Herman Marczak - May 12, 1982
Liquidation of the Ghetto
When everything was prepared and they were prepared to liquidate, so they came at night and everything had the same pattern. There was a special unit from the SS and they had the, they had the same pattern to liquidate the city. They can liquidate a city of fifteen, twenty thousand people in one day. There was no--they got trained to it, they got adjusted to it. So they came at night, four o'clock at night they came to hall, everybody got to get out and to concentrate on one field. So everybody went, the young and old and children ev...whoever didn't, and they said whoever won't be there by seven o'clock in the morning will got shot on the spot. And that's what happened. Seven o'clock it was, it was like, it started to sound like on a, on a front, you know. They're shooting people all over. And then we were there all day long, they were pushing from one side and from the other. You know, just to, harassment and things like this. Then in, in the afternoon they marched the whole town to the Jewish cemetery, it was a very large cemetery. And at that cemetery they took out from the twelve, thirteen thousand people about a thousand young people between the ages, I would say from eighteen 'til twenty-eight, thirty. On side and all the rest of them on the other side. And that's when they separated us. They take my mother and my, and my sister and all the rest of the family and put them on one side, and me they put on the other side with the young people. And then they sent us to the ghetto in Łódż. And the rest they went to Chelmno we never heard from anybody, from all the rest of the people. That happened in one day.
How old was your sister at that time?
She was born in 1927, that was, for her, it was fifteen years old--fifteen years she was at that time. So, and then we were staying there overnight--lying on the cemetery. The next day they, they took us, they marched us over the city to the railroad, to, to, to the railroad station. And the Polacks was applauding on the streets.
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