
- to take care of the baby.
- So Bubbe took the baby, [? and ?] they
- bundled her up and put her in a bag and just carried the bag.
- They thought maybe it was just food for work.
- Esther was good.
- She was sleeping.
- They probably gave her medicine to sleep.
- So another woman met her for work.
- Bubbe was working in her garden, and the woman came,
- the servant came, and she took the baby.
- And then June, it was a misunderstanding.
- They didn't want the baby.
- They changed their mind.
- And Bubbe was very upset.
- And then later, Mrs. Zulman said that they
- threw the baby in the garbage--
- not Mrs. Zulman.
- It was another person.
- Mrs. Zulman told us that the neighbor-- that [?
- this woman ?] had put the baby in the garbage.
- And then a little boy found the baby, and it was raining,
- and it was cold.
- And they took the baby and put it into a convent with the nuns.
- And the baby was there for a long time.
- And then 1944, finally we were able to get the baby.
- April, we were looking for her.
- And they went to find her at the nuns,
- and they couldn't find them.
- But we knew that Mrs. Zulman had gone to see the baby weekly.
- They said that Mrs. Zulman said it was her granddaughter.
- She said it was my granddaughter.
- She wanted to go visit her granddaughter.
- And then when Bubbe went back there,
- we couldn't find the baby.
- We didn't know.
- We were worried.
- So we went to the police, and they found out
- that some foster parents had adopted the baby.
- So they were fighting and arguing back and forth,
- and it was very hard.
- And it was before the war.
- And so finally they understood, and we were finally
- able to get Esther back.
- It was the last time we saw her was when
- she was just a very small baby.
- She was so small.
- Then we hadn't seen-- saw her in '43,
- and then we didn't see her again until '44.
- But she was so quiet.
- Going back to when you were in hiding--
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- She wasn't even walking or anything.
- Her food was really poor.
- She was back to being a baby again.
- Yeah, and we had to bring her back as far as food-wise.
- She couldn't eat anything.
- OK.
- Sorry to have interrupted.
- Going back to when you were in hiding,
- how would you describe Mrs. Zulman?
- What kind of person was she?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- She was nice, except her son kept complaining.
- He just didn't feel-- he just kept complaining.
- He wasn't satisfied.
- He was worried about money.
- He said, hey, the money's gone.
- They were giving us money.
- And they would only give us food in the morning.
- We had soup, sometimes potatoes, just bread once in a while.
- They were very careful with how much they gave us.
- Did you ever leave the barn?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Oh, no, no, no.
- Uh-uh.
- Never.
- No.
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- For eight and a half months, we stayed there.
- It was like a jail.
- We couldn't even walk around.
- I mean, we couldn't walk or anything.
- What were sanitary conditions like?
- Could you bathe, wash?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Once a month, we could bathe.
- Once a month, she'd let us.
- Not--
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Yeah, we would go into their home.
- We would go up and over, not outside.
- We'd stay in the barn and go up the ladder
- and then over into their home, but never on the ground.
- When you--
- Do you understand?
- Yes.
- Thank you.
- When you stayed under the chicken coop
- or what had been the chicken coop--
- It was still the chicken coop.
- --how long did you stay there at a time before--
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- We had to be-- we were on our back just all day, all night.
- We could come out, but it was just--
- it was so hard, because I was so hunched over.
- Yeah, our head was bent over.
- It was just such a little room.
- I mean, there wasn't much room.
- There was just maybe 2 feet of room from the top to the bottom.
- Bubbe and Zayde stayed, and I would be--
- I'd try and move around, but I just wasn't comfortable.
- I mean, they would talk.
- They would sometimes write on my arm
- to let me know what they were saying and what was--
- just talk to me.
- But mostly, they talked to each other.
- What kind of things did you do to pass the time?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Well, there were mice that ran up along the chicken coop.
- So there was paper along there, [? but ?] they kept coming down.
- The ground kept falling down onto us,
- and so there were mice there.
- And so, ugh, we didn't like the feel of it at all.
- At nighttime, I would--
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Nighttime I would just stand up and around, but not in the day.
- In the daytime, we were totally closed.
- Mrs. Zulman wouldn't let us go out.
- So in the daytime, it was totally covered over.
- So all day long, we stayed underneath there.
- Earlier, you mentioned some neighbors
- of Mrs. Zulman, or people who lived nearby,
- who also hid a Jewish family.
- Could you describe the circumstances and what happened?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- So there was a neighbor.
- Mrs. Zulman was really worried because--
- oh, no, the family was worried.
- They were drinking.
- It was Christmas time.
- They were drinking.
- And the Jewish family was very wealthy,
- and they gave that family many, many things
- to take care of them.
- And then Christmas time, they went-- they killed them all.
- And then later, after the war was all over and we were home,
- and that neighbor asked Mrs. Zulman,
- where did that family live that you hid?
- My husband's in jail now, because people had-- finally
- they told after everything.
- And then people had told that they had killed
- that family that they hid.
- And so that husband was in jail.
- So they brought butter and eggs and chicken to try and get us
- to bring--
- testify to help her husband.
- But we didn't do it.
- Every week she came.
- And we just-- Zayde wasn't home.
- He hid.
- He just didn't come out when they were there.
- But they were bad.
- They kept bothering us, wanting us to help them.
- But here, that man had killed that whole family.
- And now after the war, the Russians
- took everything from them, and that girl had to work, and she--
- two girls hid in my home.
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Whose girls?
- Whose?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Neighbors?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- The brother's daughter.
- So they stayed, and they had to hide too.
- Also, the daughter stayed in our home, and we let them.
- It was funny.
- Did anyone live with Mrs. Zulman besides her son?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- And a daughter.
- Those are three of them.
- I see.
- And what were her--
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- She's sick now.
- We still correspond with them.
- What were the names of her son and daughter?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Irina is the daughter, and the son's name?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Wladen.
- It's a Polish name.
- W-L-A-N-D-I-K, Wlandek.
- It was a very Catholic name.
- That's right, mm-hmm.
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Wladek.
- While you were in hiding in the barn,
- were there any times when you were
- almost discovered or betrayed?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Yeah, well, there was that one time where Irina's boyfriend was
- suspicious, and so they--
- that was a situation where they had sex by the barn,
- just so that they wouldn't-- she had to prove to him, so--
- [? at least, ?] it wasn't.
- What did she have to prove to him?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- She was 18.
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Yeah, so this way, she could show
- that there was nobody there.
- So he kept saying--
- maybe he wanted to see if there was people breathing there,
- because it really wasn't very well built.
- But so that this way--
- and then the mice were up there too, the mice.
- There was a paper there, and the mice
- would be going back and forth.
- But he thought that there were Jewish people there.
- And it was so small, and we had so many [? boils ?]
- on our bodies.
- It was just so filthy.
- It didn't agree with us.
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- We had no medicine.
- We had nothing.
- We just suffered.
- How long did you stay in hiding?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Eight and a half months, from March 9.
- We finally got [? to leave. ?] Mrs. Zulman said, no, no, no,
- you have to stay.
- You have to stay longer.
- Stay another week.
- And my father said, no, forget it.
- We're getting out of here.
- We're tired.
- We're leaving.
- And we couldn't even walk.
- We were crawling.
- When we'd try to walk, we'd fall over.
- Were there not still Germans in the area?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Oh, we hoped and prayed.
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Well, there were some that were still in prison.
- When I was in Zbarazh, I saw that there
- were many of the Germans who were still in prison.
- That was great.
- And a lot of the Jews would throw things at them, and--
- Going back to March 9, though, how
- did your father know that it might be OK to leave?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Mrs. Zulman heard, and we all heard, that there was the bombs.
- And we kept hurrying.
- We knew that the Russians were coming closer and closer.
- But we thought that, OK, we couldn't go [? too ?]
- until-- wait until the Nazis move further away.
- And then when the Russians were closer in, then we could go.
- So what happened on March 9?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- We stayed about two or three days.
- Mrs. Zulman said we had to stay two or three days, so we stayed.
- So Wednesday we left.
- [INAUDIBLE] we left.
- And we walked, and we fell.
- Oh, and it was so cold and frozen.
- We could barely walk, and our shoes were very bad.
- They were so small.
- Those were the shoes that got wet in the flood.
- And we laid underneath the chicken coop
- and took the shoes off.
- And here I was still growing.
- It was so cold.
- And Bubbe was sick, and she kept falling,
- and we had to pull her along.
- And Bubbe was crawling, and we were crawling.
- We saw a person with horses, and my father said, please, here
- we're sick.
- And so the [? Russian ?] said, OK, we
- won't take you all the way.
- We'll take you part of the way.
- So they put us on, and we went part of the way.
- And then we had to get off, and we had to walk some more.
- We saw a farm.
- It was morning.
- I remember that.
- We asked if we could sit for a while,
- and they gave us some water.
- We saw that there were so many Russian--
- the army, that they were there.
- It was for the relief that they were changing for [?
- the other ?] [? Russians ?] to come in.
- And the Russian asked me, do you want to go on a date?
- My father said, no.
- My father made me stay with him close.
- They all stayed very close with me.
- If I went over there, they were afraid
- that they were just going to take me, because I was just
- a young girl, and I was afraid.
- So we stayed close, and we always stayed close together.
- Bubbe was sick.
- And then finally, we were able to go in a car, in a truck.
- So we sat, and we went there for part of the way.
- Then we had to get out and walk part of the way.
- And we finally got to Zbarazh, and that was Saturday morning.
- And we met this one man.
- Let's see, what was his name?
- Silver.
- Mr. Silver.
- He knew our neighbor, Zamora, it was his sister.
- Well, found out was very bad, what happened.
- So my father had called another person
- and saw, oh, they hugged each other.
- And they wanted to know how we were,
- and they found out about where the Jewish people-- wanted
- to know where the Jewish people were.
- So they were over in the military compound.
- There were a lot of people there that had to share rooms,
- and he was there with his wife and son.
- The young boy had to-- some young boys
- had to go to the army, and it was bad.
- Father was too old.
- He didn't have to go.
- So for a while, we stayed in the room.
- Stayed there, and we rested, a lot of Jewish people.
- My father was trying to find a place,
- to see a place if we could-- another house.
- But everything was full.
- All the army was there.
- So a couple weeks went by, and I had
- to go help in the kitchen peeling potatoes.
- So I went, peeled potatoes.
- Bubbe and I worked in the kitchen.
- Bubbe was sick, and she would sit, and I would work.
- Happened I met a woman, a good friend of Bubbe's from--
- Bubbe met her from Zbarazh.
- And the three of us then, we worked together
- peeling potatoes.
- And then we finally found an apartment
- and moved here for a while.
- See, the other thing is that there were too many people
- there.
- We didn't like being there with all the Russians,
- so we went over to another place.
- So you moved to the Red Cross building?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- It used to be a school, but then they changed it
- to a military hospital.
- So if they had [? to have a ?] broken leg or if they were blind
- or something-- there were a lot of blind people.
- They were hearing people that were blind.
- So nighttime, I would go there, because I
- was bored being in the kitchen.
- So a nurse asked me to help at night,
- to help take care of them, give them water, and take
- care of different things.
- I said, OK.
- So I'd go with a hearing girl, and so she
- would tell me what they needed, and I would go.
- And they were blind.
- They couldn't see anything.
- They had covers over their eyes.
- And I would give them things, and they'd
- get mad and push it away.
- And give another one woman would say something,
- and, oh, oh, he was sorry.
- He would drink something.
- They wanted their cigarettes, and it was hard in the night.
- We only stayed there two months.
- Then I went back to peeling potatoes.
- I met this deaf man.
- He could talk.
- He would talk fine, but he didn't have this hearing.
- And he would write.
- He would just do--
- he would write for people.
- He couldn't talk.
- His voice was broken too.
- He could write.
- He was a nice man.
- But he didn't sign, but he would just make some motions
- and make signs about the different people that
- were there.
- So they were people we peeled potatoes [? with. ?]
- There were a lot of Nazis in prison.
- There were so many.
- We could see them.
- Just felt disgusted.
- Here we suffered, but there they were.
- And my father went back to Tarnopol
- to see if it was OK if we could go back to-- go there.
- But we thought, no, the war was still there,
- and there's still bombing, and the Nazis were still there.
- We couldn't.
- So we had to wait, and we stayed there for March, April.
- We went home.
- When was that?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Went back to Tarnopol in April, because we wanted to get Esther.
- Bubbe wanted Esther.
- It was her baby.
- That was April of what year? '40--
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- But then we have to go back to Zbarazh.
- We were afraid.
- 1944?
- Yes.
- It was April, toward the end of April.
- Then we had to go back to Zbarazh.
- There was another building we found.
- It was near a farm, not in the town.
- There was too many army, military, ugh, in the town.
- But here on the farm, it was quieter.
- But then the army would come in there anyway.
- They'd want to use our beds.
- Oh, I'd get so tired.
- I couldn't sleep.
- I'd have to sleep on the chairs.
- Take a couple chairs and lining them together and sleeping.
- Bubbe would stay.
- And the army, oh, they had comfortable beds, but not us.
- And then May-- and then we planed to go back to Tarnopol
- in the end of May.
- We wanted to go back to our house, into the house on 13th.
- So we went and improved the house.
- And then in June, Morris Auerbach
- came and thought that he would share a room.
- So where my grandmother's room was, that's where I went in.
- And then Morris Auerbach went to the room
- that I had slept in before.
- She was gone, so that's where I went.
- Oh, but it kept bothering me.
- I kept thinking about that Grandfather is buried--
- had been buried there for a while.
- So July, August, September, October,
- I didn't-- we all didn't feel comfortable there.
- And 1945, we decided to move.
- Before that, a few questions.
- First, who was Morris Auerbach?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- That was my grandmother-- it was Bubbe's cousin.
- Her father and his father were brothers.
- I see.
- And when you did go back to Tarnopol
- after the war, what was the town like, or the city?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Oh, things were just very damaged and destroyed.
- It looked so bad.
- Buildings were caved in.
- The train station was gone.
- The bridge was gone.
- The temple was bad, the Jewish temple.
- My home was damaged.
- There were holes in the roof.
- It was just awful.
- It was bad.
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- The bridge that you walked on, you couldn't walk on it.
- It was destroyed.
- We had to use a small wooden bridge.
- The Russians improved it.
- They made it so that cars could go.
- Before, it was very quiet.
- They weren't cars in the town.
- And then afterward, the cars came in, and it smelled,
- the gasoline.
- It used to be such a nice town.
- Used to be a lot of Jewish people there,
- but so many people were gone.
- Zamora was gone.
- Russians now lived there, another Russian family.
- [? Where ?] another Jewish family used to live,
- a Russian family now lived.
- We didn't want to be there anymore,
- because after, we found out we couldn't own our home anymore.
- The Russians owned it.
- They would have the big homes, the big, fancy homes.
- Did you find any family who survived
- who had not hid with you?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- No, the other family had escaped before the war.
- They escaped in '41.
- Yeah, I told you-- as I told you earlier, most [?
- side of the ?] family had gone through Russia,
- but my father's father wanted us to stay here.
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- So we thought maybe we should go see if they were still
- there in their home.
- They always kept visiting us.
- Our cousins would always visit us, but then they weren't there.
- So we thought, OK.
- So we'd go walking for a while.
- We saw that many people were planning to leave.
- It was kind of funny.
- So we looked around, went in the house.
- It was their apartment.
- So all the doors were open, so it was easy to just walk in.
- Everything looked the same.
- The furniture was there.
- They took their-- no people there.
- They took their clothing, but they left all the furniture,
- left the mattress, closets.
- Saw the pictures.
- Felt sad.
- Saw uncle, his wife, and the kids.
- They left all this stuff there.
- But nobody was there.
- Felt sad and walked back, and we all
- cried, because I wish I could have gone with them.
- This was before the war.
- And just felt really sad.
- Went home, and Bubbe was [? sad, ?] and we were all sad.
- Grandfather said, well, that's how it is.
- Ah, it doesn't matter.
- They're so far.
- They're going to suffer with the Russians.
- They're bad.
- But Uncle Izek was jailed twice.
- He didn't want to be in the army,
- so they hid, and they jailed him.
- But other than that-- other family?
- That was finished there.
- Others?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Father's brother.
- Which?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Yeah, but other than that, no.
- You mean no what other than that?
- Family who stayed didn't--
- there wasn't any other family that survived.
- Of the Jews who lived in Tarnopol before the war,
- do you have any idea how many may have survived?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Most were killed.
- A few were saved, and we knew a few.
- But mostly, they weren't there.
- My neighbors weren't there.
- Like I said, Zamora was gone.
- There was one man who then had lived with them.
- Henry, he lived with them.
- Nayman was killed.
- Silver lived with the baby, the woman who had the baby.
- Here we thought that man was so dumb, but he hid in the forest.
- He had different food--
- he barely had food, but he survived in the forest.
- So when did you decide to leave Tarnopol?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- 1945.
- And why did your family decide to leave?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Well, the Russians were problems.
- They were bothering my father.
- They kept imprisoning him.
- They thought he was a spy, but it wasn't.
- My grandfather's brother's son, his wife was Russian.
- She was in the Russian army.
- Actually, her husband'd been in the Russian army.
- So anyway, Bubbe kept worrying because we
- didn't know what to do.
- So that wife said she tried to go against the Russians,
- and she helped free my father.
- They kept being so suspicious about his work,
- and they kept thinking he was a spy.
- But it wasn't.
- I mean, he was just doing his work.
- Same thing with Morris Auerbach.
- They kept bothering him, and the wife and he would fight.
- And everybody was so worried.
- The Russians kept coming into our homes,
- and business wasn't good.
- And that was like a lot of people.
- They decided to move.
- I mean, we told the Russians were were going to Greece.
- We wanted to back home.
- [?
- That's what ?] we told them.
- We said that this wasn't our country.
- We wanted to go back to Greece.
- That was our place.
- So we [? saw ?] a lot of trains, a lot
- of people, a lot of young girls coming back.
- The Nazis had taken a lot of the younger girls
- from Tarnopol, young girls and boys.
- Because [? they had ?] people on top of the trains.
- We had to wait for another train.
- So that's when we left.
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- We didn't know what was going on in the town,
- because we were hiding.
- And but then we saw a lot of the girls
- and boys were returning home.
- Why were you hiding again?
- No, no, this was--
- we didn't see a lot of people before,
- because we were hiding, but not hiding then.
- Oh, mm-hmm.
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- So my father would ask them and say, well, where were you?
- They said, we had to work.
- We had to do different things.
- We had to work for the army.
- What was the--
- There were a lot of Catholics, so many Catholics.
- What was the date you left the Soviet Union?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Middle of June 1945.
- Where did you go?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- We meant to go to Krakow, and we stopped there.
- But it was full.
- We couldn't go there.
- So we [? are ?] back on the train, got on another train.
- We had different stops.
- We went to Glewitz.
- We stopped there and got off, and we looked for an apartment.
- We found one, and we took all our things in.
- The Nazis had lived there before,
- a woman and a grandfather-- grandmother.
- But we made them go out, made them leave.
- It was an eight-bedroom house with a big kitchen, bath.
- We weren't used to that.
- In our home in Tarnopol, we didn't
- have a bathroom in the house or a bath tub in the house.
- I mean, most of the time, we had to just pour it into the water
- and throw it out.
- Here, they were so comfortable.
- Everything was in the house, indoor plumbing.
- Here we had to go outside and use an outhouse.
- We hated it, [? but ?] it was so many years.
- And we-- just it was so much more comfortable
- now in the wintertime.
- We're going to take a break.
- I'd like to ask just one question.
- You said you made these people leave this eight-bedroom house.
- How did you make them leave?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Oh, we were with the Russians.
- Wait, wait, wait.
- American zone?
- We were in the American zone.
- See, there was a four--
- Glewitz was in the American zone.
- The Russians were still watching,
- see if they saw if they were still Nazis there.
- So they could still hear that there were Nazis.
- And so then they would kill them.
- The Nazis would hide.
- Oh, and the Nazis-- wait.
- The Nazis killed Jews?
- Still, even though.
- They were still starting to do it again, but they caught them.
- So they caught those people, and they made them move out.
- It was November, October, toward the end of November.
- Turns out we have actually about 10 minutes before tapes
- need to be changed, so I'll continue with a few more
- questions.
- So you were in--
- Glewitz.
- Glewitz, and where did you go next?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- So we had a meeting, and the men told
- us-- a lot of the Jewish men, they were going to different--
- helping the people.
- So they said-- they explained to us
- what to do if the Russians would catch us, just to be calm,
- act casual.
- So they taught us how to do this,
- and we had to help with Esther.
- So my father went with another man.
- They went out, and we started walking.
- It was November or something.
- We went on the train.
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- S-O-C-- S-O-N-I-W-C-Z, Sosnowiec.
- So that's where we went then.
- Then we went to Katowice in the night, and they had to walk.
- [?
- That was ?] something that happened.
- It was in the afternoon.
- It was wrong.
- We saw that the Russians were holding
- their guns and a lot of military holding the guns, just holding
- it.
- We didn't know what was wrong.
- Some people had valuables in their belongings.
- I mean, they had gold rings, whatever, money.
- So everybody had to throw all their things into the lake.
- And they-- oh, and it was a muddy area to walk.
- And we meant to go across one way,
- but we couldn't, because the Russians were there.
- So we had to go a different way, and everything was confusing.
- There were so many people walking in line.
- And oh, it was muddy.
- It was so hard to walk, because the mud was there.
- But I was happy to have the boots.
- Finally, I had boots.
- But I still didn't like it.
- It was so hard.
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- But the Russian army was all the way around us.
- And we were stuck.
- I mean, we couldn't escape.
- We couldn't go anywhere.
- So we went into a building.
- We went into the building, and it was just totally dark.
- There's no window.
- It was like a [? row. ?] It was just dark.
- So I mean, there was no place to sit.
- There was nothing.
- We kind of felt. It was like, oh, we
- saw that there was writing.
- There was writing on the walls in Yiddish, people giving
- messages to each other, that people had been there before,
- some new, different people.
- I didn't know anybody, because I didn't-- first of all,
- I couldn't read it, because it was in Yiddish.
- But we stayed there, and we waited.
- We were so tired.
- We went way into the night, and then we got up, and we went out.
- And we were able to go into the building and sit.
- And there they checked us.
- We had to take all our clothes off.
- Everybody's naked, men, women together.
- And I had irritated baby Esther, because [? I ?]
- wanted to distract them from checking her.
- So then in the morning, we went out,
- and we started walking again.
- Went to Czechoslovakia, went on the train.
- Had to stop, a small town.
- Before you get to Czechoslovakia,
- I would like to ask a question.
- You said you had to--
- Sshh.
- Wait, wait.
- Mm-hmm.
- OK.
- Wait, wait.
- You mentioned that you had to distract them from Esther.
- Why was that?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Well, I didn't want them to check her.
- I didn't want to-- because we had our money hidden in here.
- She had gold and money hidden there.
- We had gotten money from the US.
- See, we had our--
- we had a white sock or a thing that we tied,
- just a little sack, actually.
- And we put our money in there.
- It was just some [? little ?] rings.
- And we didn't want them to check her because we
- had our valuables there.
- So it was wrapped around her.
- We cut it-- after we were done, we cut it open,
- took our money out.
- But we hid it in her, on her.
- So then you said that you took a train to Czechoslovakia.
- Where did you go then?
- Yeah, we went to Czechoslovakia.
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- We went to Prague.
- And then they checked us out again.
- They took my mother's beautiful picture of music.
- It was a lake, and they took her beautiful needlepoint.
- Bubbe loved it.
- They took it all.
- We had silver candlesticks, beautiful, very valuable
- silverware.
- They took it all.
- Who did?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- The Russians, the police.
- It's like the people at the train station.
- We couldn't go in.
- It wasn't like-- see, there was Poland on one side
- and Czechoslovakia on a different side.
- And so at the border when they did the inspecting,
- oh, it was so bad.
- Bubbe was so sad she had to lose more things.
- We were so tired of all these infections.
- And but see, with Esther, they didn't find out
- about any of the money.
- But the pictures and the candlesticks,
- that they took from us.
- How long did you stay in Czechoslovakia?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Two weeks.
- Bubbe got sick.
- Meant to stay there a week, but Bubbe broke her ankle, so I
- went out, and Bubbe went back.
- And so we walked in the night, and it was really heavy snow
- and ice, and just really hard.
- But I mean, before, I could see, I mean, because everything [?
- would be-- ?] you could see the snow helped.
- Everything was bright.
- I could see the sky was red.
- Just it was bright, and it was--
- we were walking.
- It smelled all fresh, but we were walking and walking.
- And everything was so quiet.
- I didn't feel Bubbe or Ester.
- I mean, usually we'd bump next to each other.
- We got to the train, stayed overnight,
- got there in the morning.
- I looked around.
- Where's mother?
- Another woman said, it's OK, it's OK.
- They pointed to her leg.
- They said it was broken, that she had to go back.
- Oh.
- People from the kibbutzniks told me that they would help me.
- But they wouldn't because it was the Sabbath, but I couldn't go.
- We couldn't walk on the Sabbath.
- It was winter, because it gets--
- Sabbath starts so early.
- That's right, it was December.
- So we couldn't.
- So I stayed with the kibbutzniks because it was safer, because I
- didn't know those other people.
- I knew them because they lived in Glewitz.
- They lived in the basement--
- I mean, the first floor.
- We lived up above.
- So I went with them, stayed with them.
- And then Monday, we left.
- We went on the train and went to Munich.
- We stopped at [? Veden-Obetz. ?] Stayed with friends,
- slept there.
- Friday-- Saturday, Monday--
- Monday, we left in the morning, went to Munich.
- Went to Jewish committee, and the man wanted to know where--
- I wanted to know where my mother and Esther were.
- They said, everything's fine.
- So they had gone by car.
- They went by car and train to Munich.
- That man and his--
- I remember him and his wife, they were twins.
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- Oh, Ottobrunn.
- It was a small town outside of Munich.
- We had an apartment for a while.
- It was just a small room.
- It was really awkward.
- There were so many people.
- We should have stayed in Munich.
- I don't know why we didn't.
- Think we'll take a break now, a brief break.
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- No, no, no.
- Stop.
- Wait for a minute.
- [BEEP]
- Mrs. Fedrid, before continuing with your explanation of how
- you and your family work your way West into Germany,
- I'd like to ask a few questions to clarify some things that you
- spoke of earlier.
- When you were in the ghetto during the time you were there,
- did you ever leave your house or your home alone?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- No, no, no.
- Uh-uh.
- And why was that?
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- See, if I was walking along, and somebody heard me,
- and I wouldn't answer, because I wouldn't
- hear that they're calling me, they would have killed me.
- So Bubbe didn't want, neither Bubbe or grandma Mariam.
- So I would go with either Sylvia or Mariam,
- and sometimes we would move.
- Or if we were hiding in Silverman's home.
- Well, this was back before.
- We hide in the garden, went underneath, and down
- into another place.
- [SPEAKING AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE]
- But sometimes it happened that the Nazis
- would be able to go down in there and find them.