Tag #105654 - Interview #91686 (Holder Romana)

At the Russian-German crossing–there was no special border there, only a table where Germans sat on the one side and Poles on the other–my sister tried to cross with me. Everything was going well, only when you took a step forward you heard ‘Jude raus!’ [Ger.: ‘Jew – out’] and then shots in the air. She couldn’t take it; she pulled her hand out of mine and ran back. She hid somewhere in a kennel or sty and landed up back in Lublin. She went back to Lublin, because that’s where they used to live. And me, I was left standing there on that crossing between two Polish men, very nice. One of them took me by the hand, held tight and said ‘stand still.’ So I did. And I crossed with the two of them. I crossed and went back home to Warsaw. My mother was very surprised, because I should have stayed on the other side. Then my sister reappeared, a few months later, infested with lice. It was terrible. That was a very difficult time. She escaped from Lublin because it was even more dangerous there. So she stayed with us for a while with the child; then she left again and the child stayed behind. He was 2 years old then, maybe 2 and a half. He couldn’t say ‘ciocia’ [Pol.: auntie], he said ‘Tuta,’ so I was ‘Tuta.’ Then a Polish woman was supposed to come and pick him up. Marysia [Feldman] told me that apparently on the tram he asked her: ‘When is that shikse coming?’ There was always a bit of laughter in everything. ‘That shikse’ did come, and took him to Lublin. My brother also came back to Warsaw. I wrote to Lidka, because she lived in the East, and Kolomyia was not yet taken by the Germans, asking if my brother couldn’t hide with them. But her husband wrote back that the entire family came to stay with them. That was the beginning of a miserable life.