Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

Charlotte Firestone - March 11, 1982

Arrival of Germans

And that's when they...

Right after Pesach they took us already! She didn't have a chance to go back. By that time, they didn't let nobody go by plane or by train, or--you know. There was no other way to go.

So there had been a ghetto already for what, five years before they, they took...

It was just for the Polish people.

The ghetto was just for Polish Jews?

It wasn't a ghetto. They picked them up and they took them away. The family with a bundle with everything. They took them away.

Now, you said you lived across the street from where the ghetto was. If that was...

That was in 1944...

That was the Germans...

...when the Germans came in.

Uh, when the Germans came in, they set up a ghetto.

They set up a ghetto, you know. There was a place, a huge place, where they made the bricks. You know, I'm not so good in English, but they made the bricks. That's where they took all the people. All the Jews together and from there, they took them to the train and they took them to German--different places.

Now, was the ghetto surrounded by barbed wire or anything like that?

There was no barbed wire, but that ghetto was closed--up anyway, you know. You couldn't just go in there.

Were there guards?

There was guards, sure.


© Board of Regents University of Michigan-Dearborn