Ruth Kent - May 4, 1982
Relocating to the Ghetto
What did you think was happening to them?
Well we sort of were told that they were going to a working camp but basically no one asked for an explanation and no one was given an explanation and you were just hoping that you won't be next to be taken but I know the doctors were all taken and the lawyers and the teachers were taken away soon after the Germans occupied our city.
So she, she turned out to be an anti-Semite?
Oh, she turned out to be the worst.
Did any, any non-Jews help you out that you knew before?
Um, no, no emphatically no, no one helped us out. In fact I came upon this anti-Semite, this maid of ours years later um, which was a different story. Um, and my heart was always worried about this woman because even then I thought she would take a knife. I was forced to sleep at her home, I was forced, it was my only way of having a home or a bed or anywhere and I was afraid she was going to kill me during the night make up for the chance she didn't get when the Germans occupied our home. And so we went to the ghetto the whole family we shared, at first uh, my cousin Franka's--her parent's home, they took us in very graciously and we stayed with them for a little bit in Limanowskiego I think she lived 13 eventually we were, we found a room across the street which was 15. Uh, just before we were leaving for the um, for the ghetto, my aunt Franka's mother suggested that my mother would pack all our belongings--our furs or some diamonds incidentally, we had some diamonds and my mother mounted a diamond in my heel of all the children she put the diamond in my shoe, in my heel, 'cause she knew she could trust me uh, because my aunt thought that maybe that I and my little brother would go away with Mala and her two younger brothers and a little sister into the country and...
Mala is a cousin?
Ma... Mala is a cousin, yeah.
[interruption in interview] My mother spent a couple sleepless night 'cause her heart did not tell her to let us go and she made a decision in the morning and she says no, wherever I'm going my children will go. It was just a question of my uh, little brother and I to send into the country and she decided not to. And my whole family uh, went into the uh, ghetto as I said or to ??? they took our home away, our furniture and uh, we finally found a room in the ghetto.Do you remember when that was approximately when it was?
It must have been like the middle of um, uh, 1940, maybe um, or maybe...
In the wintertime?
The beginning almost of 1940, so yeah.
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