Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

Rose Wagner - August 14, 2002

Memories of the Ghetto

In the ghetto.

In the ghetto, yeah. My, my father had one brother and he was on the other side of the ghetto. So he came to see how we are doing. That's about it.

And he died in Auschwitz?

He died the last day in Auschwitz. The last day.

Really.

When they--yeah.

When the Russians came?

Yeah. The last day. Because we know people that they were with him.

Um, was anybody sick in Łódź? I mean, was there typhus...

Oh yeah.

or dysentery or disease.

You mean in Łódź after the war?

The ghetto.

In the ghetto?You know what? I...I'm sure, people were very sick.

But you didn't get, you weren't sick.

No.

And your sister wasn't.

No. I was sick when I jumped from the first floor. That's my problem now.

So you hurt...

That's, I hurt my, my spine, my back. We fell on our back, like this. And we cold and went, we cold and we hid in the bathrooms, in the toilets. Should have said this in the beginning. And the Jewish police took us out from there.

It was probably the right thing to do was to jump. Of course you never know, right.

You never know. Exactly.

You knew about the gas chambers.

No.

But when you got to Auschwitz?

Oh yeah, when we got to Auschwitz we knew about the gas chambers. We saw the smoke.


© Board of Regents University of Michigan-Dearborn