Pauline Kleinberg - October 28, 1982
Girl Warns Jews of Trouble Ahead
One girl, which I happened to know, she, she happened to be a distant relative uh, to us. They said they were cry...you know, they said I know where we were supposed to go, I know it from fact. She jumped the, the post, uh, you know uh, the...
Husband: Train.
...cattle cars. The, you know they...
Husband: Concentration.
...so she jumped one and she got off in a forest. She broke a leg. Why she was doing this? Somebo...what do you call a forest man? What does he do, a ??? What do you call? Um...
Husband: A man take care of the forest.
Of the forest, what is...
A forest ranger.
Husband: A forest ranger, yeah.
He found her, she had a broken leg. And he reported her. They took her to the hospital--a German hospital. From there she was writing a letter to the Polish, uh...
Husband: Government.
...from the city, what's the Bürgermeister?
Husband: Official...
Bürgermeister, Bürgermeister...
Mayor?
Mayor, yeah. She didn't know there is anyone left from Jews there. And she wrote there how--what happened there. She said, her father is choked. People are standing there dying in, in those uh, uh, trucks...
Husband: Boxcars.
...boxcar. Her mother's already dead, her sister is dying--her sister was pregnant--is dying. She said, "Now they're treating on a broken leg here, I'm sure, by the time the leg is gonna be okay, I'll be able to walk there--they'll send me back where they shoot me and that what happened. But I wanted the world to know what happened in those trucks." And when we came back--I didn't notice when we come back--the people from Żarki--God with us--we were driven from place to place like wild animals. We didn't know, you know, what happened. So we got this letter.
Where were you when you got this letter?
Back to our city. There were a few people. We stayed there a few more weeks.
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