Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Nancy Fordonski - July 29, 1982

A ladle?

One big ladle of soup. This was maybe, I, I don't know, like two, like two glasses of food. So I worked there in that kitchen doing different work. But uh, in ways I could be grateful also to my sister, because she met a friend and he assigned her to that work. But somehow she was thinking maybe the younger sister will be you know, it will be better for her. If she will do this, she will be more in one place and it will be easier for her. In the meantime she took up some other work. But uh, when I think of it, I'm still very grateful to her that I got there. And, because the work, the other work, what I was doing before was pretty hard on me and this was, it was uh, plenty of work because you couldn't get away just uh, how you say, by looking uh, for uh, favors. You still had to do your daily work. Working there. I was pretty much liked because I was from the youngest people there. And fortunate, I met my husband. He worked there too already quite for awhile. And we became very friendly. And um, he is from Łódź. He was born there and he lived there all his life. He had his mother there with him. He had another, he had two more brothers. One was in Warsaw, in ghetto. And the other brother, he sai...he said to himself that he won't go to ghetto and he will try to work outside the ghetto to see how he can help on the other side of the fence. And because his name, he had a Polish name, Yesha Fordonski and looking pretty much like a Gentile and having a lot of Gentile friends, thank God he had a good i...idea. He did it and he lived through the war. Yes. And he is now in Brazil, coming back. My husband, he lost his father in the beginning of the war. He was dysente...dysentery, it was a sickness that mostly you know, people, they didn't have medication. And uh, if you didn't have the proper food, so uh, after a few days you just died. But they were still, my husband's mother. And we became very friendly. I used to go with my husband, he was still my friend that time. I used to go to see the mother. She was a lovely lady and I adored very much. And I don't know you calling going steady or whatever. But working day after day together and then we're trying to see each other after work. So uh, coming back to your question. Or there was a lot of social activities or whatever between work and doing a few things at home, whenever I had a chance I still went, m...my husband came in to see us. And by seeing us it means he liked my sister too very much. They got along very well. And sometime we went to his mother. And by going back and forth, and, and, and there was just to a certain time you could even walk around in the ghetto. So it was already getting late. And we were trying to meet or see the people what we worked with them together. Because we were like a family and because most of the people what worked in that place were people what com...were coming from other cities, from small cities, from small ghettos. From small places, but they were all thrown in, thrown in the Łódź ghetto. So everybody had something in common or they lost somebody or they missed somebody. Or I met some people from another town where I had my relatives there. So whenever we had a chance and where, where, whenever we had a little free time, so we're trying all to go to my sister, to see them with my brother-in-law's or to be with those people what we were working, so.