Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Rose Wagner - August 14, 2002

When you were working in, in the Łódź Ghetto. You said you did what? Made...

I making carpets.

Carpets...

Yeah.

For, for whom?

Must be for the Germans.

For the Germans okay.

Couldn't be for, for, for, for the Polish people.

So you worked in a factory.

I worked in a factory every day.

And how did you get the job?

You know what, through the Jewish--you know what, I don't remember this.

Through the Judenrat, probably.

Yeah. And I was the first one on the list to be sent out, to be shipped out from Łódź, from the first ones, you know.

To Auschwitz?

Not--I don't know where, but I was on the list.

You mean to, to uh, work.

To work, right.

Yeah.

So I remembered that we had a neighbor and that neighbor, her sister was a big you know, she had a lot to do with the organization there, with the--so they put a lock on my outside door. Because the Jews, the police, they came to the--to our--to take you away. And I didn't want to leave and leave my sister. So she put a lock outside of the door. So they would know that nobody is--I was hiding in our house. I mean, it's an apartment, not a house.

Yeah. So she...

She put a lock outside

And they came and thought nobody was...

And they came and we heard 'em. And they were looking for me. So then they said well, "I think that nobody is here." They're gone. So we, we stayed in the, in the apartment at least one week.

And your parents had already died.

My parents were already dead, yeah. It was 1942.

What, what was it like when your--first your father and then your mother died?

It was unreal, just--it's hard to explain you know, the feeling, when you're so young.

And did they bury them here in the cemetery? Yeah. And you went...

In fact we, we had some Polish people and I wrote to them. They went there but they couldn't find the grave.