Tag #107482 - Interview #78781 (Gustawa Birencwajg)

When he went away, I didn't know if he was alive or not and I was left alone with this daughter of mine. A friend of mine helped me a bit, but it wasn't enough to feed ourselves. She was working in a factory [Plihal, an underclothes factory]. They made these knitted T-shirts there, very thin ones, quite expensive. And when the war broke out, they gave away the merchandise to the workers, so they'd sell it. She came to me and said, 'Listen Gucia, you have lots of acquaintances, take some of this and sell it.' Cela, that's how they called her, her last name was Krawiecka.

After a while the Germans came, these Volksdeutsche [4], asking about my husband. I said, 'He's not here.' So they told me to get out of the house. It was cold by then, we moved out of the apartment and I only asked them to let me take the feather quilt with me. I took it with me on my back, held the child by the hand and off we went. I decided I'd go to Warsaw. Because all these movements had begun in Lodz, they wanted all the Jews to be together. The Poles and the Germans started taking over the apartments. And you couldn't have access to it [to apartments].