Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Maurice Chandler - October 3, 1993

Yes. What that was for, I don't remember, because um, in the meantime, I remember, we had competitors, you know, the Polish um, merchants that were in the same business as we were. There were two competitors--one in particular, very nasty guy, you know, because he appealed to the Poles to buy from him because he's a goy and this and that. Always gave us a hard time, but his quality wasn't as good, you know, and his prices weren't as, you know, the usual thing. To me--imagine, the Germans--the Polish kids are bringing Germans every day to us, pointed to us, and they're coming in, and we had to do this and that please and swear that we don't have the gold and we don't have the mountains of diamonds and all this, so one day, I said, I said to this German, I said, "We're not the only people that have stores with goods, you know, Stoff," as they called it, you know. He said, "What do you mean?" I said, "Another store too." So, he said uh, "Show me." So I took him, and I watched him, and I walked him over to the goyishe.

You were talking to him in German.

Yes.

You, you--in German.

Yes, yes.

And then what happened?

And then, all hell broke loose. He went in, ???, I can see his face. This guy was a killer. He was a Scharfuehrer, which was the sergeant--top sergeant, and he was an SS ???. The guy probably--I remember at the time he had grayish hair, a moustache. Oh, he could have been maybe fifty years old. "You, ???" And I remember I walked in, and he had his henchmen over there, and he walks in, and I left him, and he walked in there, and he found out that these were goyim, and he felt--he came out--whatever the conversation was with the goyim, the Jew tried to unleash him on goyim. He came out to kill. He was looking for me, and so I understand he came back to our house to look for me. He was going to kill me, because my parents told me, because I wasn't in the house somehow. I don't remember how it was, but the word was out that they uh, they called him in Yiddish, the merder--the killer is what we call him, came to our house and demanded to where I was, and from that day on, I had to be out of sight. And at that time, he said, "Why didn't you go east?" We started hearing stories that uh, in the meantime Warsaw was taken. We started hearing stories about the Russians are coming up to the Bug River, and that means the Germans and a lot of Jews are going over to the other side. That's when I started inquiring about it. Somebody said that so and so has a guide and can take you down to--it was like a hundred miles down east from Warsaw to the German-Russian lines, and that's how we got to the Russian side.