What has changed for me during the war
Before the war we lived in Sochaczew. I had parents and two sisters. Daddy
was a craftsman, a shoemaker, and he made good money. I went to school, to
grade four, and I was a good student. Suddenly the war broke out. The bombing
started. When the first bomb fell on our town, everyone started running
away to wherever they could. Taking some bedding and linens with us, we took
a horse wagon to Wiskitki.²⁰ After a short time we found out that the house
where we lived had burned down. Having no reason to go back to Sochaczew,
we stayed in Wiskitki. My parents rented a flat and my dad worked hard to
feed the family. We did not go without food and we usually had some work
to do for the peasants, and the peasants gave us potatoes, beets, flour, and
groats in exchange for the work. However, we did not enjoy that for long
because we were resettled, and they did not let us take more than 20 kilograms
of luggage and 25 zlotys. One day, there was an order to leave town immediately.
Horse wagons arrived and took the sick, children, and elderly women to
Żyrardów, and the men went on foot. We spent one night in Żyrardów. We were
taken by train to Warsaw.²¹ When we got off the train, there were already big
cars that took us to the Point at Niska Street 20. At the Point we spent two
weeks. My parents rented a flat, thinking that in a private flat daddy would
be able to work and feed us. But daddy couldn’t get any work and we were
starving. Daddy felt weaker every day, until one day he died. We mourned
the death of our beloved daddy for a long time. Mummy started [14] selling
whatever was left in the house. We were in a very bad way. Four weeks after
daddy died, mummy fell seriously ill and died shortly afterwards. We were
left on our own, three orphans without any means. We were doing very badly.
We had nothing to eat. There were days when we went to sleep without a scrap
of bread. Until a friend of my daddy’s found out about our sad fate and tried
to get us admitted to the day-care. We started going there on 1 August. A few
20 Wiskitki (Żyrardów County).
21 From the end of January to mid-March 1941, the occupying authorities resettled about 50,000 Jews from the western part of the Warsaw district to the Warsaw ghetto. Jews from Wiskitki were resettled on 3 February 1941. See Tatiana Brustin-Berenstein, “Deportacje i zagłada skupisk żydowskich w dystrykcie warszawskim”, BŻIH 1952, nr 3, p. 115, tab. VI.
