Isaac Engel - June 16 & 25, 1992
Brother Taken by Germans
Right away.
Right away.
How did they take him?
They just saw that--they, they took him not in a real ca...they took him where the POWs--with the PO...
Did they come in the house?
No! They saw him outside on the street.
How did they know he was Jewish?
Huh?
How did they know he was Jewish?
They didn't care if he was Jewish or not.
Okay.
They saw a man in the military uh, uh, uh looks like uh, in, in this age.
Mm-hm.
He was four and, and a half years older. I was eighteen years when the war broke out. He was twenty-two and a half, almost twenty-three. So they just took. All the, these young people, they just took 'em. So--and my mother went to Lublin. Because we didn't have where, even a place where to sleep. She went to-- she had a sister, two brothers there. So she went to Lublin. She had a mother there. She went to Lublin with my little brother and me, and my father. Then later my, my brother, older brother, somehow he got outta there. Remember how, that, I don't remember exactly, but he got outta there and he went to Lublin too. And me, my fa...and my father was th...there and we were digging out the stuff and we had our customer. They came and they bought it, because there was nothing available to buy. We were digging out stuff. Some of it was sellable and some of it was not. Some of it like was fifty percent good. Some of 'em, uh, like files, I'll give you an example. This was not resellable. Because if it went through the fire, that's it. But there was nails, some of 'em, there was like all kinda, all kinda stuff. We found this in--it was sellable so we sold it and, and we lived on it. And not only this, we sent my mother some money. Because, what we--my mother had--I still remember, she had two thousand zlotys on her.
When she left.
When we left, when we were that, in that village. The village name was Zielonka. It was right out from the woods and they sent us to that village that time. So there were three soldiers came into that village and they could speak Polish. German soldiers. And they said, asked to the, to the Polocks--some of 'em, they could speak Polish, "Where are the rich, rich Jews here?" So they f...figured that we were uh, at this guy, the richest farmer in the village, he had a big house and everything. So they, they showed 'em over there. They came in and right away and they took away. And my mother had two thousand zlotys and they took away the money and left us without a penny. Even the money wasn't worth much. But like if you needed one--a zloty to buy a, a bread, so there was two zlotys. But you could bought, but without money, you couldn't buy anything .So there was a, a Volksdeutsch in the same village. His name was Grabosky, I remember. And he used--was a customer of ours in the same village. And my mo...we knew all these guys, they used to come from the villages to buy stuff. So my mother went over to him, and he went with my mother to these German soldiers, they were still in the village, and he tells them, in German he told them, he spoke uh, fluent German. And he tells them in, hm, that those people uh, are burned up and they don't have nothing left. And give 'em the money back. So he pulled out, guy pulled out twenty z...zlotys. There was one, one de...denomination of twenty. And he, and he wanted to give my mother, my mother didn't want to take it. And that's it. That was the end. But we were, we managed. We digged out stuff and we were selling it. And we had, we weren't going hungry and we had to eat. In the meantime we had some money coming from some of these uh, Poles in the villages, they owed us money. So me, my m...mother went there. We were uh, most of the villages we were walking there. There was no transportation. And they gave us stuff. They gave us food, they gave us like everything uh, you name it. Whatever the farmer had. They--a farmer had everything. It, it's not like here. There was uh, ??? if it's a farm from chickens, there were just chickens. But not in Poland. Poland he had chickens and he had eggs and he had uh, and he had cows and he had everything! So what, everything we would, we, we got it. It was some of 'em, they owed us money. And they gave us.
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