Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Irene Sobel - September 8, 1998

Can you spell that for me?

I can just spell it for you phonetically. I-G-N-A-T-K-I, pronounced Ignatki and that was next to Białystok. There were all kinds of little like huts, you would call it cottages or huts and a few families lived in one, in a very wooded area. After awhile--and that, again, it was kind of a peaceful to me, as a child, there were a lot of little kids and we went around and around in the woods and I was missing my mother and tried to ask. And my father would say, "She will come, she will come." At some point--and again, the interval of time is difficult for me to judge now--at some point he left us in the care of some other people and he said that he's going to bring our mother.

Do you remember where you were at this point?

Still in that Ignatki.

Ignatki. You stayed--how long did you stay there?

Uh, we must have stayed a few months there, okay, a few months. He went on top of trains--he told us after that he uh, was hitching from train to train on the roof of the trains until he got as close as he could to the borders and then walked. When he came to the no--I mean to the no man's zone--when he came to the no man's zone the whole thing was empty. No person was there left. What it turned out is--and he came back and told us and we were very upset and cried. And he says that "Mom will come, she will come." But he was very disturbed and he didn't know what happened. What it turned out, the Germans came and took all the people.