Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Natalie Zamczyk - January 30, 1984

So uh, he, so he has connection, he had friends and he had one friend and she told him, yes, I will help you. She was working in the, in the--how you call this--in the uh, special government...

Government, yeah.

...what they give the papers.

Yeah.

You know, identification card. And this time happened that Polish people have to change their ??? card and identification cards also. So this was, for us, occasion. So my husband called her and told her, she can come to see him outside the town where he was still working, because he wants the paper. And now is the time that maybe she can do it, because the Polish people have to change paper. So my maid, and so she said yes, but you have to have a marriage certificate, Polish, real from Polish somebody. So we didn't know what to do, and I asked my maid, my former maid and her husband, and she said, I have for you. Because on my card, on my, on my uh, false paper, I was born in Germany. Because my former maid, she was really born in Germany.

Oh.

Because her father and her moth...mother was Polish, her father was mixed, German and Polish, and they live in Germany. And after her father uh, got killed, I don't know, in Boer or someplace. So the mother didn't have nobody there so she took the children and came back to Poland. So she had a sister and this sister married a German man, a real German man, and they left Krakow and they were living in Germany. So she didn't change the paper, she didn't have. So she said, that's what it is. I am going to go and, to the priest, because I know where she married and I get, take the copy of the marriage certificate and you can apply when you have somebody. And that's what she did, but the woman, her, her sister had two girls, not a boy. So I didn't have papers for my son. Only the priest was very nice and gave her a blank birth certificate. You know, he was a nice man, and we fill it out, his name. Listen, this birth certificate wouldn't help him because he was circumcised. In Poland nobody was circumcised, only Jewish people. I have to say this because it's the truth. So this wouldn't help him, you understand. But I had this and I, and we got the, and she make for us the papers, you know, this time. She did that, she came to the store, she made the fingerprints in our store and everything, and she went there and she got ready this paper. Oh, we gave her our pictures and she put the other name and our pictures on it, you understand?

Sure.

And we got the papers and she brought it. My husband, of course, paid her for it but she didn't, she didn't want it, but she was a nice woman. And we had the papers and I gave the papers to my maid to keep it. So later when we saw that it's going bad and bad. So I was the one what I should go first.