Irene Sobel - September 8, 1998
Living in Poland After the Holocaust
When you came back to Poland and discovered what had happened, how did you discover it?
My mother tried to contact through the Red Cross, through all available organizations and there were various organizations that tried to reunite families. She put our name and she looked for the names and couldn't find a single person. And, of course, there was no way of addresses because the whole area was demolished where all of them lived. So she tried for quite some time. And that, for me, was a very hard thing to accept. Somehow the hope that after the war life would go back to normal, that this is just a stage, that when this is over it's going to be like a bad dream from which you wake up, turned out that it led to another bad dream. The fact that everything that we knew or that I knew was destroyed and was gone. I remember when the Polish government or whoever was involved in that uh, set up or created the monuments for the ghetto fighters in Warsaw. They made a big uh, official event of it, the unveiling and I was sent as a youth delegate from Krakow to the unveiling in Warsaw. And remember it was an enormously powerful thing for me. In the face of the men on the monument, I saw the faces of all my cousins. I saw the faces of all the people whom I had known, who were my world, my small world. We heard a lot about, what was his name ???
Anielewicz.
Pardon?
Anielewicz.
Anielewicz, the fighter of the...
The ghetto fighter...
The ghetto fighter.
...Mordechai Anielewicz.
Yeah, Mordechai Anielewicz, we heard a lot about him. There were all kinds of interviews that I was exposed to. Interviews after--when in--after the war in the orphanage. Some segments of my past were in a collected book of children survivors. I don't even know who it is. One of the teachers was a journalist before the war and she herself and some others put together...
© Board of Regents University of Michigan-Dearborn