Harry Praw - June 30, 1982
Łódź After the War
How many people you think--Jews do you think survived from your town?
You know, it's funny. It's the same thing what you told me, you said your mother was from Łódź but yet she wasn't from Łódź.
Yeah she stayed there...
So I had a lot of, I had a lot of friends here, "Oh I'm from Łódź."
Yeah.
"Where are you from Łódź?" "I am not from Łódź but I lived in Łódź the last few years." I was born in there 'til I got kicked out. So I, I really can't tell.
Can't tell, mm-hm.
There were 300,000--two hundred--a good 200,000 Jewish people in Łódź and there is a few--I have a few people I know here that are real Łódź because if I ask him, "Where you from?" and he tells me where he lived, I happened to live a block or two blocks away.
You know for sure.
And I know. But you don't find too many.
Did you go back though to your town?
No.
Never went back.
Unfortunately. We heard what was going on in Łódź--in Poland, period. In Poland the ghetto because the Jews started traveling. A lot of them said, "I've got to go back to Poland." When they went back to Polish some of the towns they got back--when went back to the towns that they came from--when they came back to Germany they run away with their lives. They risk their life of going back to the Polacks.
The Polacks were just as bad.
Because the Polacks were worse. What the Germans didn't finish, they finished. Because they always thought the Jew comes back he must be coming back to look for whatever he hid, the gold, the jewelry, or money or what.
Hm. So that discouraged a lot of people from going back.
So then we got discouraged and then they told us there's nothing there, there's nobody there. There's a few Jews they started lets say going back to Łódź and they came back to Germany, "I saw this one and that one, I didn't see nobody of your family. I saw very few Jews there." So, Jews--if there was any survivor if it wasn't listed on a camp bulletin board so it wasn't actually there.
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