IV: Okay.
LW: I have two clear episodes from my childhood just before the World War.
I would like to mention them because I have such a drastic example.
From Schweden, in 1995, I was invited to participate in a celebration in the Santa Gertruda German church in Stockholm.
To speak about my freedom.
It was 50 years after Germany's capitulation.
Related to this, I recall that a very well-known diplomat, three years older than me, was asked in Swedish television
what he remembered about the first day of the World War on September 1, 1939.
He said -- to shine a bit -- "one only remembers what one has read."
It was just a saying, but it is not true.
I was younger than him. I have very clear images of this day.
And can describe it exactly.
The second episode is how I got into an fight with Rosa, the youngest of my four sisters, who was two years old than me.
In summer 1937 about the Spanish civil war.
She could not believe or grasp that a government could be in the right and that the insurgents were not right.
I had read more and I explained to her that Franco - that was the fascists, were supported by Mussolini and Hitler
And that they were attacking a democratically-elected rebublican government.
She said that couldn't be, the insurgents are always in the right.
So...we were bright, we were interested, we didn't read, we didn't have a radio, just picked up from the adults' conversations
Or we read old newspapers. We didn't have a newspaper at home.
I also remember vividly the story with Richard VIII {Edward VIII} and Miss Simpson.
How the King of England gave up the throne for his love of Miss Simpson from America.
It was her third marriage.
And argued over what it meant to be dethroned, to abdicate.
Then September 1 arrived, war broke out, it was a very warm summer, in August.
Sitting under a tree, this warm air...wonderful. And then war.
In Lodz we hardly experienced the war events, the acts of war.
Except for the Wehrmacht marching into Lodz.
And this sound of the steel-covered boots against the cobblestones, I still get shivers down my back when I think of this sound.
The expression of a barrel, an unstoppable force destroying everything in its way.
One of the first images is, after the bans were introduced.
Curfew. Not being allowed to go out, staying home at night.
But one day, we lived on the corner of Steinstrasse Kamienna and Oststrasse, later Piłsudskistrasse.
There was a apothecary across the street. And one morning I saw on the corner a group of soldiers and three Jews in front of them with long beards.
And the one with the bayonet cutting off the beards, with the skin, it bled terribly.
That was also a shock, but back then I was yet exhausted.
How can they treat people like that?
But not the same shock as in Auschwitz with the...electrical wires, isolators.
After a very short time it was announced that all Jews from the city had to move to the quarter where I was born, to Bałuty,
We had moved in December with all our possessions.
To Birkenstrasse (???) 39, then 59.
The first months until spring 1940 there was still school.
It was a high school, because I had already completed primary school.
We were still brought together for classes, it was to some extent normal, we still had some supplies.
There was still food to buy, still had some change, but then everything was forbidden.
And then, as I learned later, they had the idea of setting up a ghetto and I have quotes with me from Uebelhoer, the president of the city of Lodz.
I can read them:
"From Friedrich Uebelhoer, in December 1939.
Decrees about the ghetto
The establishment of the ghetto is a temporary measure.
I reserve the right to determine the time and means with which the ghetto and thus the city of Lodz will be made free of all Jews.
It is our goal to eradicate this plague once and for all."
That was the announcement, the ghetto and the "residential area" of the Jews, nicely worded.
It was a state within a state. I was 13 years old. Just turned 14, in January 1940.
And we were poor. Everyone was put to work.
I began working as a galvanisator in the metal factory 1, but it was called "Ressort" {department}.
That was a new word that we did know before. "Department" instead of "company". Factory buildings were departments.
We had various names, there was clothing department, metal department, straw department.
And I knew that there was a ghetto administration, that there was a head, that was Hans Biebow, a salesman from Bremen, I learned that later.
And the entire population was divided into work deployments. There was no unemployment.
There were sick people, old people and small children.
They were -- most of them -- unable to work, they were stopped at the shutdown ["Sperre"] not like the word today meaning a barrier like at a station that you have to pass through.
A shutdown was when quarters, buildings, or street blocks were blocked off.
Going from one apartment after another, taking away the sick, old and small children. And they disappeared.
As I later learned, most of them went to Kulmhof, Chelmno. To the death camp.
It was not a labor camp.
Those of us who worked, in this Galvanisation division, my task was iron rings that were attached to the tarpaulins, for the open truck transports.
Weapons to the east, to protect from rain and snow.
And they had to be painted to prevent rust.
I had filled the container, about 1 x 1 meter, a square, with paint.
Above it, on a frame on a hook, 100 hooks, I hung the rings on there, dunked them in this paint container.
Then raise it slowly, with a winch, wait, paint is dry, remove rings, pack them in a box, the 100.
And then again, hang up new ones, dunk them.
After repeating this procedure three or four times the hooks were so covered in varnish that it was hard to get the rings down and put up new ones.
I had to take the heavy frame with the hooks to the blacksmith and burn them off over the open fire.
Then scrub it with a iron wire brush and clean it and then begin again.
After doing this work for a few weeks I had the idea of how to make the work easier.
Why should I go to the fire, I can bring the fire here.
I filled cans with paint, a little paint, lit it at the blacksmith's, returned, and held it over the hooks to burn off the paint.
I didn't think that the burning paint in this --
IV: tub.
LW: The tub with the paint fell and suddenly -- Pamm! -- everything went up in flames.
We quickly covered it with a lid -- it wasn't big, a meter, and extinguished the fire.
But I was called to the director of the metal department, a Jewish director, Hiemovicz, then Hans Biebow arrived.
The first thing Hiemovicz did was hit me, a few slaps.
Then Hans Biebow arrived, me with my broken Yiddish-German, explained that I had just been trying to speed up the process so that I could produce more.
Not the cumbersome trip to the blacksmith...I
It would seem, since I am here now, that it was convincing and I wasn't put up against the wall for sabotage.
But I was punished for the incident and expelled to plumbing.
That was truly a punishment, because there we had to seam together metal sheets.
We had to seam it exactly straight on the chisel, a wooden hammer and on the other side and then join them.
And hammer them together so that it stays.
Without gloves, the sharp edges, these metal sheets, constantly deep wounds, festering, wounds that never healed.
That was truly a terrible job.
IV: Your mother and your three sisters, what did they have to work?
LW: Yes.
IV: What were your living conditions, how did you live, how was the food during these years in the ghetto? You were there for several years.
LW: We lived {clears throat}
In one of those -
We first lived at (???) 39, Hohensteinerstraße, then 59, then in the end at Rembrandt-Straße 7.
The nearyby synagogue had been torn down by then.
One room that was about five by six square meters.
A pretty big room.
When you entered there was the kitchen area on the right, a cubboard and a stove.
Not electric, but with wood.
There wasn't much to cook.
And to the left was the room with two windows to the courtyard and on the right was a closet against the wall.
A table in the middle.
We were eight people in the beginning, later nine.
That means, me, my mother and us five children, then as of 1942, when they liquidated the small ghettos around Lodz.
Also a new word, liquid refers to money, cash which comes from "liquor" in Latin.
Liquidation here has a totally new meaning.
And those who were qualified to work, who were not sent to Kulmhof, like my cousins, they came to Lodz.
And my cousin Leon Miltschitzky, with one arm, was a soldier and was wounded on 21.9 at Skierniewice and had his arm amputated in Warsaw in the Red Cross Hospital.
And then was sent home, from Warsaw to this town.
And he told me how in August 1942 his parens, invalids, were sent in one direction and he and his two sisters stayed on the other side.
One sister, Ursula, said that she couldn't leave her parents alone and went over to their side and to her death.
And Rachel and Leon stayed and both came to the ghetto.
Rachel for some reason was almost immediately sent to Kulmhof. Leon joined us and lived with us in the apartment.
And the aunt with her husband from Konin who was also resettled to Lodz at this time and lived with us.
So we were nine people in this room, we had -
IV: Could you speak a bit in general about the living situation, so far this has been focused on your family.
But in general the ghetto was overpopulated. How was the hygiene, the living situation for all the people? What was your impression of this life in the ghetto?
LW: It was work from 7 in the morning, by foot, it was a three kilometer walk to work.
At work we were given a soup, as I said, I worked as a galvanisator, then later as a plumber.
When the factory moved into Ghetto 63. Then I was put in the electrical division, that was better work.
Winding motors, pulling cables, except - when I was supposed to pull cables through thick walls.
We didn't have any drill machines, I had an impact pipe, that is how it was called.
A meter long pipe, teethed on one end, flat on the other, with a heavy hammer, pulled millimeter for milimeter through a meter thick wall
That was terrible work.
And working until 7 in the evening, dragged home, mother had made some cabbage, from vegetables, potatoes, something warm.
And then to bed or on a cot, a mattress, or on the floor and slept.
There was hardly any social life.
My one sister, Mala, she died five or six years ago in Israel at the age of 80.
She worked in the library.
She brought us books, the only thing one was capable of doing in the free time, if there even was any free time, and one was able to experience it as such, was to read a book.
My other sisters, Lola and Franka, worked in the tailor department.
And Rosa worked in the straw department, they braided straw and made boot covers for the winter campaign so that the soldiers could pull them over their boots to keep out the cold.
Our family was among the poor people.
Hardly any contact with people who owned anything or with people who held a function in what was practically its own state.
Most of what I know about the ghetto I learned a few years ago, my son brought me a book by Mr. Poznański, who was 50 at the time.
He took detailed notes, from everyday life, how many rations there were each day, the relations in the administration, who was who.
I knew there was a Jewish administration.
A food division and work -- like departments in a government.
A total self-administration under Biebow and a few guards all around.
They kept everything under control, almost 200,000 people.
I know episodes, like the shutdowns of 1942, when the sick, the weak, the old and children were removed.
I remember a wave of new arrivals from Austria, Germany, German-speaking people, not from France.
And they came from normal, restricted, but normal conditions.
There was no sewage system in Lodz, no running water in the apartment.
No toilets, we went to an outhouse in the courtyard.
And we were scared to go out, always together with a candle, light, because there were rats there.
So they came from a normal civilization, into this eastern misery.
It was a huge shock for them, but we natives had hardly any contact.
I have an image of two children, a girl, maybe 12 or 13, and a boy, maybe 6 or 7.
And they sang, begged on the street corner, "Mamatschi, buy me a pony, a pony would be my paradise."
And he stretched his hand out to receive a few pennies.
And as I said, we didn't get any special rations.
We had the average life of 95% of the population in the ghetto.
The few percent in the ghetto administration around Rumkowski and his government, he drove around in a coach with two white horses.
Obsessed with power probably.
His slogan was "As long as we are useful for the Germans, we have a chance to survive. And you, Hans Biebow, as long as you produce, I make money."
And that is how this hermetically sealed off ghetto was able to function.
We had very little contact to the outside world.
When I was working as an electrician, I noticed, but not really, that the master, the electrician, was a real electrician, he had built a radio.
Sometimes he told something about the outside world.
But otherwise, older youth, they had an underground organization, socialist of course.
And at the end my younger sister Rosa was in it so that when the ghetto was liquidated in summer 1944, something very special happened.
But since you asked about everyday life.
We were given food ration cards and a ration, per person a loaf of bread, around two kilo per week.
And my oldest sister Lola had an iron discipline, she distributed the bread portion every morning, no less and no more.
And we had to make do with that.
One has to consider that for someone who was strong, big with a strong build, full grown, for him that little piece of bread was hardly enough.
If he didn't have self-control and devoured two week rations within three or four days, ate it all up, then he already had a two-day minus.
At the next distribution, he would barely be able to stop himself from eating it all in two, three, four days.
And after a few months he was gone.
Death by starvation.
We lived from these rations with vegetables, potatoes...that was daily life, and the soup at work.
During the day that was our nourishment. I doubt it made up even 1000 calories altogether.
Probably...there are statistics, there are reports by people who had been been adult at the time.
From Lucjan Dobroszycki the two volumes of documents from the Litzmannstadt Ghetto, I intentionally do not say "Lodz Ghetto" because there was no ghetto in Lodz.
There was a ghetto in the city of Litzmannstadt on the territory of the city, the former city of Lodz.
So we had no contact, neither with the functionaries in the departments, norwith the foremen at work, who had climbed higher and received extra rations.
And the few interactions with my friend Henrik Kuppermann or I knew I had cousins there, relatives, but I saw them only one or two times, we didn't have any contact otherwise.
The social life was basically at zero, there was no -
IV: You mentioned that your sister was a leftist, your older sister. You spoke about the Spanish civil war.
Did you speak in the family about what was happening to you, how it would continue?
Were there any thoughts about it?
LW: No, I have to say "no" again, just the opposite, we were almost happy that we were spared the awful side effects of a terrible war.
Since we were closed off, we thought, there is war, we are hungry, we work.
But think of the soldiers on the front, who are facing death. Any moment if they are shot or shoot someone else.
So that is terrible.
Hitler declared war not against another country but unilaterally against us, Jews.
And we are suffering from this, it is terrible, but think, in everyday life, we didn't have the feeling that we were threatened by death, in our everyday life.
Just the opposite, we were so content, to be able to say 'nothing can happen to us, we are working hard, okay, we are hungry, but we are not directly threatened.
Except for these few shutdowns, when the people were picked up and when the small ghetto -- the ghetto was divided into two parts.
The main street from Freiheitsplatz, with Kosciuszko Säule the tram was from the Polish side.
Farther north, to the Polish side, the ghetto - and there were two wooden bridges one could cross, from one side to the other.
And then, I think it was 1943, the small ghetto was liquidated, those who survived came to us. Hidden.
It was very crowded.
There was a theater in the beginning.
It had its own money, I have an example here, called "Rumki", from Rumkowski.
So there was still entertainment, so to speak, in the beginning.
The last three years were just hard work, gray.
I can't even remember a summer, or sun, just gray, rain and cold, cold.
It was so cold that I even did something illegal.
We didn't have any wood or coal to heat. In the metal department I rolled a meter and a half wire into a coil.
I drilled holes into the window frame, two holes, then above our window there were two wires, ground cables, scraped them.
And in the evening when it was dark, pulled them through, opened the window and pulled them through, attached, the hooks and with one wire on the hook on the ceiling.
That iron coil glowed, the corks may have blown sometimes, the fuse.
That gave us a little warmth.
IV: Good, because of the time we have to move on to the liquidation and the journey -
LW: Yes, and then was the last...can I tell you how we left the ghetto...It is known that they...
IV: OK, yes, we will come to --
LW: Good, finish the time in the ghetto.
The ghetto was liquidated in summer 1944, July, August, because the front was already at the Weichsel, was coming closer.
Lodz is only 140 kilometers from Warsaw.
And they were constantly campaigning to get us to volunteer to leave.
We were told that we would be brought to a secure place, we would continue our work again --{cough}, excuse me.
And that we could bring everything with us.
But as I said, one knows what one has and uncertainty was for us a reason for concern.
We wanted to put it off and I had the idea:
I pulled the wardrobe away from the wall, a half meter and squeezed my family into it.
I threw some shoes and some things in so that the entrance wasn't visible.
I climbed in too and joined them.
Left the door open, no luggage and left food on the table as if we were in the middle of a meal.
We succeeded with that three times, we heard people come in.
"Ah, they have already been picked up."
But the last time we didn't close the door and left a backpack hanging on the door.
We heard a voice, a German soldier: "If we find anyone we will shoot him."
And then my dear mother couldn't stand it anymore, in good German -- she spoke both German and Russian -- born before World War I, 1993, 1893.
"Now don't shoot!"
And then we came out.
Me first, then my mother, my aunt Ewa, because her husband, my uncle, had died in 1943.
My three sisters and the youngest sister, Rosa, who was already very leftist, she stayed there, with my cousin Leon with the amputated arm.
They didn't go out of the hiding place and they didn't look in. They saw six people leave, how did they all have space in there.
Lined up in rows of five and went to the collection point at Scharnetzkystrasse, where the trains in the Radegast district were waiting for deportation.
Our sister Rosa came in the evening to say goodbye.
She was staying with her collective and waiting for big brother -- the Soviet Army -- to liberate her.
And our cousin didn't know what was happening to him.
But he survived.
He also came to Auschwitz and the Kapos protected him, always --
Because he was to them, if not a hero, then he was a soldier, had fought, they showed him respect.
And they protected him because he was an invalid, a war invalid and they protected him from the SS.
And he survived Auschwitz, other camps too. He died, age 86, in Haifa.
IV: Good, but now -
LW: In the morning we were loaded onto cattle cars, perhaps 150, 200 people.
They could still stand, we had our -- I had a rucksack with me. Everyone had a small bag with them.
We could sit or lean on that.
There was a pail in the corner of the car to relieve oneself and a felt blanket as a curtain,.
And that lasted about two nights and another day, no food, no drink.
We could look through the grid sometimes.
But we didn't know where we were going.
And the moment came that I told you about.
Arrival, on the platform, the ramp...in Birkenau.
Out of the car, backpack was pulled out of my hand, and when I said that my stamps were in there, my collection.
He looked at me: "one comes here to die, not to live."
Then I was thirsty, there was a bottle, I wanted to drink but there was oil in it.
Made it even worse.
And then this...they didn't let the people catch their breath, pushing so fast.
That I said to my mother and my sisters "we'll see each other inside!"
And in the front, a few men in uniform stood there, I don't know if it was Mengele or not, he didn't introduce himself.
I came to the front, assigned to that direction and no one said a word.
So I was in Auschwitz and the shock when I saw those isolators.
Arrival in Auschwitz, three stages - disrobe, shower, remove everything.