Tag #157210 - Interview #78001 (Salomea Gemrot)

I don't know who, but after the war someone on my husband's side was interested in who I was and where I came from. And they denounced me to the militia, that I had false papers, because I didn't have an identity card, but this German 'Kennkarte' [identity card] written out in my wartime name. They came, the militia, all dressed up in uniforms! They took this 'Kennkarte' from me, they tore it up and threw it in the corner. I was supposed to show up at the militia in Cracow, as a suspect. I went there with a heavy heart, because even the Germans never treated me like that. I went there, it was some important office. Several people were sitting behind a desk and I was being interviewed by some, forgive my language, ditz, no more than a teenager. So they looked at it [the document], because they picked up this 'Kennkarte' then and put the pieces together and glued them. And in this 'Kennkarte' I was seven years younger than in reality. I was born in 1909 and in those documents it was 1916. This woman looked at me angrily and said, 'You're one arrogant Jew to make yourself so much younger.' What a circus. And I looked at her and thought, 'You bimbo, why are you angry?' And I said to her, 'Why do you think no one ever questioned this before. You're the first one. And how dare you address me like that? Why? What times are we living in?'

A friend of mine, Marysia, a friend of the family and a Catholic was there with me. She got really scared. And she said, 'What is she doing?' But they didn't do anything to me for that, because she didn't have the right to address me like that. Oh, these are interesting memories. My husband would sometimes stop me and say, 'You know, you're behaving like a drunk.' And that's when they forced me to get a new identity card, the proper kind. I had to go to Rzeszow, find my birth certificate the way it was and now I have my last name and maiden name in my identity card and everything. That was the one and only time I went to Rzeszow, for that birth certificate, but I didn't visit anything, didn't walk around. I just went to the Jewish community, collected my birth certificate from them and went back. I couldn't even walk on those streets, because I remembered very well what it had been like.