Selected text
We [the group which ran away from Lodz] were all supposed to meet in Praga [district of Warsaw], on 39 Zamenhofa Street. That was the plan. I found this street. I found the apartment; I think it was on the fourth floor, very high up. They were already waiting for me. My sister-in-law’s sister was running away from Lodz with me. Her last name was Goldsztajn, maiden name Szajewicz. She was supposed to marry my older brother. I gave her 70 zloty to hide. I had saved it earlier. Women used to wear belts with these steel or metal baleens. I put the money in these baleens. And I met with her at her brother-in-law’s on 9 Mlynarska Street. From there we went to Dworzec Wschodni [Eastern Train Station]. We had arranged we would leave from there.
Some from our group ran away with others because the commotion was unbelievable. There was poverty. People were smuggling different things. You couldn’t get into any car. They ran away, but they said we would meet at the train station in Malkinia. Malkinia, I knew where to get off. I stayed with my sister-in-law’s sister, but she also got lost after a while, as women do. It was very crowded, I managed to get inside the car and she stayed behind. I was angry, why did I take a woman with me anyway? As a boy I was different than I am today, I could manage very well. Well, I managed to get on, so I stayed on. I didn’t even notice when we crossed the Bug. Alone. [Editor’s note: Mr. Bromberg suddenly remembers that, in fact, he was not alone, as it will be evident from the story below.] They weren’t with me, she wasn’t with me. We reached some place at night, people were shouting that there’s a stop and getting off. ‘What is this, is it Malkinia?’, ‘No.’ That place was called Sadowne, it was on the other side of the Bug. I wanted to get off as well, but I really believe in destiny. I have struggled all my life, but somehow I manage to make it through every disaster. So I thought, where would I go if this wasn’t Malkinia, ‘Where’s the train going next?’, ‘Next stop is Malkinia.’ So I said I’d go to Malkinia. And I went to Malkinia.
I thought there’d be a large train station there, but it was dark, some shack made of planks, a house. So I shouted, I thought I’d find these friends. But there was no one there. Oh, I also took with me two of my friend Igiel’s cousins. Their last name was Mehl. The younger one’s first name was Mosze Baruch, he was a bit retarded. I don’t remember the name of the older one. I was with them. When we got off the train it was dark. We entered some dark shack. People were talking to one another. They couldn’t see each other. Boys from the countryside were sitting there with baskets of eggs, they were smuggling them to Warsaw and back. So I listened and they were talking about Jews in Polish, that Jews are hiding, that Jews in Bialystok [large city, 180 km from Warsaw, 293 km from Lodz] nail the tongues of Poles to tables. I couldn’t speak Yiddish [there], so I moved closer to my friends and whispered in their ears that we’d better run.
I didn’t speak Polish that badly, well, you could recognize the accent, that it was different, but not bad, but they had a bad accent. I didn’t want them to speak up. Because I knew the way from my friend from Lodz, I knew that when you leave the station you have to go uphill, then there would be a white house, etc., so I whispered to them to be quiet and said we’d run away from this station. And those people kept talking about Jews. We were afraid that we’d be caught once daylight came. We thought this wouldn’t end well. I took one of them by the hand, he took his brother and we sneaked out, in the dark.
I could only feel where I was going, because we couldn’t see one another. I jumped out of this station with them. I started thinking, ‘railroad track’. I looked. There it was. Uphill. So we walked along this track uphill. I looked for this white house. It was starting to get light. We met a man, a railroad worker, a Pole, along the way. ‘People, what are you doing here? Death penalty, bullet in your head, martial law, war and you’re walking on the railroad tracks?’ He was a good man, he showed us where there was a path. We kept walking, walking. They had luggage, I had luggage. There was some Pole in front of us. He’s huffing and puffing, carrying bags, heavy bags. I said: ‘You know, this must be a smuggler, let’s get closer to him and help him carry it, you take one bag, I’ll take the other.’ And that’s what we did. Faster, faster [we caught up with him], because he was walking slowly, his things were heavy. ‘Mister, we’ll help you, where are you from?’, ‘Oh, I’m so tired.’ He had earlier smuggled some Jews, a rich Jew from Malkinia. ‘And we want to get to the Soviet border. We lost a girl, we lost our friends. We’re supposed to meet there. Where is this Soviet border?’ He gave us these bags and we kept walking uphill. It was already daylight.
We reached some barn. He put it all down next to the barn and told us to wait for him. He went to get the Jews. I looked inside the bags. Beautiful shoes. They produced such shoes just before the war, they were called Dulboksy. High shoes, you could even wear them in the water; they were waterproof. I didn’t have shoes. I had these old shoes for the summer, with holes. I only had these, because my good shoes had been stolen. If I had known then this Jew had such a mess in these bags I would have taken them. He himself didn’t know what he was carrying in the bags. So we waited and waited with these bags. It could have been half an hour. He came back with another Pole. They told us to take everything and put it in that barn. I thought that for this help he’d tell us which way the border is, how to cross it illegally. I told him we wanted this information, but we didn’t have any money, because we really didn’t. I had 70 zloty in that belt of this sister-in-law, but I’d lost her. And this Pole refused. If we give him 20 zloty per person, he’ll tell us. I said: ‘Mister, at least tell me whether we should go east, or north, or south. Where?’ The bastard wouldn’t tell us. ‘Mister, we helped you. We have no money, search us if you want to, we don’t have anything.’ He wouldn’t, damn it, he just wouldn’t. So I said – too bad. I didn’t know how I knew what to do. We’d do it on our own.
We had already passed this white house. We walked and walked, on fields, footpaths, roads. We saw two women carrying something heavy. Who were they? A mother and a daughter. We were still thinking we were walking towards the border, that there would be Russians there, some gate, and they wouldn’t want to let us through it, so we took these two women with us. We reached a forest, we entered the forest and there was a commotion there, lots of people, shouting. I thought, damn it, that’s got to be the border there, there must be Germans there and the Jews are begging to be let through. That’s how I imagined it. We looked and there were 20, maybe 30 Jews and two Poles making a deal, how much it would be per person. We separated from the women then. I thought there was no point in waiting for them [the smugglers]. I didn’t have any money, it wouldn’t have worked anyway.
I walked with those two brothers and we reached the end of the forest. There was a huge clearing and a large hill behind it. A wooded hill. I saw people running there normally. What happened? It turned out that was the neutral zone; we had left the Polish border behind us. And we hadn’t met any Germans! That’s what destiny is. The neutral zone, it was so-called no man’s land, a demarcation line. There were people lying there – women, children. They would lie there for many weeks, dying of hunger, cold, they couldn’t get across the Soviet border. Whoever had money, bribed the forest rangers, the border patrol. There were two places where they let you through. Where we were, they [the Russians] were saying that they were all peddlers, bumpkins, so they didn’t want them in. We sang the International [former USSR anthem; written in French by Eugene Pottier, a woodworker from Lille, after the fall of the Paris Commune of 1871, and set to music by P. Degeyter. It has been used across the world as a song of resistance to oppression.].That’s how we asked them to let us in. But we were hungry. I thought I’d sneak to a nearby village. I didn’t manage to, the Russians caught us and sent us back to the neutral zone.
Some from our group ran away with others because the commotion was unbelievable. There was poverty. People were smuggling different things. You couldn’t get into any car. They ran away, but they said we would meet at the train station in Malkinia. Malkinia, I knew where to get off. I stayed with my sister-in-law’s sister, but she also got lost after a while, as women do. It was very crowded, I managed to get inside the car and she stayed behind. I was angry, why did I take a woman with me anyway? As a boy I was different than I am today, I could manage very well. Well, I managed to get on, so I stayed on. I didn’t even notice when we crossed the Bug. Alone. [Editor’s note: Mr. Bromberg suddenly remembers that, in fact, he was not alone, as it will be evident from the story below.] They weren’t with me, she wasn’t with me. We reached some place at night, people were shouting that there’s a stop and getting off. ‘What is this, is it Malkinia?’, ‘No.’ That place was called Sadowne, it was on the other side of the Bug. I wanted to get off as well, but I really believe in destiny. I have struggled all my life, but somehow I manage to make it through every disaster. So I thought, where would I go if this wasn’t Malkinia, ‘Where’s the train going next?’, ‘Next stop is Malkinia.’ So I said I’d go to Malkinia. And I went to Malkinia.
I thought there’d be a large train station there, but it was dark, some shack made of planks, a house. So I shouted, I thought I’d find these friends. But there was no one there. Oh, I also took with me two of my friend Igiel’s cousins. Their last name was Mehl. The younger one’s first name was Mosze Baruch, he was a bit retarded. I don’t remember the name of the older one. I was with them. When we got off the train it was dark. We entered some dark shack. People were talking to one another. They couldn’t see each other. Boys from the countryside were sitting there with baskets of eggs, they were smuggling them to Warsaw and back. So I listened and they were talking about Jews in Polish, that Jews are hiding, that Jews in Bialystok [large city, 180 km from Warsaw, 293 km from Lodz] nail the tongues of Poles to tables. I couldn’t speak Yiddish [there], so I moved closer to my friends and whispered in their ears that we’d better run.
I didn’t speak Polish that badly, well, you could recognize the accent, that it was different, but not bad, but they had a bad accent. I didn’t want them to speak up. Because I knew the way from my friend from Lodz, I knew that when you leave the station you have to go uphill, then there would be a white house, etc., so I whispered to them to be quiet and said we’d run away from this station. And those people kept talking about Jews. We were afraid that we’d be caught once daylight came. We thought this wouldn’t end well. I took one of them by the hand, he took his brother and we sneaked out, in the dark.
I could only feel where I was going, because we couldn’t see one another. I jumped out of this station with them. I started thinking, ‘railroad track’. I looked. There it was. Uphill. So we walked along this track uphill. I looked for this white house. It was starting to get light. We met a man, a railroad worker, a Pole, along the way. ‘People, what are you doing here? Death penalty, bullet in your head, martial law, war and you’re walking on the railroad tracks?’ He was a good man, he showed us where there was a path. We kept walking, walking. They had luggage, I had luggage. There was some Pole in front of us. He’s huffing and puffing, carrying bags, heavy bags. I said: ‘You know, this must be a smuggler, let’s get closer to him and help him carry it, you take one bag, I’ll take the other.’ And that’s what we did. Faster, faster [we caught up with him], because he was walking slowly, his things were heavy. ‘Mister, we’ll help you, where are you from?’, ‘Oh, I’m so tired.’ He had earlier smuggled some Jews, a rich Jew from Malkinia. ‘And we want to get to the Soviet border. We lost a girl, we lost our friends. We’re supposed to meet there. Where is this Soviet border?’ He gave us these bags and we kept walking uphill. It was already daylight.
We reached some barn. He put it all down next to the barn and told us to wait for him. He went to get the Jews. I looked inside the bags. Beautiful shoes. They produced such shoes just before the war, they were called Dulboksy. High shoes, you could even wear them in the water; they were waterproof. I didn’t have shoes. I had these old shoes for the summer, with holes. I only had these, because my good shoes had been stolen. If I had known then this Jew had such a mess in these bags I would have taken them. He himself didn’t know what he was carrying in the bags. So we waited and waited with these bags. It could have been half an hour. He came back with another Pole. They told us to take everything and put it in that barn. I thought that for this help he’d tell us which way the border is, how to cross it illegally. I told him we wanted this information, but we didn’t have any money, because we really didn’t. I had 70 zloty in that belt of this sister-in-law, but I’d lost her. And this Pole refused. If we give him 20 zloty per person, he’ll tell us. I said: ‘Mister, at least tell me whether we should go east, or north, or south. Where?’ The bastard wouldn’t tell us. ‘Mister, we helped you. We have no money, search us if you want to, we don’t have anything.’ He wouldn’t, damn it, he just wouldn’t. So I said – too bad. I didn’t know how I knew what to do. We’d do it on our own.
We had already passed this white house. We walked and walked, on fields, footpaths, roads. We saw two women carrying something heavy. Who were they? A mother and a daughter. We were still thinking we were walking towards the border, that there would be Russians there, some gate, and they wouldn’t want to let us through it, so we took these two women with us. We reached a forest, we entered the forest and there was a commotion there, lots of people, shouting. I thought, damn it, that’s got to be the border there, there must be Germans there and the Jews are begging to be let through. That’s how I imagined it. We looked and there were 20, maybe 30 Jews and two Poles making a deal, how much it would be per person. We separated from the women then. I thought there was no point in waiting for them [the smugglers]. I didn’t have any money, it wouldn’t have worked anyway.
I walked with those two brothers and we reached the end of the forest. There was a huge clearing and a large hill behind it. A wooded hill. I saw people running there normally. What happened? It turned out that was the neutral zone; we had left the Polish border behind us. And we hadn’t met any Germans! That’s what destiny is. The neutral zone, it was so-called no man’s land, a demarcation line. There were people lying there – women, children. They would lie there for many weeks, dying of hunger, cold, they couldn’t get across the Soviet border. Whoever had money, bribed the forest rangers, the border patrol. There were two places where they let you through. Where we were, they [the Russians] were saying that they were all peddlers, bumpkins, so they didn’t want them in. We sang the International [former USSR anthem; written in French by Eugene Pottier, a woodworker from Lille, after the fall of the Paris Commune of 1871, and set to music by P. Degeyter. It has been used across the world as a song of resistance to oppression.].That’s how we asked them to let us in. But we were hungry. I thought I’d sneak to a nearby village. I didn’t manage to, the Russians caught us and sent us back to the neutral zone.
Period
Interview
Jakub Bromberg
Tag(s)