Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Nancy Fordonski - July 29, 1982

Who liberated you? The Americans.

The Americans.

Okay.

Yeah. United States.

Okay.

So we were on the train and on the train we had to try to help ourselves with food. Whenever there was a stop uh, we had to try uh, to get down when we saw house or a field or whatever. When they stopped every fifty miles or so. Nobody was around uh, to do for us anything. So we were just going down. When one went down and brought something so we're sharing it and, and helping each other. And we came back to Łódź. [pause] Being in Łódź they had already a uh, UNNRA committee. They ask us uh, to register and uh, they were trying you know, to give you food or something to wear. And uh, there were people there from before, like people what stayed on what never left the ghetto. There were about eight hundred people what never left the ghetto. So they had already their places, their apartments. So you were looking for people you know or for a friend or just for a good human being who will take you in. Oh, I couldn't just go over to somebody and ask him or he can help me with something. But in a way we were a little fortunate that we met a friend of ours. She's now in Israel. And uh, Lotta Birnmaun, she was already in, in Łódź a few days and she was with us in concentration camp in Stutthof and in Dresden. She was between those people what were left waiting for that time to be sent to Dresden. So she was one of them because her uncle Stier--he lives now in Israel--he was uh, very uh, one of those big shots with uh, ???.

Oh.

And she was his niece. And because we were together and was almost the same age. So she had a place on the fifth floor someplace, and she says, "Don't look for any other place. You come with me. And she slept on a cot. She had--she didn't have for herself even a bed. And we slept on the floor. Just covered with some blankets. And uh, that's how we started you know, to go to see who else is around. As long as we had a roof over our head and we didn't have to wander around you know, to, to worry where, where to put your head down. So this was already a relief for us. Being there a few days, a friend came back from the concentration camp. He was--and he happened to work in the same uh, factory where I worked in that uh, in Łódź--in ghetto. He worked in that uh, factory where they were making the uniforms for the soldiers. And we were friends. And he saw us. And he happened to be in concentration camp together with my husband. That time he was not my husband, he was just my boyfriend. And when he came home and he saw me, he says to me, "Nadia, remember," we say, Mikhail--Polish it's Micha--he said, "Michael is alive. He will come back. He's coming back to Łódź, that what he told me. But after the war, he ate some food and this and that, and he got sick and he has typhoid. But when I left him he said he was in pretty good shape already and he was, he was al...he almost pulled through.