Joseph Gringlas - January 14 & 22, March 18, 1993
Size of Family
The, the whole family, cousins, aunts, uncles did you have grandparents? Do you remember your grandparents as well?
I remember, only grandparents I remember is my mother's mother. And she was living with a, my aunt, my mother's sister.
Was she alive when the war came?
She was liv...no, the war started, she, she died before the war.
In 1939, before the war started, how, how large do you think the whole family was? The extended family?
Oh it was uh, we were eight, let's see. And my uncle's two sons and then from my father's side, my uncle. And my mother's side were about eight children, about. It's a big family. And uh, there was another, anoth...my mother, there was three sisters in Ostrowiec. Now there's, now the...uh, and, and about seven, eight children. It was a big, large family.
Sixty? Fifty?
Yeah, about that.
About that.
Mm-hm.
How many survived?
Okay, who survived eh, so it was brother and me, two of us from our family survived.
Your other siblings were all...
My family.
...all, four others were killed then.
Others was sent away and killed, right.
And aunts and uncles?
All aunts all went...
To Auschwitz.
No, they didn't go to Auschwitz. The time after--it was in the--before they started the, sending out the peo...Jewish people from my home town, I was working, my brother was working. In my home town there was a big factory, it's uh, metal--big metal factory.
The German factory?
It was a Polish factory before the war, but the German took it over in.
© Board of Regents University of Michigan-Dearborn