31.8.24 (filmed 19.12.23)
When mum is alert, I continue to tell her stories from her life, from her early years. The same stories that she once told me. She is like a kid, wide-eyed, listening to fairy tales.
I think she remembers most of them. Not hearing well doesn't help.
About fifteen years ago, when I recorded mum recounting these stories, this is what she told me about this incident:
My parents were keen swimmers and they swam regularly at the local pool. Afterwards, my mother would have a massage by a masseuse who was a hunchback. It turned out that he was a Volksdeutsche (an ethnic German living in Poland with allegiance to the Nazi party).
In September, 1939, the day after the Nazis invaded my home town of Zgierz, he betrayed us and brought two German soldiers to our house. They ordered us to leave immediately without taking a thing. My mother begged him to let us take my white wrought-iron bed and he must have had a touch of conscience because he let us take the frame, but not the mattress.
My parents held the parts of my bed frame as the three of us stood by the road leading out of Zgierz. We did not know where to go or what would happen to us. A passing truck stopped. The driver offered us a lift in the back, but he refused to take the bed. I watched my bed on the side of the road get smaller and smaller as my parents and I left Zgierz for the last time.
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Meanwhile, the Nazi authorities were setting aside a section of the city, a ghetto, where the Jews were forced to live apart from the rest of the population. The Łódź Ghetto was, in effect, a large prison the size of several suburbs. It was surrounded by a barbed-wire fence and guarded by both the Jewish and the German police.
The ghetto consisted of the Old City, including the suburbs of Marysin and Baluty, with the Jewish cemetery at one end. Baluty was a poor neighbourhood before the war, but after we moved in, its Catholic inhabitants were moved to a better-class area. The Jews of Łódź and those from the surrounding towns and villages were rounded up into the ghetto with more than 150,000 Jews crammed together. Anyone who tried to leave was shot by the police.
On 1 May 1940 holding only our small rucksacks, my parents and I were ordered into the Ghetto.
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