Henry Krystal - September 19, 1996
Deportation of Mother
Which city? Not where you were, but where your mother was.
Where I was. In the meantime they had also already done it where my mother was. My, my mother I was told was trying to smuggle herself out and to walk to join me where I was, to the city, to go. She couldn't, she couldn't have gone to the camp to work and she couldn't have uh, joined me or anything. But she tried and they caught her and put her in jail, but they released her on the j...day that they took all the Jewish population, loaded them. Uh, they, they requested uh, the farmers, the peasants to provide horse and buggies, a kind of hay transportation, wagons and they took them the railroad and they shipped them.
To Treblinka?
Yes. And then on Yom Kippur they did the same uh, in Starachowice, the, the people with the work cards were marched away and then the rest of the population was assembled on the marketplace and uh, also shipped by wagon, by train, by those closed trains to Treblinka.
Did you realize this was the last time you were going to see your mother?
Yes I couldn't, I couldn't prove it but I had the feeling, yes.
And had you heard from your father and brother?
We had heard from my father and from my brother during the period that, uh. Two periods, one was uh, when the Germans and the Soviets got along and then the second was after the Germans occupied all of Ukraine. Then they would on occasion send us a card and on, I think on one occasion even a parcel. And uh, they, they would somehow thinking of how they could come back and join us so that we would be together. But it uh, apparently it didn't, nothing worked out.
Do you know where they were?
They were in the area, in the vicinity of Tarnopol.
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