Tag #110492 - Interview #88510 (Ludwik Hoffman)

In June 1942, all Jews received special armbands [18] and were sent to work. That lasted until August 1942. Then, one day, all Jews were told to go to the synagogue. The first day the Ukrainian police (there was no German police in Truskawiec) went from house to house and took all the Jews they found to the synagogue. That was followed by a two-day lull, and what had happened to the people taken to the synagogue, we could only guess. People said they had been taken to a camp in Boryslaw [10 km south-west of Drohobycz] but that wasn’t true [on 6th August, 1942, a transport of some 6,000 Jews from Drohobycz, Boryslaw and other places was sent from Boryslaw to the Belzec camp]. The only people around were our Christian neighbors. Later it turned out some Jewish families had been hidden. The Germans also left the Judenrat [19] in place to watch over the liquidation of Jewish property. Some two months later all of its members were executed.

On our way to the gathering point, my father met a Ukrainian police officer who told him to leave us at the station and said we’d be taken from there to a labor camp near Truskawiec. We had never heard of the place before. Father brought one more girl from the synagogue with who I later started meeting in the camp [at the vegetable grange in Truskawiec]. Then he returned to the gathering point and we never saw him again. Like we never saw again the rest of the family, taken away the night before [as part of the 6th August 1942 transport].