How They Lived to Tell 1939-1945 Together members of a Jewish youth group fled from Poland to Slovakia, Austria, Hungary, Romania and Palestine Edith Ruina Including selections from the written Recollection of Rut Judenherc, interviews and testimonies of other survivors. © Edith Ruina May 24, 2005 all rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Published 2005 Mixed Media Memoirs LLC Book design by Jason Davis [email protected] Green Bay,Wisconsin CONTENTS Acknowledgment ..............................................................................v Chapter 1 Introduction ......................................................................1 Chapter 2 1939-1942 ......................................................................9 1. The People in this Story 2. The Situation of Jews in Poland Chapter 3 1939-1942 Poland..........................................................55 Before and After the German Occupation Chapter 4 1943 Poland ..................................................................87 Many Perished—Few Escaped Chapter 5 1943-44 Austria............................................................123 Chapter 6 1944 Hungary..............................................................155 Surviving in Hungary Chapter 7 1944-1945 ..................................................................205 Romania en route to Palestine Chapter 8 Palestine ......................................................................219 They Lived to Tell v Chapter 9 ....................................................................................235 Author’s Reflections MAPS ..............................................................................................x Introduction - Jewish Holocaust Losses Chapter 3 - Division of Poland Chapter 4 - Poland to Istanbul Chapter 7 - Eastern Front - Flight from Persecution Chapter 8 - Routes of Illegal Immigration References ........................................................................................x vi vii viii Acknowledgment How did I come to write this book about the survival of a Zionist youth group from Poland when I am not one of those survivors? It would have been too daunting a task were it not for my personal history and the encouragement and contributions of many people. I was profoundly moved when I heard about the survivors who are the subject of this book and wanted to learn more of their experiences during the holocaust. Over a period of several years, this became an all-engrossing venture into a self- education program about the holocaust and then into the inten- sive work of interviewing, arranging translations, and rendering this text. My personal motivation stems from a debt I feel to my Polish born parents. I was born in the United States in 1924, only four years after my parents arrived here from their respec- tive Polish shtetls, small cities. Most of my parents’ siblings and their children, whom I never knew, remained in Poland and did not survive the holocaust. In the late 1930s, when I was in ele- mentary school, I recall my mother reading from her father’s last letters in Yiddish about his terrible fears for his family.I remem- ber, too, wealthier relatives’ futile attempts to arrange for their parents and siblings to leave Poland and come to the United States. I regret how little attention I paid to my parents’ earlier life in Poland, and to their loss of brothers, sisters, and parents who did not have the good fortune to emigrate. I am the same age as the survivors in this book. It is only because of my par- ents’ emigration from Poland that I did not suffer their fate. So, ix in a sense, this book is a long-overdue way of paying attention to their losses. Now for my gratitude to individuals who helped me in the process of research and manuscript creation.Antony Polonsky of Brandeis University early on encouraged my pursuing this. He thought it particularly valuable for insights into the situation in Silesia, the region of Sosnowiec and Bedzin where the subjects of this account lived. On several trips to Israel, I had the opportunity to meet with other Shoah scholars in Israel. One of the first was Dalia Ofer, who has done important work on the illegal immigration of Jews to Palestine before the end of World War II. She intro- duced me to Avihu Ronen, a younger Israeli Holocaust histori- an and the child of survivors. He was most generous in suggest- ing other sources of information as well as his own work pub- lished in Hebrew that refers to the survivors in this account, who came to be identified as The Group. I have also had instruc- tive meetings with other Israeli scholars: Israel Gutman,Yehuda Bauer, Shmuel Krakowski, Dina Porat and Shlomo Netzer. I have drawn upon the publications of these people as well as of many other scholars. I made extensive use of Leni Yahil’s masterful work, The Holocaust: the Fate of European Jewry, 1932- 1945. It is encyclopedic in its coverage, an excellent and read- able text distilled from the work of numerous holocaust schol- ars with an extensive bibliography. In Cambridge I have benefited from several academic con- ferences on the holocaust.Access to the superb library resources of Harvard University allowed me to enjoy days of roving through the stacks to locate relevant historical texts. Staff mem- bers of the United States Holocaust Museum made it conven- x ient to avail myself of the library resources there.They also made it possible for me to attend the Displaced Persons Conference in 1999 sponsored by the Museum. Upon arriving in Palestine in 1944 and 1945, the youngsters in this story stayed at the Hanoar Hatzioni Kibbutz Tel Izhak which is now a center for holocaust education in Israel. The archivist there helped me to locate relevant testimonies going painstakingly through hundreds of file cards since they had no computers. Archivists at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Jerusalem, too, were helpful. Yona Zimmerman, a talented bilingual Canadian student at Bar Ilan University, aided my exploration of the Yad Vashem materials, where (to my sur- prise) Hebrew is necessary to access their collection.Yona also translated English and Hebrew simultaneously when I inter- viewed survivors who did not speak English. Yehuda Bauer wisely cautioned that this story required knowledge of Hebrew and Polish. I have compensated for my own language deficits by the help of excellent translators. Bauer and others encouraged presenting this exceptional survival story which is unknown to English readers. I quote extensively from Rutka Judenherc’s written recol- lection.That memoir which she contributed to me has made an immeasurable contribution to the rendering of this unusual his- tory. Tadosz Szafar translated Rutka’a story from Polish into English. Szafar was a refugee from Poland who reached the United States just before the war. Working on this translation affected him deeply. Rutka appreciates that he artfully rendered her text into English, not only because of his linguistic skill but because of his own experiences in Poland. Szafar died before I could thank him adequately. xi Tusia Gutman, another of the survivors shared her privately published memories with me. Upon reading a draft of this text, she expressed her gratitude for my work. I am greatly indebted to friends who have translated copies of individual testimonies that I found in Israeli archives. Geulah Pariser has been my loyal Hebraist. She was born in Palestine and lived in England during the war. It seems strange that her Jewish husband who had fled to England from Hitler’s Germany was interned in Canada during the war because the British regarded him as a German citizen and hence an enemy alien. Shlomit Haber-Schaim, an Israeli who has lived in the United States for many years, also translated Hebrew manuscripts. Two people translated Polish testimonies for me, Stasha Janowska and Anita Leyfell. Stasha’s father led her out of Warsaw in 1939 when she was ten years old, to be raised by nuns in Poland. She became one of the “hidden children” who lost their families. These women survived the holocaust in Poland and had successful professional lives there. Anita told me that the few Jews in Poland after the war could be readily identified because they never referred to relatives; their relatives were killed by the Germans. However, despite the few Jews remaining in Poland after 1945, a new wave of anti-Semitism in the late ‘60s caused them to give up their careers in Poland and immigrate to the United States. Nadine Rodwin and Magda Tisza translated texts from German. Nadine’s family moved from Russia to Germany and then to France just before World War II, when Nadine came to college in the United States. Magda is from Germany. Her hus- band, a refugee professor from Hungary, translated a bit of xii Hungarian for me. Magda is an avid book collector and occa- sionally found relevant excerpts for me in old texts. Sherwin Greenberg, an old friend and a talented photogra- pher, carefully rendered maps to clarify the location and circum- stances that affected the survivors. My greatest regret about my commitment to this project over an extended period has been that my husband’s picture of retirement did not include a wife unavailable for sharing what Robert Browning described as “this last of life for which the first was made.” But Jack believed, as I did, that this story needed to be told and therefore warranted my time—and his.Without his continuous encouragement, careful reading, constructive criticism, and