A generous reader suggested that I post here, instead of my usual obscure, generally unnoticed weblog. I thought I would try it and see what happens. I am definitely an admirer of Daily Kos. I'm sorry my first entry here is so somber but it's what is on my mind today.
I got up early this morning, to spend a little time reading and listening to voices in observance of Yom HaShoah, the day of remembrance for the Holocaust.
On the Holocaust Survivors site, you can view photos and hear accounts from survivors.
One is Eva Galler, born in Oleszyce, Poland. Her story is here.
The Nazis reached her town in 1941. Laws were made immediately to separate the Jews from the Poles, to isolate them. Jews were ordered to wear identifying armbands. They were barred from working, except at hard labor assigned by the Nazis. Hunger was widespread.
Eva tells how neighbors turned against them:
We were not allowed to walk down the sidewalks, but had to walk down the middle of the street. The street in our town was not paved. When it rained it became a street of mud. Once my mother forgot and walked on the sidewalk. A young man walked by, a Ukrainian man who was a teacher. He had helped my brothers with their homework and had come to our house. He went and hit my mother when he saw her walking on the sidewalk. My mother came in and cried. She said, "If a German had done it, I would have said nothing. But this man should have been an intelligent person: he came into my house and I fed him."
Isolation and impoverishment were just the first steps. In 1942 the Jews of Oleszyce were taken to the Lubaczow ghetto. As elsewhere, they were evicted and relocated with little protest from their neighbors.
The ghetto was the size of one city block for 7,000 people. We slept 28 people in a room that was about 12 by 15 feet. It was like a sardine box. People lived in attics, in basements, in the streets--all over. We were lucky to have a roof over our heads; not everyone did.
It was cold. In one corner there was a little iron stove but no fuel. We were not given enough to eat. The children looked through the garbage for food. There was not enough water to drink. There was one well in the backyard, but it would not produce enough water for everybody. To be sure to get water you had to get up in the middle of the night. Once I had a little water to wash myself, and my sister later washed herself in the same water.
Some people started to eat grass. They would swell up and die. Because of the unsanitary conditions people got lice and typhus. My brother Pinchas got night blindness from lack of vitamins. Every day a lot of people died.
In 1943, the police began to round people up in Lubaczow for deportation to the Belzac death camp. Eva's family knew what happened at Belzac, becaue of a survivor who had made his way back to warn others. When the train started to leave the terminal, Eva's father told the three oldest children to jump from the open windows, to escape.
She evaded the soldiers' guns and found a gentile friend who hid her. Through the subsequent years, she survived by passing as a Pole.
She recalls the rest of her family disappearing as the train departed (audio recording here):
We were a big family. We were eight children. I am the oldest of eight. When they took us to the trains to take to the death camp, I was seventeen years old and my youngest brother was three years old and I still hear him scream, "I want to live too."
I offer a few lines from poet Charles Reznikoff:
Innocent people - men, women and children -
ordered from their beds in the dead of night
and carted through side streets so as not to disturb the Aryan citizens,
and then standing with their bundles in railroad yards
waiting for trains to take them -
where?
We who lived through those years finally knew.
In America, we must ask ourselves: who is being carted down the side streets now while we sleep? In what acts are we complicit by failing to see, to hear, to remember and feel the suffering of those whom our leaders label "different, "enemy" or "threat"?