Zofia Szostak - 1985
Harassment II
Yes. And those were really very bad, you know, people. And finally, you know, I, I got really frightened, and I said something what doesn't make sense right now, but it made a big sense. I said, "Do you know my mother will be very angry with me if I don't show up at certain times? She's waiting." A stupid excuse like this, you know. He looked at me and he says, "Go! Go quickly." Not that he was sorry, you know, I think that probably why he was taking me there, you know uh, everything maybe when he knew that I was not Jewish, he knew I was Polish, maybe he knew all of sudden maybe I had some money, and maybe I would give him some money or something. You know, they were trying to make business. But, well, if he ever pushed me behind those, those, that gate, I would have died. Uh, either that night or next morning, two, two Polish women, you know, who were...they were selling maybe some chickens or something, you know, some stuff to, to ghetto, 'cause, business was still going, you know, and they were caught over there and they died. So they executed, or rather murdered, you know, the whole, whole surplus, because the ghetto would not hold all those people. Six-thousands of people they shipped to...across the Raba river, to Baczkow Forest, and they, they killed them off, you know, over there. Six-thousands of people. Okay, so, later the ghetto was closed and very few, few of the people who could get out of there, you know, they had to... maybe they had some official business you know, those Kapos, you know, the po...the Jewish Police, they were able to go occasionally and uh, you know, for whatever reasons they had, they, they were able to go. And...well, all of sudden, people who used to, who used to live side-by-side, they were separated by the wall, you know, yeah. And uh, now how I found out a little bit, you know, what was going on over there, because, okay, after--I can't come up with the months exactly, but this was, this was happening in 1940, '42, you know, uh, summer, fall, winter. And uh, gradually they, they started liquidating uh, those sections of the ghetto. And uh, they came up, this was only one, one section remained. And at that time, some people came to us one, one day, and they told, they told us that we, they were assigned part of our house, they could live over there. They were Jewish people, supposedly from Guatemala. Not that--they were Polish Jews, you know, from...I think that, at least, this, this lady, she was from Kraków, and the other family, I don't know where they came from. But they were, they were good, good friends, and uh, she was, uh, she was a doctor's wife, and with her young daughter, Eva. And uh, she told us that this other, other man, you know, Dr., Dr. ??? Okay, I don't know if he had a doctoral degree, or if he was a medicine uh, you know uh, medical doctor, or something like this. Anyways, she always refer, refer, you know, referred to him as Dr., Dr. ???, and he was with his mother.
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