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How They Lived to Tell 1939-1945 Edith Ruina PDF

250 Pages·2005·11.43 MB·English
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Preview How They Lived to Tell 1939-1945 Edith Ruina

How They L ived to Te l l 1939-1945 Together members of a Jewish youth group fled from Poland to Slovakia, Austria, Hungary, Romania and Palestine Ed i th Ru ina Including selections from the written Recollection of Rut Judenherc, interviews and testimonies of other survivors. © Edith Ruina May 24, 2005 all rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Published 2005 Mixed Media Memoirs LLC Book design by Jason Davis CONTENTS Acknowledgment ..............................................................................v Chapter 1 Introduction ......................................................................1 Chapter 2 1939-1942 ......................................................................9 1. The People in this Story 2. The Situation of Jews in Poland Chapter 3 1939-1942 Poland..........................................................55 Before and After the German Occupation Chapter 4 1943 Poland ..................................................................87 Many Perished—Few Escaped Chapter 5 1943-44 Austria............................................................123 Chapter 6 1944 Hungary..............................................................155 Surviving in Hungary Chapter 7 1944-1945 ..................................................................205 Romania en route to Palestine Chapter 8 Palestine ......................................................................219 They Lived to Tell v Chapter 9 ....................................................................................235 Author’s Reflections MAPS ..............................................................................................x Introduction - Jewish Holocaust Losses Chapter 3 - Division of Poland Chapter 4 - Poland to Istanbul Chapter 7 - Eastern Front - Flight from Persecution Chapter 8 - Routes of Illegal Immigration References ........................................................................................x vi vii viii Acknowledgmen t How did I come to write this book about the survival of a Zionist youth group from Poland when I am not one of those survivors? It would have been too daunting a task were it not for my personal history and the encouragement and contributions of many people. I was profoundly moved when I heard about the survivors who are the subject of this book and wanted to learn more of their experiences during the holocaust. Over a period of several years, this became an all-engrossing venture into a self- education program about the holocaust and then into the inten- sive work of interviewing, arranging translations, and rendering this text. My personal motivation stems from a debt I feel to my Polish born parents. I was born in the United States in 1924, only four years after my parents arrived here from their respec- tive Polish shtetls, small cities. Most of my parents’ siblings and their children, whom I never knew, remained in Poland and did not survive the holocaust. In the late 1930s, when I was in ele- mentary school, I recall my mother reading from her father’s last letters in Yiddish about his terrible fears for his family. I remem- ber, too, wealthier relatives’ futile attempts to arrange for their parents and siblings to leave Poland and come to the United States. I regret how little attention I paid to my parents’ earlier life in Poland, and to their loss of brothers, sisters, and parents who did not have the good fortune to emigrate. I am the same age as the survivors in this book. It is only because of my par- ents’ emigration from Poland that I did not suffer their fate. So, ix in a sense, this book is a long-overdue way of paying attention to their losses. Now for my gratitude to individuals who helped me in the process of research and manuscript creation.Antony Polonsky of Brandeis University early on encouraged my pursuing this. He thought it particularly valuable for insights into the situation in Silesia, the region of Sosnowiec and Bedzin where the subjects of this account lived. On several trips to Israel, I had the opportunity to meet with other Shoah scholars in Israel. One of the first was Dalia Ofer, who has done important work on the illegal immigration of Jews to Palestine before the end of World War II. She intro- duced me to Avihu Ronen, a younger Israeli Holocaust histori- an and the child of survivors. He was most generous in suggest- ing other sources of information as well as his own work pub- lished in Hebrew that refers to the survivors in this account, who came to be identified as The Group. I have also had instruc- tive meetings with other Israeli scholars: Israel Gutman,Yehuda Bauer, Shmuel Krakowski, Dina Porat and Shlomo Netzer. I have drawn upon the publications of these people as well as of many other scholars. I made extensive use of Leni Yahil’s masterful work, The Holocaust: the Fate of European Jewry, 1932- 1945. It is encyclopedic in its coverage, an excellent and read- able text distilled from the work of numerous holocaust schol- ars with an extensive bibliography. In Cambridge I have benefited from several academic con- ferences on the holocaust.Access to the superb library resources of Harvard University allowed me to enjoy days of roving through the stacks to locate relevant historical texts. Staff mem- bers of the United States Holocaust Museum made it conven- x

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