Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

Ruth Muschkies Webber - February 2, 1987

Krakow

After you got to Krakow, how long after that before you were reunited with your mother?

Well, my mother was not liberated until the war was over because she was sent into Czechoslovakia towards Germany. My mother found me actually coming back from after the liberation. Most of the survivors tried to go back to their towns hoping that the family, the rest of the family will do the same, and on the way back to those towns transportation was terrible, the trains were running very badly and they had to spend many nights on different train stations making connections. And what people used to do is put their names, lists of names of survivors, people that have survived that have passed by this particular train station, and had written on the way where they were going to. Now the names of the children in this orphanage that I was in were posted on the train station in Krakow. And some of the people from our town that were passing by Krakow saw my name there and when they saw my mother in Ostrowiec when she came back told her that I survived and that I'm in Krakow. But my mother's main concern was to go back to Ostrowiec because she knew she had a daughter there because my sister stayed with a Gentile family so she was anxious to see if she survived. I mean she was almost sure that she survived.

And she did?

And she did. And then from Ostrowiec she came to Krakow.

With your sister?

With my sister.


© Board of Regents University of Michigan-Dearborn