Transcript: When the war broke out it was September 1st, 1939. I was 11 years old. And, as a matter of fact, my father was supposed to be taken into the Polish Army to fight the Germans. By the time they called him, the war was after two weeks -- Germany occupied Poland, the war was over. And the Russian Army, of course, occupied the area where I lived and we were under the Russian occupation from 1939: September 1939 until June 22nd, 1941. It wasn't easy in the beginning, but we weren't exposed to anything like we experienced when the Germans came in. And when the German occupied -- declared war on the Soviet Union, a week -- let's see now, the 22nd...I think by July 5th or 8th, they occupied my hometown, the Germans...And after four weeks or August 1st, they had all the Jewish men from 16 to 60 report in the marketplace, and they picked out 220 men: all the teachers, Jewish teachers, the, Rabbinical staff, the business people and my father was one of them and my father was then 41 years old. And they took him out about a mile and a half from our house and they shot every one of them. That was my exposure to the Holocaust, you know -- I thought then. That was on August 1st and eight months later, what was it, May 8? So May 8th, [the] entire Jewish section was surrounded by the Lithuanian soldiers, by Ukrainian soldiers, by Germans and also the police that volunteered from my hometown. And they kept us four days under house arrest. We couldn't even go out to go the outhouses, you know, or to do... And on the fourth day, May 12th, they woke everybody up around five o'clock and they started yelling, "all the Jews out of their homes!" And they put everybody again in the marketplace there and...while they were chasing everybody out my mother was going out with my sisters and my grandmother and she insisted I should hide in the attic. And I was crying; I didn't want to leave my mother alone, and my sisters. But she insisted that I go to hide in the attic. And while I was hiding in the attic, you know, they came to look -- the police, like I said from the hometown. And they came to look for me because they knew there's a boy hiding in the house. But they couldn't find me because we had a secret entrance from, to get into the attic not from the outside, but from the house. And I heard them talk to each other. They said -- one said to the other one, "oh, we'll catch him later, don't worry about it. Let's not waste our time." And a few hours later the only thing that I heard was machine guns firing and shouting and all these things, and I didn't know what was going on. And I would say by twelve o'clock I heard cries in my house...while sitting in the attic, and I didn't know what to do -- should I get out? And the first thing I did, I was running to see who survived -- my mother, my sisters? And I walked into one the bedrooms and I saw my sister and her baby and she was screaming and crying -- my sister -- and pulling her hair. And she was so...she didn't know in what world she is because I kept shaking her and I said, "what happened, where's mom and where are the sisters and where's my grandma?" She said, "everybody's dead." I said, "what happened?" So, at that day they'd had killed 2,500 people...also [at] the same place where they killed my father eight months before that.

• published: 30 Aug 2013
• views: 5