Cwi Rottenberg

I was the eldest child in our family and the only daughter. I had three younger brothers.

This is my eldest brother Cwi Rottenberg. I don’t know exactly when and where this photo was taken. He was very young then, maybe 16. At that time he was going on to a technical high school.

We didn’t use the name Cwi. We called him Rysiu. He was born in 1917. I remember him starting to walk. We were living in Skryhiczyn then, and he saw a goat racing along the street and wanted to catch it.

Rysiu finished elementary school in Lodz and went on to a technical high school for the textile industry. He did his school-leaving exams there and started work as a dessinateur.

A dessinateur draws the designs according to which the cloth is to be woven. My brother worked in that capacity until the outbreak of the war.

At the beginning of the war Rysiu married Tusia, I can't remember her surname, and he and his wife wanted to cross to the east. The Germans caught them; his wife got free somehow, but he was arrested.

They held him for a whole year in Pawiak, and there he worked in his own trade and taught others. My parents were in the Warsaw ghetto, so when he came out of prison he went, with his wife, to the ghetto.

He started work in a co-operative that made brushes. I saw him for the last time in that co-operative in August 1942 during the first deportation from the Warsaw ghetto.

I got out of the ghetto then, you see, and it was only afterwards that I found out that when they rounded Tusia up for deportation, he went with her into the wagon.