Zosia Laks

This is my younger sister Zosia. The photo was taken in the 1930s, but I don’t know where.

I remember the birth of my sister Zosia, because my mother gave birth at home. She didn't go to the clinic, like she did with Jadzia. It happened then, I was in first grade, that the servant came to get me from school.

On the way, as we were walking, we saw lots of people. Everyone was saying something: 'What happened, how did it happen?' It turned out that my brother had just been run over by a car.

So we came home and we told Mother that Natan had been run over by a car and that's when she went into labor. Natan was taken to the hospital, examined. It wasn't anything serious.

We later saw the man who stopped that car at the last moment, because the car would have backed up and smashed my brother's heart. It turned out it was a German, his name was Doctor Aronade.

He was a physician, a pediatrician. Anyway, that's when Zosia was born, after seven months of pregnancy.

Zosia was really tiny - Mother used to say 'she's as large as a knife,' I remember they put her in cotton, because there were no incubators then. And later, several days after she was born, this same Doctor Aronade saved Zosia, because the baby started dying.

The bed was near the furnace, carbon monoxide must have been coming out of it; coal was used for fuel then. I remember that Doctor Aronade took two bowls, one with hot water, one with cold water and kept moving the baby from one bowl to the other and that's how he saved her.

Zosia was very close to Natan, our brother. She adored him and he was nice to her, good and kind. Not like I was to her. I remember that I once took her hand and put it on a hot light bulb.

Zosia annoyed me, because I had to take her everywhere with me. When I went to the Organization [Mrs. Wygodzka used to belong to the Zionist Youth Organization Akiba], I had to drag her with me.

I think she was later a member of this organization as well, but this was already during the war, in Sosnowiec. Zosia also managed to go to the Berek Joselewicz school for some time. When she was ten years old, the war broke out.

Photos from this interviewee