Skierniewice to Łódź, I learned that the situation was hopeless and that nobody knew when my brother would be released. There was conjecture that they would release his group and mobilize another. But that is not what happened.
We became very depressed because I had no other siblings and my brother was the one who made our home a cheerful place. He couldn’t stand it when you sulked. He liked cheerful faces!
Once he did manage to get a furlough and he wrote us that he was coming home. Unfortunately, he had to return to his military unit after two days. During that visit his friends claimed that he was cheerful, but both of us, that is, I and my mother, noticed a change in his disposition.
Thereafter his letters started to arrive from an unknown place—he could not write where he was. So we addressed our letters to the Army Postal Service.
In his letters he asked us to get him released. He wrote how to do it. Unfortunately, our efforts proved fruitless. We were a middle-class family. My brother was a furrier and he traded furs, too. He had a licence, [2] which we mailed to him. My mother tried to convince the social services to declare him the sole provider as she was a widow and he, her only son, helped us financially. But the social services concluded that my mother was financially independent because she ran a store and because I, her daughter, worked in a Social Security office. In a word, they concluded that my brother was not the sole provider. At that time we still did not think, not for a moment, that it would come to war. Neither did we suspect that his life was in danger. Otherwise my mother would have closed her store and I would have quit my job. Everything could have been different. We could have saved him that way. Now it is too late!
For war did break out. My brother disappeared without a trace. I thought that I too would be mobilized as a nurse for the Red Cross emergency service. I continued to go to work. During alerts my mother phoned me at the office as she wanted us to be in touch at such moments. That situation lasted until 5 September, when the doctor, that is, my boss, escaped from Łódź along with all the men. I ran to the Polish Red Cross and volunteered as a nurse, but they did not take me in. So I returned to the office to set everything in order. In the main office they told me to take the first-aid kit, bandages, syringes, and medical tools to my home or to the hospital. Naturally, I preferred to take
