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So what happened? How did I get away? My father pushed me out. ‘Run!’ – he said It was a moment. There was a gap and I used it. At the exit routes from the ghetto there was police, Germans. There was commotion, shouting, noise, and I used that moment to run away, no one even looked at me. I went all alone – and that was it. I managed to escape. And so my solitary life began.
I headed straight for home. And I ran into one of our neighbors – before the war this was a person my family was quite close with. Sure, they fed me, gave me some food for the road, but then the neighbor says to me: ‘You’d better leave, quick, because we are scared as well.’ I understood them, and later I understood even better – at first I was a bit bitter about it, why they treated me this way. These were good friends, we were quite close, and so I am not surprised at them at all. The intimidation was really powerful, so that everyone was just watching out not to get in trouble. I never went there again afterwards.
Where was I to go? I went to the Polish man for whom I had worked earlier on. He always said to me, when I was still in the ghetto: listen, if you manage to run away, you just head for Warsaw. And this is what I did. So he helped me quite a bit. One more thing I remembered just now. The man I worked for, or maybe it was his wife, they gave me a chain and a cross. And I wore it afterwards, even when I lived in the orphanage. Perhaps this is what protected me in a sense? I didn’t know what to do, and I didn’t have anything of my own, so I went to the train station, got on a train, and went to Warsaw, where I had never been before in my life. At such a time – and without a ticket, on top of everything else. But I got through, with nobody even looking at me in the train, because this was period when a lot of people traveled, and there were special cars for Germans, where the Poles were not allowed to enter: Nur fűr Deutsche.... Lots of people with luggage, with bundles, and I just somehow stuck myself among them.
I headed straight for home. And I ran into one of our neighbors – before the war this was a person my family was quite close with. Sure, they fed me, gave me some food for the road, but then the neighbor says to me: ‘You’d better leave, quick, because we are scared as well.’ I understood them, and later I understood even better – at first I was a bit bitter about it, why they treated me this way. These were good friends, we were quite close, and so I am not surprised at them at all. The intimidation was really powerful, so that everyone was just watching out not to get in trouble. I never went there again afterwards.
Where was I to go? I went to the Polish man for whom I had worked earlier on. He always said to me, when I was still in the ghetto: listen, if you manage to run away, you just head for Warsaw. And this is what I did. So he helped me quite a bit. One more thing I remembered just now. The man I worked for, or maybe it was his wife, they gave me a chain and a cross. And I wore it afterwards, even when I lived in the orphanage. Perhaps this is what protected me in a sense? I didn’t know what to do, and I didn’t have anything of my own, so I went to the train station, got on a train, and went to Warsaw, where I had never been before in my life. At such a time – and without a ticket, on top of everything else. But I got through, with nobody even looking at me in the train, because this was period when a lot of people traveled, and there were special cars for Germans, where the Poles were not allowed to enter: Nur fűr Deutsche.... Lots of people with luggage, with bundles, and I just somehow stuck myself among them.
Period
Location
Poland
Interview
Stanislaw Wierzba
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