Aaron Salzburg - July 24, 1984
Sandomierz
Where um, where did you go after um, the ghetto was liquidated?
After the ghetto was liquidated--five weeks after, about four or five weeks after we were sent to Sandomierz--a city thirty kilometer east of, of us on the Vistula, a predominated uh, Polish city. Mostly Polish people. I believe before the, before the liquidation of that, of that city there must have been something like fifteen hundred to 2,000 people. The p...total population might have been something like eight or nine thousand. When we got there, there were no more Jews there. The Jews were sent out from there uh, maybe three weeks before we got there. The matter of fact is, the way the Germans tried systematically to liquidate the Jewish people in Poland--they used any angle possible to do the job--to complete the job the way a German understands to do business. Dr. Frank--the general governor of the Protektorat, at that time, he gave a decree to open four ghettos in the Protektorat--that means in Congress Poland--in the middle of Poland. Uh, I remember the cites, with the exception of one. Number one was Sandomierz, SzydŁowiec, Radom and a fourth one--which unfortunately I don't know the name of the fourth ghetto. It was late fall of 1942. They knew there were thousands and thousands of Jewish people hidden, in the--in the forest, hidden wherever--in the sewers, some with Polish people and they were desperate to get some protection somewhere. He ordered these four ghettos to be opened. I would believe at that time there weren't too many ghettos left in Poland. As a matter of fact, all the ghettos--the, the major ghettos--were liquidated, with the exception the Warsaw ghetto was still--was still there with not too many people left. It might have been at that time 100,000 Jews in Warsaw, at that time. Łódź or so called--Litzmannstadt still had quite a few hundred thousand people. They were intact with the occasional sending out people to Auschwitz, but other than that there were no more ghettos--official ghettos in Poland, except small groups of people here and there. So he ordered four new ghettos and he gave order to all the Polish authorities--and the German authorities--wherever a Jew is hidden, or wherever he lives has the right to come to any of these ghettos with the help free to come in without being uh, harassed or killed or anything--just like a free person. And uh, unfortunately, we knew the truth so did, so did the Germans, but we couldn't help the situation. As we got to Sandomierz we enjoyed freedom for not more than a couple of weeks. We could go out of the ghetto, there wasn't a closed in ghetto at the time, we could go wherever we wanted, but thereafter, they started to close in the ghetto, to fence it in. I was one of the people which helped on fencing in that Sandomierz the ghetto. There was a, a fence made of wood. Can't remember the, the height of it. I would guess anywhere from five to six meters tall. We had a man watching out us--a Gendarmer, Gendarm...Gendarmerist or a Gestapo or whatever it could be called, by the name ???. I believe he was killed by the Polish underground after a while, which this uh, serves him pretty good.
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