Danuta Lis
I haven’t decided to share my story until the fourth volume of the Children of the Holocaust Speak because I have tried not to think back on my experiences. However, I believe that I should “bear witness”. I belong to the so-called first generation of the Holocaust. I was born into a wealthy family. My […]
Józef Lipman
This is how it started: on September 1, 1939, the war broke out. I had just turned eight in July and had been promoted to the second grade of primary school. We had been preparing for the war for several weeks. We had painted all the walls in the house and we bought groceries: two […]
Elżbieta Jadwiga Keiferowicz
I’m a nun in the Congregation of the Stara Wieś Sisters Servants of Mary Immaculate. Born in 1924, I’m currently eighty-five years old. I’ve been in the Congregation for fifty years. I’m an internist by profession. After four years of medical work in Tarnów, I joined the convent. My mother, born in 1900, became a […]
Joasia
For the past few years, I had been persuading Joasia to write down her wartime memories. She didn’t want to. She said that she had nothing special to tell… Finally, when I offered to write what she would tell me, she relented. Joasia could well have written her story, but most likely—like many of us—she […]
Maja Hrabowska
Warsaw 1942 Before the mass deportation of Jews from the Warsaw ghetto to Treblinka, I worked in Schultz’s workshop to help my family get by. I had stated that I was 14, even though I was only 12, to avoid being considered a child. It was known that the Germans slated children for extermination, and […]
Zbigniew Ryszard Grabowski (1)
The prewar times I was born in 1927 and until the war, I had lived in Krakow as Ryszard Adolf Abrahamer. My father, Szymon Abrahamer, was an economist. He was highly educated and very knowledgeable, and for family reasons he was in charge of the import-export office in my grandfather’s mill enterprise, “Górne Królewskie Młyny”. […]
Anna Goldman
I was born in October 1937. My parents lived in Gnaszyn, five kilometers from Częstochowa, where they both worked in the Gnaszyn Manufactory. Father was a chief engineer, and mother—an accountant. I spent the first two years of my life peacefully, surrounded by a large loving family. Father had two brothers and a sister, Mother […]
Aleksandra Frenkel-Czarniecka
September 1939 Even before September 1 my father decided that we would go to Warsaw. He remembered that in the first days after the outbreak of World War I, the Germans entered Kalisz and the city was completely destroyed, so he thought that we would be safer in Warsaw. He was a wise and farsighted […]
Czesław
Before the war, my name was Maksymilian Ścisłocki. I was born in 1928. I lived in Warsaw, in the Jewish district at 9 Miła Street. My father was the representative of the Singer company in Warsaw. My mother, however, didn’t work. I had a brother ten years younger than me. His name was Marek Ścisłocki. […]
Danuta Cukierman
KATARZYNA MELOCH: I know you were born in 1942, at the darkest time of the Holocaust. The crematoria in concentration camps were working at full capacity. And yet, Jewish mothers kept giving birth to new babies… DANUTA CUKIERMAN: I was born in Lvov. My mother, a Warsaw native, had escaped to Lvov with Daddy because […]