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Joseph Gringlas - January 14, 1993

You were with your brother though, right? The two of you together?

Yeah, we came to Warsaw and we.

Now did you think about Palestine?

And I said, if we survive this kind of ??? and there was somethinggoing on about Israel, I wanna be, I wanna go-going to be-join the kibbutz.And we joined the kibbutz when we were in Warsaw. In Warsaw we worked in theghetto. There was, yeah, after the, there was the, there was the Warsaw ghettowas all, it was liquidated, there was no buildings, everything bricks andbricks and bricks. Miles and miles where the-Warsaw was big. And the build...andwe, in, in the, but where it was the ghetto they bombed, as, you know, whathappened where they, the rest, the people were fighting the Germans.

Mm-hm.

So they flushed ??? in the bunkers and the rest they bombarded.So after the war we came back to Warsaw, we work...we worked in the, to cleanthe, those bricks. While we cleaned the bricks, somebody came back to thekibbutz and told us, there's some Torahs hidden in the ghetto. They knew exactlywhere it was. Actually it wasn't a Torahs, it was monies, whatever. It wasa bakery, I remember it was a bakery. So we found a lot of money. And thenwe worked a few months in Warsaw, but we had, we organized to go to Israel,go all the way.

Was there black marketeering in Warsaw?

Yeah, there was black market, there was.

Did the money help?

But I was in kibbutz. You see in kibbutz it mean that you'rein kibbutz that means, especially kibbutz I belong was you not supposed tohave any money. Everything was like combined in a group.

So you were planning to go to Palestine?

I was planning to go to Palestine with my brother. And we stayeduh, stayed in Warsaw. Organized, yeah, Warsaw kibbutz was organized underZuckerman. I don't know if you heard about it.

Mm-hm.

He was, he was-he worked-he was in the army, the Polish armyas another Jew, as a Gentile, he was the captain, it was the biggest anti-Semiticarmy. They didn't know he was Jewish. He helped the Jewish people undergroundin the ghetto. That's where they had the guns organized they were fighting.He was the head of, he was try...getting them the help-guns. So he, afterthe war he organized Warsaw ghetto-Kibbutz Lohamei ha-getta'ot.

In Israel.

It was in Warsaw. He was the head, organized, he was, he was,'cause he was a captain in the Polish army during the war, so he. Then afterthe war ended, he was in Warsaw, it was-he the one organized whatever survivorsleft to get in and he must have been a Zionist in the beginning, that's whyhe organized the kibbutz and he came in the evening to us and talked about.So we're in Warsaw and then, how we going to get out from Poland? That's anotherquestion. So to get out from Poland they made us that we are Greeks. Nobodyto speak a word Polish. And we walked like whole group of boys, probably theAmerican Joint made us papers that we are Greek.

Wait a minute, you didn't speak Polish?

Yeah, we spoke Polish, but to get out of Poland to go in to Germany.