Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

Jack Gun - August 12, 1999

Travelling Around Poland

It was like a mother figure.

Right, a motherly feeling. Uh, and I always remembered her. And then my brother in the meantime, he met another young lady that he, he sort of became very friendly with. And he asked my opinion once. He says, "What do you think?" this girl's name was Sonia, I also remember. It was the same name as my mother. And he asked me, he says, "What do you think of Sonia? Do you like her?" I said, "No. I don't like her." He says, "Why don't you like her?" I says, "I--she's not as nice as, I says, as that other girl you once met, Manya." I said, "She was very nice." And I really feel that I probably when...whenever I saw him getting serious with somebody I didn't like. You know, I felt like uh, it would be taking something away from me. You know, he wouldn't pay as much attention to me, or whatever. But I think that's the feeling I got. So anyway so--well we were in Vladimir-Volynsk there. After awhile he ran into Manya again. And she went with us together to Poland. And she started to be with us. And we got into Poland, we were going in different cities. We were in Łódź, we were in Lublin, we were in Danzig, Gdansk, in Polish, I think it's called.

How did you travel to all these places?

By train.

By train.

Yes. And my brother tried to do uh, some black market business. They used to sell horses, I remember. But we were always scared. We heard of still a lot of, eh, a lot of anti-Semitism in Poland. We heard of instan...instances where Poles were still killing a few Jews.

Did, had you heard of Kielce?

Uh, later on. So uh, but I think Kielce was after we left already. Wasn't it in '46?

Forty-six. Yeah.

We were already not in Poland. We left Poland in end of '45. And we were, like I said, I don't know how many months. But towards uh, in '45 uh, we heard about a organization called the Beriha. And they were bringing Jews over uh, the borders...

Secretly.

...secretly. They were paying off guards and, and we were traveling as Greeks. Because there was a lot of Greeks, going back to Greece for some reason. I don't know what the Greeks were doing there. But I only remember that this--we were supposed to be Greeks. We wore those round berets and you could only speak if you could, if you knew how to speak Hebrew, because Hebrew sounded like Greek to them. So anybody, you couldn't speak Jewish, you couldn't speak Polish. That's the only language, otherwise you had to be quiet 'til we crossed. And I remember we had to walk distances to get over a border and then we got into a train. And we got into Bratislaw, Czechoslovakia. And we were there for several days. And then we finally wound up in Vienna, Austria at Rothschild's Hospital. There was a big complex with all kinds of refugees.

All right. We'll stop here, we'll come right back.

[interruption in interview]

All right, you'd been traveling a lot.

Yes.


© Board of Regents University of Michigan-Dearborn