Diana Russ, born in 1927
Work saved me
I was born in Łódź, in 1927. I had a good, loving family—my mama, my father and my elderly grandmother. I was an only child but I wasn’t lonely. I had close relations with all my aunts, uncles, and their children. When the war broke out, I had completed six years of elementary school. Although my parents weren’t wealthy, I went to a good private Jewish school.
We moved to the ghetto as soon as the Germans announced that Jews weren’t allowed to live “on the Aryan side.” My father and uncles found a decent house within the perimeters of the planned ghetto and we all moved there: both of my mama’s brothers and her sister with children. Each segment of this large family had their own room. Running water was in the hallway, the toilet was in the yard.
For the first two years in the ghetto, I continued going to school. Later I had to work, first in an embroidery workshop, and then in a tailor’s. Soon, however, my father found me a job in an accounting office. Everyone had to work. The unemployed didn’t get food stamps. Even our old grandmother worked at sorting clothes left by Jews who had been sent to camps.
Up to a point, for around two years, life wasn’t so horrible. We exchanged food stamps for a small chunk of dark bread and artificial marmalade. We got soup from the kitchen run by the municipality. You could still buy some food on the black market, of course, for huge amounts of money. There was also some “social life.” After work, people would get together, play cards, chat, and even sing. It seemed that we might survive that war somehow, the more so that the ghetto in Łódź was productive and worked for the Germans. Different departments [Arbeitsressort—trans. note] provided the Germans with a number of items. I embroidered the stripes on officer uniforms. But at that point you could already see people begging, the hungry and dying for whom there was neither job nor bread.
The notion that “we might survive somehow” evaporated after the first roundups and deportations. So far, my father had been protected because he was the director of the sewing company, but he hid Grandma, Mother, and me in an empty house. This lasted until the liquidation of the ghetto and its population. My whole family and I were sent to Auschwitz in late August 1944. The Germans had told us that we were going to work in a different city. On the way, people were shouting to us: “Where are you going? Run! They’ll kill you!” It was hard to believe that.
In Auschwitz, on the ramp where you waited for the selection, I was still with my mother. We approached the desk where high-ranking Gestapos were standing. One of them asked my mama how old she was. She replied that she was 38. He wanted the exact date but she couldn’t remember it. The Gestapo told her to stand by and try to remember it. But my mother still couldn’t produce that date. When he called her again, she started screaming, of course, in German: “What do you want from me? I’m upset, they took my child!” Again, he put her aside and told her to remember it. At that point, some prisoner approached my mother asking what the Gestapo wanted from her. He quickly calculated the year and made up the month and day. Mama finally fulfilled the Gestapo’s demand, who, as she later learned, was Mengele. I wandered around the crowd to stay close and I could hear everything. Soon, my mother and I were separated. She was sent to Bergen-Belsen.
I ended up in an arms factory in Psie Pole near Wrocław. Work was very hard, the machines dangerous, and a moment’s carelessness could cost you your hands—on top of which, we were hungry, cold, and tired.
I couldn’t have looked too bad, because the foreman ordered me to clean his office. He always left some food there. At first I was scared to even touch that food. I thought it was a trap. But the foreman told me to eat everything up. This lasted for a few months, until December. Work probably saved my life. My cousin was there with me. She didn’t want to work. She said that she was sick and she stayed in bed. That bedrest weakened her even more and later she couldn’t handle the marches from camp to camp, during which everyone who was lagging behind the goaded group of prisoners was killed. She was shot.
When the front was approaching from the west, we were loaded on passenger trains (it was expected that they would be bombed) and taken through Czechoslovakia to Bergen-Belsen. From there we were herded through Buchenwald, which refused to take us for lack of room. We were kept there for a few days and herded again, this time to Mauthausen for a few weeks, and later to Gross-Rosen. When the liberation army was approaching, I was very sick. I had been punished by my Ukrainian supervisor because I wasn’t able to bring two trees at once from the forest, only one. She sent me to the typhoid unit and I contracted it.
After the liberation, very sick with typhoid and dysentery, eaten by lice, I was put in a lazaret set up by the Allies. Luckily, a doctor from Belgium took an interest in me. He asked me why I wasn’t eating and if I had an appetite for anything. I replied that I’d like a fresh bread roll. Then he told me that he was going to send me to Sweden and that I’d get that roll there. And that’s what happened. Still en route on the ship, they operated on my festering glands. I was hospitalized for almost a year in Sweden. The moment I felt a little better, I began searching for my family via the Red Cross. The letter reached Poland. It turned out that my parents were alive, and that my closest aunt and her daughter had been found. One of our cousins and a few other relatives had also survived. I returned to Poland, to my parents, in 1947. I got married soon after and had a daughter. In 1950 we left with my parents for Israel.
Post scriptum
Diana passed away unexpectedly in November 2005, almost three weeks after she dictated her war recollections to me. For the last few years, she had been afflicted by her disability. Her vertebrae had crumbled.
After surgery and permanent rehabilitation, she could move around by herself, that is, take a dozen steps despite pain, which couldn’t be alleviated by the strongest pain medication. But she tried to walk and not be a burden to anyone. She was strong-willed and never complained despite the fact that her life hadn’t been easy. When talking about her war plight, she never failed to comment that she was luckier than some others who had experienced more hardship. That is why her story about her life in the ghetto or in the camps is succinct, devoid of drama, which (deservedly) fills many war recollections.
After the war she wanted to go back to school, but she obeyed her parents, who decided that for her safety she should marry. The more so because the suitor happened to come from a very good family and was thirteen years older. To her parents, these were his great attributes. He fell in love with Diana at first sight, which charmed her and made giving up school a little easier. Diana got pregnant and gave birth to a daughter. In those times, it was unthinkable for a married woman and a mother to continue her education. Her second daughter was born a few years later, already in Israel.
Diana considered her lack of education the greatest injustice that had befallen her. But she did learn. She completed the school curriculum along with her daughters, and later while helping her grandchildren with homework. She read a lot. She was an incredibly bright person with an open mind. Diana had a rare linguistic talent. She came back from Sweden speaking Swedish, and thanks to that, upon her arrival in Poland she had job offers. She didn’t lose these abilities in her old age. When I was visiting Israel, I witnessed how she freely conversed in four languages at the same time.
After her family left for Israel they struggled, as most did in that pioneer and war period. After a few years, thanks to work and thrift, they did better financially. That was when Diana’s father passed away, as if he had decided that now he could afford to because his family was safe. He had survived the ghetto, camps, and the march to Terezín with a serious heart condition, which had been diagnosed even before the war. Her mother, who lived to see her first great-grandson, died at the age of 86. Diana’s husband died ten years later. She suffered from loneliness which couldn’t be alleviated by her daughters, six grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren, because she wasn’t able to look after them. She had a constant hunger for activity, which couldn’t be satisfied due to her health.
My visit brought her some joy. We had always been close, although in half a century we saw each other only a handful of times. I couldn’t stay longer in Israel because neither of us could afford such luxury. When I was saying goodby to Diana, I didn’t think for a second that it was going to be our final goodby.
Halina
