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I Claims Conference
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_ , ■: Against Germany
Claims Conference Holocaust Survivor
Memoir Collection
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Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2019 with funding from
Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, Inc.
https://archive.org/details/journeybackholoc01rotb
This book is dedicated to:
The memory of my family,
murdered by the Nazis,
and all the other victims;
to:
My only surviving sister, Eva,
and her husband, Paul;
And to my beloved little family,
Sima, Stephen, Jessica and Daniel,
whose whole existence
inspired me to write this book.
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FOREWORD
The history of the Jews is a tragic history of persecuted, innocent people. But the 20th
century holocaust is the bloodiest page in it.
So many books have been written about the holocaust and many people don't want to
read or listen any more about this subject. They say that the past belongs to history and it's
time to forget things which happened many years ago... history.
Maybe they're right - life goes on.
Unfortunately, the few survivors who are still alive can't forget it -1 am one of them and
what outraged me is the falsifiers of history, dishonest liars who crawled out lately to deny.
Deny the facts, the documents, the films, the eyewitness testimonies.
Their goal is to minimize the terrible tragedy which befell the Jewish people under the
Nazi rule. Distorting the truth, they can't hide their sympathy to the criminals who are
responsible for the genocide. They can't hide their nostalgia for the "good old times." They
can't hide their anti-semitism.
Why did I keep silent for so many years? There are a few reasons. First of all, for 37
years after the war, I lived in the former Soviet Union and there, the Jewish holocaust was
ignored. I think that it was partly (as they say) that they have enough of their own martyrs,
and most of all because of anti-semitism.
Anyway, silence allowed me to cast a veil over my past, which I want desperately to
forget. But this was impossible.
That cursed time haunted me all my life. There is no place to hide from it.
For many years, I have been reading other peoples memories and my heart was
bleeding. Their hell was my hell. Their misery was my misery. Throughout these years I
was writing, in my mind, my story. The story of a child and teenager in Poland during the war
I didn’t put it on paper because this was the one thing I did not want to share with my
) little family - the agony of my childhood - the fear to be born Jewish.
In this way, the years in hiding during the war were followed by many years of hiding
my past, my pain, my nightmares.
But deep inside the past kept me captive. Under the normalcy of everyday life, there
was a wounded troubled and weeping soul.
I was nine years old when the Germans occupied Poland. When they left, I was 14 -
the age of Anne Frank.
I have read her book many times and perfectly understand her feelings and the
situation they were in. We were both Jewish children sentenced to die - doomed because we
were born Jewish. The only thing that is different was the countries and the hiding places.
Her's was a breeze compared to mine.
Nobody can imagine hiding in a pit, the physical discomfort, dirt, hunger, thirst,
darkness and the mental anguish that you could be discovered and killed at any moment.
This fear, a constant fear of neighbours, informers, your host in whose mercy you are,
who is paid - but can change his mind and push you out in the cold...
The most vulnerable victims were the children whose fight for survival more often than
not, ended in disaster. They were young and not shrewd enough to lie and pretend to be
what they are not.
Hiding under a false identity was extremely dangerous. Suddenly, you had to change
yourself, mix with strangers, be with a crowd who is suspicious and hostile, who tormented
you with questions - testing you, trying to catch if you made a mistake which will cost you
your life. The cruelty is unbelievable.
You fear everything - a knock on the door, a neighbor's glance, your host’s gossip and
even yourself. What if in my sleep, suddenly I speak Yiddish?
I went through all this and much more and survived! No, it was not a miracle, it was a
lucky accident, also not without the help of a couple of noble gentiles. Very unusual persons
and not ordinary Poles.
The next 37 years in Soviet Russia is another story of survival, and again, i was lucky
to be able to escape this "paradise" and find my last sanctuary in a free, democratic country -
Canada.
Better late than never.
This wonderful country restored my faith in humanity and gives me the feelings of
belonging and peace.
Peace? But my past never goes away, never abates and follows me like a shadow. I
don’t have peace, even in this peaceful country. I don't have peace from my memories - they
are so vivid.
When I walk along the clean streets, looking at the nice houses, whose lawns are
decorated with flowers, shrubs, bushes and trees - suddenly it hits me! Can I hide in these
shrubs so that nobody will find me?..,
Many book^are written about the Holocaust by scholars, historians. But with all due
respect to them, I can tell you that only the survivors knew the real story, the real hell. Only
they saw the murderers with their own eyes. Only they knew the sorrow to be left alone,
when everybody you loved is gone - murdered.
That's why some ended their lives after liberation. They were unable to cope with their
losses, their loneliness and unable to again function in a normal world.
One of them was Ruth Minsky, a talented poet and a troubled soul, a survivor whose
poetry I use to begin my story.
In the summer of 1943, when I was 13 years old (two months before the Germans
captured us) I wrote a poem, "The Doomed'" which ended with these words;
