| Len's cousin
Saving a child
Len: I want you to tell the story again about the Christian woman who brought up a Jewish girl. That was not on the tape.
M: Are you sure?
Len: I'm almost sure.
M: It happened to us, after the war of couse, we tried to get out as many Jews as we could out of Poland, but also, a main preoccupation with us was of getting out children who were saved by the Church or by Polish families who forcibly tried to baptize them or they were too young to know any different way. In most cases, it was infants, really, which parents literally threw them over the fence, you know, on a yard with a home, that maybe they'll survive.
As a matter of fact, some people even had their names. They wrote down the name, the name and the family, just to keep it in case, if the Poles will be willing after the war to return the child. And it turned out that in most cases we had rescue it out of the Church, because they wouldn't come forward and tell us who was left.
So, it was Poles, actually, who used to come, the same Poles who before used to go and squeal to the Germans that there is a Jew hidden near, and used to get a pound of salt for it, so the same Poles used to come to us and say that for so-and-so money, they will tell us where a Jewish child is.
But anyway, we gathered together some children, and we had lots of problems with them because they were fully indoctrinated with anti Semitism. They were really brought up anti-Seimites. They didn't want to be Jews, and they hated Jews, and they didn't want to have anything to do with us.
But, it happened one case, where a woman brought to our kibbutz — I think she was about 30 years old — a girl that she raised her as her child. But this girl somehow, even though she must have been 5 or 6 years old anyway when she got here, somehow she couldn't remember a thing about the past. All she could remember was since she was brought into this Polish family.
No matter how much we tried, we tried to ask her through all kinds of ways and means, we even tried to call her certain names which a normal Jewish mother calls a child. And that's true, you know. We tried everything we could, maybe she'll remember. We mentioned hundreds of names, Polish-Jewish names, Jewish names, maybe she remembers how she was called before. This kid really remembered nothing, and apparently the mother was very good to her, her foster mother.
But this woman [several words inaudible] and after the war, she thought it's time to see what she could do with this little Jewish girl, who was brought to her to try and survive the war, which she did very well manage, and she raised her as a sister to one of her daughters that she had. And for a whole week, this girl kept on saying that she is not parting with mother. This is my mother. This is the only mother I know. I love my mother, I love my father, I love my sister, and I don't want anything. I don't want to be with you. I don't know you, and I don't like you.
But, she wasn't raised in an anti-Semitic way. She just wanted to be with her mother. She didn't know anything about Jews, she wasn't told anything about Jews. If she knew anything about Jews, it was, like, if she went to school, what she knew from other kids. From home, she was not indoctrinated in any way. And the mother looked like a very fine, intelligent person, actually.
Until Friday night. In the kibbutz we were lighting candles, and this girl seen the candles, and she started to cry. We really couldn't stop her. She was crying and crying and crying, and all of a sudden she remembered. As a matter of fact she performed for us like the ceremony, the way her mother... she showed us the way her mother used to do it. Like with us, two girls used to go and just light the candles, you know, because it wasn't a religious kibbutz. As a matter of fact, I'm sure that these girls didn't like usually you have to make a b'racha when you light the candles, but I doubt that whether even they said the b'racha.
But she told us exactly the way her mother used to put a kerchief on her head, and how she used to make... That's the way usually Jewish women do, you know. And she really performed to us the candle ceremony the way our mothers used to do. And she remembered her mother.
And all of a sudden, she said she'll stay with us. Now that she remembers, all of a sudden... And her real mother was really happy about it, because she felt that her place should really be with Jewish people. And it went on like this till Monday morning. Monday morning when this mother was supposed to go home — she couldn't stay with us forever — she started to say goodbye to her, the girl changed her mind again, and all of a sudden she said.. She started to call her mother again. "I don't want you to leave me. I don't want to leave you. I love you. And I don't want to go away from you." The same story, you know.
And no pleading.. We couldn't do anything with this kid. And then the mother said, "You leave me with Direle [phonetic]. I'll talk to her. I'll talk to her and see what I can do." And the mother started to plead with her. She said, "Look, I'm not going away. You are not going away. We are just parting for a short while. Wherever you go, you'll have and address. You write me. You know my address. I'll write to you. We'll be in communication. We'll come to each other. That doesn't mean that we are parting our relationship. We are just parting. But, I'm still your mother. If you want me to be your mother, and I love you. You know that just as much as I love your sister," she said, "like your [sic] own girl.
"But I believe," she said, " that your place is with these people. You were born a Jewish girl, and now the war is over, you don't have to worry anymore about Hitler and about his bastards [?]. So if you would listen to me, you try and go over there. If you ever decide you want to come back, you know that my door is always open for you. So, you don't have to say good-bye."
And she really talked to her. She was a very intelligent woman. She was a teacher, really. And, anyway, she talked her into it, and she decided to stay with us. And of course, we sent her right away away. We sent her to Germany. We didn't want her to be too close to home, so we sent her to a kinderkibbutz, to Germany. But, anyway, we saved her.
But that was a real.. The whole kibbutz, you know, everybody was crying. First of all there were people who remembered their brother... You see, mostly there were young people. So, you couldn't remember having your own children. Like, we were young people. The oldest was maybe 30 years. That means that when the war broke out, he was in his early 20's or something. But most of them.. Nobody was married or anything. So nobody could remember anything about children. But everybody reminded themselves your brothers, you sisters. Most people who were older, they lost everything.
As I said, we were in a family. That was a rarity. It was something one in millions. But most people came, it was literally all by themselves. It was very bad. At best, you had maybe a sister or a brother, but not the parents. There was not a thing like coming out whole from this ordeal. The odds were one in a million. So, everybody was crying. She kept us all in tears, for a whole week. But anyway, it turned out that we managed to save her.
But, with these children that we saved, was, oy, did we have trouble. Every time we used to go for a walk or something, as soon as we went through it, by a church, they used to all run into the church, and they used to kneel and start to cross themselves, and yell, "I hate Jews. I don't want to be with the Jews!" All kinds of anti-Semitic slogans, you know, and we had a job to collect them again. Later, we got wiser. We used to send more people with them, so we could take better care of them. But in the beginning we didn't realize, and we'd send one or two boys or girls, and all of a sudden they lost them all. We had to go and start looking for them again. We had lots of trouble with them.
And that's another, acutally, war crime. To take kids and forcibly convert them to Christianity. |
