Holocaust Awareness Week Philip N. Backstrom, Jr. Survivor Lecture Series Rena Finder 2002 Elizabeth Wyka: I want to welcome everyone. I wan to welcome everyone to the Philip Backstrom annual Holocaust survivor lecture series. We are very fortunate to have someone with us today here at Northeastern who has survived the horrors of the Holocaust. Miss Rena Finder is a Schindler survivor. So, she's going to talk about her personal experiences and how she knew Oscar Schindler and how she came to survive it all. So, without further ado, here is Mrs. Rena Finder. Rena Finder: Thank you and good afternoon. I am wondering how many of you saw the movie Schindler's List? Well, that's great. I'm thrilled. Well, first of all I want to tell you that the movie is very factual. Everything that happened in the movie actually happened to me. I was very thrilled when the movie came out, because until the movie came out, after Steven Spielberg made the movie about the Holocaust and Oskar Schindler, Holocaust was something that only a few people talked about, read about, or saw about. Rena Finder: Because every other movie about the Holocaust would usually be shown in a selected theater and for selected audiences. But because Schindler's List was made by Steven Spielberg, that of course made everybody very curious to want to come and see it. To everybody's amazement, the movie has actually become a wonderful teaching tool. It's shown as a teaching project in many, many schools. So, I want to tell you a little bit about myself, what it was like for me when I was a little girl growing up in Krakow, Poland. Rena Finder: The movie, as you all know, took place in Krakow, Poland and surrounding. I was always aware that I had to be careful. I remember coming home from school one day from the first grade crying because somebody called me a name that I didn't understand, but I knew it wasn't good. I remember my mother trying to... actually took me to the library and tried to get a book and wanted to tell me about the different religions. Rena Finder: So, we were a great minority in Poland and not allowed to do a lot of the things that normal Polish citizens could do. But still when you're a little girl you don't pay attention to all what's going on outside of your little world, your parents, and your friends. All this, of course, changed on September 1, 1939 when Germany invaded Poland. Rena Finder: Overnight from being a little girl, I became an enemy of the state. Because immediately the Germans took all our civil rights away. The Jewish children were not allowed to go to school. The Jewish people were not allowed to own Page 1 of 15 businesses. Our bank cards were confiscated. We had to wear a white arm bad with a blue Star of David. We were on strict curfew. We were on very strict food stamps. Rena Finder: Most of all, we were told that we would not be allowed to remain in Krakow. We were told that some of the Jew people, some of the Jewish population, would be deported. The rest would be resettled into the ghetto. There were about 250,000 people living in Krakow at that time, about 38,000 were Jews. We actually could live, were allowed to live, all over. It was an older part of town, but we lived outside of the older part of town. Rena Finder: We were told that we would have to be resettled into a ghetto that would be located across the river but still in the town of Krakow. We were going to be given an area of about two avenues long and about four blocks wide, and that those of us who would be lucky enough to get a permit to remain in Krakow would have to resettle. Rena Finder: Anybody under 12 and anybody over 55 would not be allowed to remain in Krakow. Those were deemed unfit to work, but I was very lucky because I was tall for my age, and my parents were able to falsify my birth certificate and make me two years older. So, when the day came that we all had to report to the German headquarters, I remember that there were long lines of people waiting their turn in front of a huge building. The building was in the middle of the city. As I told you before, Krakow was a beautiful, beautiful ancient city. Rena Finder: So, while we stood there waiting our turn to enter the building, we were surrounded by what it seemed to me hundreds and hundreds of guards. The soldiers were armed not only with ammunition but also with dogs that were trained to tear us apart. Before we realized what was happening, trucks came. The soldiers started to separate men from women, boys from their fathers, little girls from their mothers. They were throwing the children onto the truck, or they were leaving the children wandering and crying on the ground and throwing adults into the truck. Rena Finder: There we were in the middle of the beautiful city where all around us the Polish people are occupied still went about their normal lives. They went to work. They went to school. So, there is no way that anybody could say I didn't know, I didn't see, I didn't hear, because there we were. Rena Finder: People are, of course, crying. People, mothers, were hysterical. They were throwing themselves on the ground and kissing the boots of the German soldiers begging them for mercy, begging them to allow them to be together with their family, with their children. But you know, there was no mercy coming from any of the German soldiers. Rena Finder: Within just a week, over 50,000 Jewish people were deported from Krakow, and of course we never heard from them again. Now, we were told that those who Page 2 of 15 would be deported would be sent to farms to help the farmer grow food for the German army. The rest of us who were given permits had to help build the ghetto. There had to be a wall all around the area. The windows overlooking the ghetto, overlooking the other side of the streets, had to be covered with plywood. You were not allowed to go near the windows or the patrols would shoot. Rena Finder: When the day came that we had to leave our homes, when the ghetto was ready, it was just the day that you saw in the movie. We were only allowed to take a few of our belongings. My father was able to get a pushcart on which my mother and my father put some bedding, some pots and pans, some linens, and we all put on as much clothes as we could possibly wear and still walk, because we were only allowed to take a very small suitcase. Rena Finder: So, I think I must have put on maybe three pair of ski pants and sweaters and heavy socks for my ski boot, everything that would keep us warm. I remember that we had to leave everything else behind. The furniture, we couldn't take, because we were going into the ghetto where we would be very, very crowded. We would be given a small area in an apartment. We would not have our own apartment. Rena Finder: I had my own room. [inaudible] I wonder if any of you even now who Shirley Temple was. Do you? I used to love to read. So, whenever I got good grades. Whenever I brought in a really good report card, I always had a choice of either getting a book or a Shirley Temple doll, and I used to alternate. We just left everything there. Rena Finder: Can you imagine how we felt walking out of the house, clothing on, not even locking the door? Walking down the stairs, starting to walk through the ghetto, through the narrow streets of Krakow with the pushcart. We all pushed the pushcart, and it wasn't even heavy, but the roads were full of mud. Rena Finder: Then on the sidewalks the people stood by and they were cheering happy to see us go. As we walked to our new prison behind the wall and behind the barbed wire and onto the new building. It was a huge, huge building. I remember we had to climb up four flights of stairs to come into a small apartment. There were two tiny bedrooms. I don't think the rooms were more than 10 by 10. Rena Finder: In each bedroom there would be three families sharing it. There was a tiny kitchen. There was not hot running water. The bathrooms were outside on a balcony. It was horrible. We didn't have enough water. The water would be shut off for most of the time. We didn't have enough electricity. They would shut off the electricity. There was very little food. We were so crowded, and we had to keep clean, because if you don't keep clean you get lice, and lice brings diseases. Rena Finder: Little children that were smuggled into the ghetto were dying from starvation, but those of us in the ghetto, we still had hope. We had hope that we would be Page 3 of 15 liberated.