Miriam Sharon, born in 1934

In the forests of Siberia

I was born on September 10, 1934, in Chorzów, in Upper Silesia. Around four thousand Jews, mostly assimilated ones, lived in Chorzów before the war. My parents came from devout families in Nowy Sącz. After getting married, they moved to Chorzów, to change their lifestyles from Orthodox to secular and progressive, which prevailed in Chorzów at the time.

I was the second child in a wealthy and partly assimilated Jewish family. My sister Rysia, who was five years older than me, went to a Polish school. My parents had only two children. Mother and Father spoke to each other in Yiddish, but to us children only in Polish. I remember that my mama spoke in a pure Polish, without a Yiddish accent. I had a Polish nanny named Agnieszka, who loved me very much.

We spent our summer holidays together with our cousins in the village of Bystra. We were there on September 1, 1939, when Germany attacked Poland. We couldn’t return to Chorzów because it had already been taken by the Germans. At that point, we didn’t think that we would never go back to Chorzów. My father loaded us on a truck and we set out towards Ukraine. There were twenty adults and eight children.

We joined thousands of people who wandered down the roads on foot, by cart or car, trying to escape the Germans. German planes bombarded fleeing  civilians.  I  remember  that  horrible  journey  as a terrified child: the smoke rising above fires and moans of the wounded calling for help. I remember houses on fire in Tomaszów Lubelski and how the town went down in flames.

After many days of traveling we reached the Ukrainian forests, where we hid from the bombs. I celebrated my fifth birthday there. In the summer of 1940, as a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, new borders between Germany and the USSR were drawn up. Polish citizens who refused to take Soviet citizenship were considered enemies of the Soviet Union.

One summer night Russian soldiers invaded our home to arrest us. My mother, who had a heart condition, refused to follow the Russians’ orders. A Russian soldier pointed a gun at her, threatening to shoot her. My sister and I stood near Mama, but luckily the soldier didn’t shoot. It turned out that an officer of Jewish origin stopped him. The soldiers left but returned the following night and forced us onto boxcars, which headed in an unknown direction.

The trains, which were filled with hundreds of people, had no toilets. People went to the bathroom next to the tracks, in  public, during short stops. My family took the top racks of the car, where it was difficult to sit. The food was scarce and the sanitary conditions were terrible. The dead were buried by the railway tracks. It seemed that this journey would never end. In reality, it lasted two months.

As a 6-year-old child, I couldn’t come to terms with the terrible reality. I escaped it by closing my eyes and disappearing into a world of my own thoughts and dreams to which no-one else had access. This was my way of limiting contact with harsh fate. Even today I’m considered a dreamer in my circle, but back in those days I believed that I had found the only way to survive the shame and suffering.

One day the trains stopped and we were ordered to get off with all of our possessions. We had reached Arkhangelsk, a town “at the edge of the world.” From there, we walked for hours through swamps, being bitten by mosquitos, to a labor camp. We spent eighteen months in that camp in nightmarish sanitary conditions and crowded quarters.

The winter dragged on. The frost and snowfall were insufferable. My father did forestry work. My mother was constantly ill. My sister and I didn’t go to school because there wasn’t one. My sister taught me how to read and write. She instilled in me a love for the Polish language and Polish literature and poetry that never went away. My sister was my only teacher and friend.

In 1941 when Germany attacked Russia, the Polish government-in-exile made an agreement with the USSR, based on which we received amnesty. The Soviet authorities allowed us to leave the labor camp and we regained our freedom. Again, we were loaded onto trains, this time southbound. We weren’t sure where to get off because the German army was moving fast and we had to flee it again. We had no food, and epidemics broke out. Sometimes we would get off a train, spend a few days at some station, and then get back on another train.

For a few months we lived in Bukhara, where we  suffered poverty and hunger. Agnieszka, my Polish nanny who had followed us throughout the exile, fell ill with typhoid and died. When my father was looking for work, he was arrested for no reason. He spent a few months in jail but he managed to escape. While he was imprisoned we moved to Samarkand, where my mother’s brother and several other relatives were staying. We lived in Samarkand until  the  end  of  the war. The conditions were bearable, relatively speaking, but there were also periods of hunger. My parents put us in an orphanage. There was a Polish school in Samarkand and we had friends there.

We lived like a lost tribe in a lost world. We didn’t know anything about the incredible crimes committed against Jews in Poland and other European countries. We didn’t understand the scale of the tragedy until we were repatriated to Poland. Our entire extended family had been murdered. We were left with nothing. It’s hard for me to describe Poland in 1945. For us, it was a country of damnation—the country of death.

Soon we emigrated to Brazil, where my mother’s brothers and sisters were staying. I lived in Brazil until I was 30. I studied biology, and after I earned my master’s degree I emigrated to Israel, where I currently live with my husband and three children: Igal, Dafna, and Urim. I have five grandchildren: Jonathan, Maya, Ella, Romy, and Tomer.

I don’t consider myself a child of the Holocaust. I think I was only on its edge. I wasn’t even a child who was hidden from the Germans. I had the rare privilege of surviving the war with my closest family.

When I left for Brazil I was young and I got my life back on track. So what is it that I’m missing? Why are my unhealed wounds hurting? Why am I writing a chapter for your book The Children of the Holocaust Speak?

In 1996 I took part in a workshop at Yad Vashem, the goal of which was to teach people who had survived the Holocaust to talk about their personal experiences. I attended that class with my husband, who had also survived the Holocaust. For the first time in my life I was asked to recount my experiences. The group of people with a similar  past were listening attentively. I was curious how they would react to my confession. When I was done, the psychologist who was  conducting that class, cried out: “If you’re not a child of the Holocaust, who is?” The participants peppered me with questions. Suddenly, I was one of them. Yet another witness, yet another account from the darkest era in human history.

All my life I had kept quiet about the history of my childhood. My memory is foggy. I’ve forgotten many facts. I’ve never had a sense of belonging. I speak a few languages, but I don’t have one in which I can confess all my thoughts and impressions. I have as many personalities as  the  languages  that I speak. I am  passionate  about  literature  and I write poems, and yet I studied biology. I always expect sympathy and affection, which are supposed to protect me from the fear that I might suddenly lose everything I love. I’m not capable of strong feelings. I miss something unspoken, a feeling of happiness that evaporated forever along with my childhood.