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On the third or fourth day of the war Mom and I left. There were no trains then yet. We met with Mrs. Mamber, my mom’s friend from school who used to write for IKC. She was a baptized Jew [i.e., she changed her faith]. She was with her son, daughter and husband, and we got a cart and a horse together. The daughter of Dr. Leinkram, Maryla, also came with us. She was very close to my mom; she was three years younger than me. First we walked to Wieliczka [town about 30 km east from Cracow], we spent the night there, and later began escaping east on that cart. And it was a great adventure, with shooting, running away, jumping out. Mrs. Mamber was very fat and when she had to jump off during the bombing, she would jump off that cart very quickly, but when she was to get back on it again, we had to lift her up. We slept in barns on the way. The further east we got, the poorer the country was getting. Near Cracow, for example washrooms were normal, had four walls, and the further we got, the fewer walls they had, and in the end we had to go to a cowshed where animals lived.
We were heading towards Rawa Ruska [a town about 250 km east of Cracow, today in Ukraine]. I remember one place to sleep in a poor shack, where they made Russian dumplings. They only had flour, water and potatoes, they didn’t even have salt. I remember those shacks, where there were horrible flies, we had to fan ourselves with branches, as we couldn’t stand it otherwise. Mrs. Mamber’s little dog also came with us, he was white and well taken care of at first, but later was covered with leaves because he got dirty in those barns.
I remember it as an adventure, although it wasn’t fun on the way, they would shoot very often, we kept seeing corpses, horse corpses, it was war. Then we got to the town Belz, the one from the song. [Editor’s note: ‘Mayn Shtetele Belz/My little own Belz,’, lyrics by Agnieszka Osiecka; a town about 250 km east of Cracow, today in Ukraine]. It was absolutely incredible for me, complete exotics. A market consisting of houses 1.5 meters wide, where there was only a store, a hallway and one room. In windows girls with long black hair in disarray. They were selling garlic cakes on the market, there was a tzaddik’s house on another street… And we learned there that the Russian army had entered Poland [14], so we turned back. The Mambers’ son kept going east. I have no idea if they survived.
We were heading towards Rawa Ruska [a town about 250 km east of Cracow, today in Ukraine]. I remember one place to sleep in a poor shack, where they made Russian dumplings. They only had flour, water and potatoes, they didn’t even have salt. I remember those shacks, where there were horrible flies, we had to fan ourselves with branches, as we couldn’t stand it otherwise. Mrs. Mamber’s little dog also came with us, he was white and well taken care of at first, but later was covered with leaves because he got dirty in those barns.
I remember it as an adventure, although it wasn’t fun on the way, they would shoot very often, we kept seeing corpses, horse corpses, it was war. Then we got to the town Belz, the one from the song. [Editor’s note: ‘Mayn Shtetele Belz/My little own Belz,’, lyrics by Agnieszka Osiecka; a town about 250 km east of Cracow, today in Ukraine]. It was absolutely incredible for me, complete exotics. A market consisting of houses 1.5 meters wide, where there was only a store, a hallway and one room. In windows girls with long black hair in disarray. They were selling garlic cakes on the market, there was a tzaddik’s house on another street… And we learned there that the Russian army had entered Poland [14], so we turned back. The Mambers’ son kept going east. I have no idea if they survived.
Period
Interview
Maria Ziemna
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