Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Maurice Chandler - October 3, 1993

You got to the Russian side?

Yes. I took my brother with me, and, and I suppose at that time my parents were sort of glad that I was getting out of town, because the word was out that this guy was looking for me. So in a way, they didn't try to stop me, stop me from leaving. I remember we went to Warsaw, my brother and I and two other people. They were also a set of brothers, the Rothstein Brothers--they were all from our shtiebl--and we left by train about twelve, one o'clock, towards a city called Małkinia. If you have a map, I would show you.

Małkinia?

Małkinia.

It's Treblinka.

In those days, Treblinka...

Not Treblinka ???

In Małkinia was the crossing of the Bug River. We were in that train. The train traveled all day. I don't know. It was ??? packed. There were Jews, there were Poles, and nobody knew who was going where. Everybody knew one thing in mind: we were going east. And around midnight, the train came to a halt, and it was something like in a, in a bizarre nightmare dream what this place looked like at night, twelve o'clock at night. All the doors opened, and you could hear Germans running around with dogs, you know, German Shepherds, and firing rifles in the air and shooting. "Raus, raus, raus! Everybody raus!" And we jumped out of the, the uh, the train, and we were standing in the bush, and the Germans lined up and somehow somebody pushed here, and here and here. Somebody's getting beaten up and somebody said the dog is jumping somebody, and they lined us up and they're searching for money, for--and somehow we were following--my brother and I--we lost the other two. It was like in the darkness. All you could see was flashlights. And nobody knew where to go, but we're following the mob of people from that train. They were running like cattle, and here we heard somebody being beaten up and somebody being shot. I didn't see anything, you know, just running. And we ran through mud and obstacles and rocks. Suddenly, you know, it's like--I don't how far it was, how far we went. It was like in the middle of the night being chased--like you run in a mob, like cattle uh, stampede.