Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Herman Marczak - May 12, 1982

So your brother left before you.

He left in 1940 already, he was sixteen, seventeen years old. They took him to camps in, in Poznan.

With your mother?

We, we were home. Me and my mother and my sister were home until they liquidated us.

And they just came and they took your brother?

They met--they came to the Jewish Committee, they say that they want five hundred boys. So how they put together, they always--nobody knows. Maybe rich pe...people got money that well could buy themselves out or whatever. We don't know that. So the Jewish police came in the night and knocked on the door, you have to go, so you have to go. That's--that the way it was.

And you didn't know where you were going.

No, but uh, later on the--they, they took him to, to, to, to work on the railroad, railways, they took him to work to, to, to ???, all kind, all kind of physical hard work. It didn't cost 'em nothing. They sent 'em mostly to, to northwestern Poland where it was a very large German population. They sent--kicked out the Polacks and they been planning to make this beautiful German cities forever and ever and they had all of projects. And that's where they send those people to work. They never came back.

And your brother was one of them.

Yeah. He never--I got a brother-in-law here, he was there but he survived.

Oh.

Yeah.

Were there ever any public executions?

Yeah, sure there were public. And, and that story went on 1940, 1941. Even 1940, we--the young people knew already that they take people, they gas them and they burn them. We, we, we knew all ready.

You knew that.

Yeah.

How did you know that?

How we know that, because if people started to disappear in the streets, people started to disappear. So the Jewish Committee or some other leaders they started to think, what happened to those people. Where are they taking those people, you know. Then it developed a pattern. First they take 'em to the, to the, to the police or lock up...

[interruption in interview]