Tag #123941 - Interview #78211 (tomasz miedzinski)

And we reached Kolomyja. The ghetto there was already sealed, we had no stocks of food and we weren't prepared for the approaching winter. Fortunately for us, our mother's cousin lived there. I think he was called Zalman, but we called him Ziama, Ziama Gutman. He was a jeweler and was employed by the Germans. I suspect that he was employed to melt down teeth. He had managed to win the Germans over to him. He had this house where two families lived. In the yard was a little wooden recess with a loft, and he put us up in that loft. Our uncle Hersz Gutman from Kolanki was already there, with his elder daughter; his son had already been murdered by Ukrainian nationalists. There were a few thousand people in the ghetto. They were living everywhere: in the ritual slaughterhouse, in the cheder, in the Jewish school. Typhoid fever and typhus were rife; incredible starvation everywhere. There wasn't a nettle to be seen, because people cooked nettles. The bark had been stripped from the trees. By some miracle my father again found employment as a carpenter in the municipal offices, and received his ration - a pot of soup. My older brother was in contact with a group of youths; he was 16 by then. They resolved to try their luck in Romania. One night, a little group of four or five of them slipped out of the ghetto and disappeared without trace. I suspect that they were caught somewhere on the border and murdered.

And on a single day, a Sunday at the beginning of October 1942, we called it Bloody Sunday, an 'Aktion' was organized in all the ghettoes that were still in existence from Kolomyja to Lvov. Because Sunday was not a working day there were always a lot of people around, always crowds on the streets, the Jews, as usual, would be politicking; people checking who was left alive. But that Sunday there was a hollow kind of silence. And through a chink in our recess we saw that transports of Jews were already being led away. People were walking in a column, downcast, distraught, swollen, stupefied, they were going without protest. We were dragged out of our recess by Ukrainian policemen and made to join the column.