Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Sam Seltzer - November 29, 1982

Excuse me, let me ask you one other thing. When you met these girls for the first time, did they have any news for you about your family?

Yes they, that, let's see, that was already uh, I think in '43, beginning of '43. That's when they made a ghetto. They took the rest of the girls, the ones who could work. And then my hometown was sent in into, into uh, Sosnowiec and they made a ghetto in Sosnowiec. And they told me that my uh, my uh, mother and sisters and the kids are in the ghetto, see? And I, I asked uh, them why didn't my sisters uh, leave the kids somewhere with the uh, Christians and that, because they look just like uh, Christians. Uh, so uh, they told me they didn't want to. They want to stay with the kids 'til, 'til the end. And in fact, there was a, a uh, German major which used--knew us from over the border, his father was friends with my father. And he promised that he's going to come back and take all the women and the children over the border and they'll be free, because over there it was Judenrein, means free from Jews. And if anybody could stay there after they freed the you know, made it clean from Jews and somebody can go over there, you can hide over there. Especially women. Women and children they wouldn't bother, so. So he said that he's going to come for the women and children. But he went to Warsaw for somebody on business with money and they caught him on the train and they put him in jail, see? Otherwise all the women would have been saved. All, all my sisters and children. So uh, it didn't happen.