Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Nancy Fordonski - July 29, 1982

So we were still laying there and with a whip he was knocking on that uh, on that piece of sheet what was covered, what was laying on the top of that bedding and we were underneath. So nobody was breathing and we didn't come out. We just took a chance--it was a chance of our life, but we took a chance and they walked out. And other days were again that they were coming, we were afraid to do the same thing, because you know, sometime you do one thing and even you are lucky with it, you don't know it will work the next time. So we went upstairs in the attic. And we were hiding between the joints. So even when they come up, when they were coming up on the steps looking in the attic, we were laying just like the joints so they couldn't see us. But--and my husband was still with us upstairs and then someday you know, he was hiding in his room with his mother. But it came already to a point that his mother was in the room laying in bed, she was pretty sick already. And it was an announcement that all the sick people will be carried out the following night or the next morning. There's nobody anymore you know, to take care of them because the younger people were already in--on the trains or--and that what we heard. That, that Stürmführer or that SS men, I didn't see a face, I could just hear voices, said [pause] "Next, as soon as possible we'll come and get you out of here, of the room." That what they said to my mother-in-law, she rest in peace. So when we heard this, when they left you know, we heard this, we got scared that she will be taken away. So we decided that we go ourself you know, to the train and we will take her along. Because she was still in her uh, fifties, and a young gorgeous woman. So we thought that maybe somehow she will be still with us. Why? We knew that the men were separately and the women go separately. But here I was with my sister, so I thought just like my mother, she would be my mother and I you know, would take care of her and she would go with us. And we decided the following day to go to the train and to go on. Somehow--I don't know, sometime I think maybe if it wouldn't be for her, maybe we wouldn't--we would stay on and still take a chance but taking her under consideration we went. And besides this, this was already the last two days that they were liq...liquidating the ghetto. We didn't know this, that this was almost the last transport. Because when we came to Auschwitz and we were on the fields the following day [pause] Rumkowski, he was there--Ältester--the, the whole, the Führer from the Łódź ghetto. He came already the following day. This meant that the ghetto was already liquidated.