Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

• Contents
• Map

Luba Elbaum - January 20, 1982

All right, tell me about your life then with your parents now.

And then we went with the parents. We start to work. I work with them for a little while. And then came in the fall. In the fall, you know, the summer went by and came in the fall, came. We used to work--me and my father, my brother--we walked home from work--came a letter, like I mean the Polish, like I mean, they going to make a ghetto in Bełżyce. You know, Bełżyce, not, you know, was near Lublin. Of all the small towns they're going to take out, we have to go to the ghetto. There was already in '41 after Rosh Hashanah--after Yom Kippur I mean. They tooked out--they were already in Lublin--was already the ghetto in Lublin. And they came--all they came the German, the ???, they make like a ???, the German. They tooked out in the night all the kids--younger people. They start to take out the younger people and take to Majdanek, to Lublin.

Now when you say they took the kids, they came right to the house...

They came in the night to the house and they tooked out. If I have a, if I--when they came in, and I have a--if I am work they didn't took me because I used to work for the German. So we used to work already. You have to be a citizen. To live in the town you have to be a citizen. If somebody run away from the town, you know, like they came and they looked at, and somebody like the Pollakin, and said there--the Po...the Polish people, they went to police and say, "Oh, they're Jewish. The Jew run away like from the ghetto, and they're in my house." They used to come, take 'em out and shoot right away. So they had all us. They had all us the name because the Pol...the German--the Pollakin, the Pollakin they give all the name out for the Jews. So we were already in their hands. We couldn't run away no place.