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In the ghetto Father worked in the hospital. I don't know what he did there - he had had nothing to do with medicine, of course, but they took him, because he was wise. He went to work in the mornings. I stayed at home; my brother worked too. He used to go somewhere with Father; I don't even remember where.
Later on Father managed to have some papers done that made me two years older. He bought these high-heeled clogs to make me taller, and I worked. It was a carbide factory, a Jewish factory, in fact, that had been taken over by the Germans, opposite the ghetto, on 2 Lwowska Street; we used to go past the wire and it was out on the Aryan side. And there I worked with the father of Polanski Romek, that's how I know him. [Polanski, Roman (1933): Polish-born American film director. He escaped from the Cracow ghetto on the day it was liquidated, 13th March 1943, and survived, in hiding with a peasant family.] We worked on three shifts. So sometimes I would come home and Father wasn't there; we would miss each other. And when I had a night-shift I would sleep during the day.
There, in the ghetto, I was hungry all the time. Then I would have eaten anything, but there was nothing. They didn't pay us, of course. We worked for nothing, you see [but nevertheless everyone wanted to be employed, because that was protection from being deported from the ghetto].
Later on Father managed to have some papers done that made me two years older. He bought these high-heeled clogs to make me taller, and I worked. It was a carbide factory, a Jewish factory, in fact, that had been taken over by the Germans, opposite the ghetto, on 2 Lwowska Street; we used to go past the wire and it was out on the Aryan side. And there I worked with the father of Polanski Romek, that's how I know him. [Polanski, Roman (1933): Polish-born American film director. He escaped from the Cracow ghetto on the day it was liquidated, 13th March 1943, and survived, in hiding with a peasant family.] We worked on three shifts. So sometimes I would come home and Father wasn't there; we would miss each other. And when I had a night-shift I would sleep during the day.
There, in the ghetto, I was hungry all the time. Then I would have eaten anything, but there was nothing. They didn't pay us, of course. We worked for nothing, you see [but nevertheless everyone wanted to be employed, because that was protection from being deported from the ghetto].
Period
Location
Poland
Interview
Teofila Silberring