How They Lived to Tell 1939-1945 Edith Ruina

250 Pages·2005·11.43 MB·English

by  Jason Davis

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