Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Harry Praw - June 30, 1982

Mm-hm. Is--were other people in your apartment taken at that time?

Everybody.

Everybody in that whole...

They just, they just rounded up about a square mile.

Square mile, mm-hm.

The rounded up a square mile, and they loaded us up on the streetcars and then they took us to the factory and that's where we laid on the floors for about a week. And after that, again, they loaded us up again on the streetcars. And they were always so nice. They always say, "Oh, we're taking you work and you'll be free, and you'll--no problems." And then they took us to the railroad station, which they loaded us on the cattle cars, that was their best place. And they dragged us for about two or three days from Łódź to the first stop was in Krakow--the Krakow railroad station. And around midnight we got there, of course we didn't have--we didn't know any time or what day it was. The food that we had on the entire--in the cattle cars was the snow that we had to lick off the walls to keep us alive. That was our food because it was winter already. So there, they opened up the doors from the cars around midnight and it must have been the Red Cross, we didn't even know what it was.

Uh-huh.

They gave us either it was coffee or soup or water, it didn't--at that time it didn't really matter what it was. As they loaded up the cars, and every car there must have been at least a hundred, a hundred and fifty people. You couldn't stand and you couldn't sit and sleeping was out of the question.

You were all crammed in.

Yeah. Then uh, so they kept us there, I think, overnight and then they started moving again. And they moved us out to a ??? it was called Galicia. A city called Jaslo. Or it was Jaslo, J-A-S-L-O.

Mm-hm.

See, before they did this, Łódź was a for...fortunate place for them. Automatically it became part of Germany. It was called the Third Reich so they named it Litzmannstadt. Or a few community--a few small towns around it, they all made it part of Ger...the German Reich. And the rest of Poland was what they called a protectorate. So, must have been about within a couple of weeks after we left Łódź, we came into a town called Jaslo. And there's mostly a Jewish community--unloaded us, they unloaded us off the trains.