The Gestapo packed us tightly into waiting train cars designed to transport animals—but now we were the cargo—about 120 people crammed together in each rail car. But because I was with my family it did not bother me. In all, they jammed 712 Tomaszowers onto the train.
It seemed as if we were en route for a long time. In fact, it was a journey of only fifty-seven miles to Blizyn, located in the Polish district of Radom.
Suddenly, the train stopped in the middle of a field. German and Ukrainian soldiers opened the doors and started yelling "RAUS! SCHNELL RAUS!" ("Out! Fast, out!"). While the soldiers yelled, they beat us with rifles and whips.
Since there were no steps we had to jump down from the high rail cars. As she landed Aunt Eva injured her knee and foot. Others also suffered injuries. Nevertheless, the soldiers forced us to run onto a meadow, and from there they led us to the camp gate where we lined up. The guards searched us, confiscating whatever few belongings we still had. Fishel Samelson, though, was able to get in with lots of clothing on his back.
"When we were brought in from Tomaszow to Blizyn, I must have had about a dozen shirts on me," said Fishel. "I had a jacket. I had an overcoat, I had scarves. Most of the people were frisked. I was able to get into Blizyn without anything taken away from me. In addition to that I don't know how much money I had sewn into my jacket. And I was able to go into the camp with all that. And little by little I used to sell that. I sell a shirt, I used to get two loaves of bread. An overcoat, I remember I had a brand new overcoat I had made in Tomaszow that I brought to Blizyn. God knows how many loaves of bread I got from a Polack at the wire, at the fence," said Fishel.
After the search the Nazis registered their prisoners, assigning us to barracks according to our work detail and separating men from women.
Until now we had lived as a family, Mama, Tatus, Romek, and I. But now Mama and I went to the women's barracks on one side of the camp, while Papa and Romek were ordered to the men's barracks on the other side.
Soon transports of Jews arrived from Piotrkow, Lublin, Radom, Bialystok, Kielce, and other towns and villages.
The camp's barracks contained three-tiered wooden planks that served as beds, seven prisoners to a slat, so that each person occupied only half a meter, as crammed as sardines in a tin.
Cousin Fryda was squeezed next to her sister in the bunk: "Every night as she lay beside me in our bunk, my little sister, Dorka, would sing herself to sleep. I loved hearing her, but sometimes I scolded her for not falling asleep sooner. I couldn't understand how she could be so happy and cheerful while so hungry, but what did a three-year-old who had been born into such conditions understand about cruelty in this world?"
Blizyn was an Arbeitslager, a slave labor camp; later on it would be designated as a concentration camp, run by the SS with many Ukrainian guards. While Blizyn was not designed as a Nazi death camp, many of our fellow prisoners would meet their death there, most frequently from disease, because the sanitary conditions were simply awful. Our barrack previously had been occupied by horses, so it was rampant with mice and rats. You had to cover your entire body with blankets to avoid the rodents. Twice, rats bit Aunt Eva on her nose and toe.
"Once at night at twelve o'clock, Busco, the assistant camp commander, came in and he woke us all, and he said, 'Out!,' recalled Aunt Eva. "It was snowing. I awoke and my nose was bleeding. I was bitten by a rat, and it hurt me very much, and I hardly could put on something. Everybody was out. I came the last one out. He said, 'Why did you come late? I'm going to give you twenty-five whips!' I said, 'Don't you see I was bitten by a rat. I couldn't get up. The rat didn't want to go away.' So he said, 'OK.'"
It wasn't only our barrack; the entire camp was infested with rodents. Screams punctuated the buildings at night as prisoners were bitten. Szmul Szampaner claimed some of the rats were the size of cats. "I throw the shoes at them, they wouldn't go away," recalled Szmul.
Zlacia and her bunkmates would place sheets on the plank above to prevent rodents from falling onto them. "We hung a sheet over a small piece of linen and at night, a whole day, we saw dancing the mice there inside," remembered Zlacia.
At night if we had to urinate we were forced to pee into a bowl, the same bowls from which we ate our soup.
The men's barracks used a different system, as Wolf Kaiser wrote:
For a toilet, two huge barrels were put on each end of the barracks which were steady in use, because of the cold, and the amount of the people. The smell of urine was terrible. In the early morning, when the barracks were unlocked the barrels were removed by putting sticks through the handles of the barrels and two men . . . carried them out on their shoulders. After disposing of the contents, the barrels were brought back to put them in their place."1
Sometimes water was available from a metal pipe outside near the front of the barrack. Once, when the pipe had been dry for several days, Fryda recalled gaining permission to go to the nearby river to wash dishes.
"I remember passing the house where the commandant lived. I remember the most beautiful poppies in front of his house. The Ukrainian guards were cavorting in the river, jumping and swimming," said Fryda.
It was a stark contrast to our daily routine, which required hard labor of every person. Some were assigned to a loading and unloading commando; some worked in a quarry outside of camp, the Steinbruch, where they were breaking up stones; and still others were part of a road-building crew.
There was a very large shop as well. In a huge building that extended on and on, about 700 people worked in facilities for shoemakers, carpenters, knitters, blacksmiths, watchmakers, and, of course, tailors, all producing goods for the Wehrmacht, the German Army. The sewing machines and machinery for other trades were some of the very machines the Gestapo had appropriated from Jewish homes and businesses for the Tomaszow workshops; they had simply moved the slave labor production to Blizyn to continue benefiting from our efforts.
Each day at the tailor Werkstatt (workshop) Mother and I would reunite with Tatus and Romek. We were assigned to repair uniforms arriving from the front, as well as sew new, reversible uniforms for use in both winter and summer, green camouflage patterns on one side and white on the other for camouflage in the snow. Everyone had to complete a daily work quota, which I accomplished with Mama and Papa's help, sometimes at night. Using a special tool I made buttonholes, finished them by hand, and also sewed buttons on the uniforms.
Because we all had to work the few children in camp were not permitted to play. Nevertheless, there were times when we sneaked off to a small tunnel near some pipes and were able to improvise some quiet games.
As in Tomaszow, Rutka worked in the slipper factory, making slippers for German invalid soldiers, while Hanka cleaned clothing in the laundry.
Each workshop had its own SS supervisor, and above them all was a headmaster. The head of the tailor workshop was a German sadist by the name of Eizik.
The SS required a high production quota from each prisoner. Those who fell short got twenty-five lashings on the behind from a guard using a whip with large knots to magnify the pain for the offender, who would receive his punishment while leaning over a trestle. We all had to witness such spectacles, as well as shootings and hangings during Appell, the daily morning and evening prisoner count.
We stood, often in freezing cold weather, as the guards counted us. If the count at Appell did not equal the number of prisoners, we had to remain on our feet, shivering in the cold, our hands and feet frozen, until the count matched. We were so brutalized and terrified that children learned quickly what to do in order to survive, where to hide, how to remain inconspicuous.
Only after morning Appell was completed would we receive a meager breakfast of a slice of black bread and ersatz coffee. In the late afternoon we would get some watery soup, in addition to the bread and ersatz coffee.
"If you knew the person who gave out the soup she gave you from the bottom (which could include pieces of potato or turnip). If you didn't know her, she gave you from the top, so you had water," said Zlacia Warzecha.
Sometimes, though, meals were simply skipped. The deadly combination of minimal nutrition and hard labor caused some Tomaszowers to perish.
"It was always Yom Kippur," remembered Szmul Szampaner. "You were always hungry. There was nothing to eat."
"I said, 'That's it' many times because I was hungry all the time," remembered Genia Rozanski, who witnessed her friend Balcia Reisbaum starve to death. "Who can live without food? In the morning you were up and [you would] find a friend there [dead]; last night you were talking to her."
Blizyn's filthy conditions triggered an outbreak of lice, magnified by the fact that the camp had no bathing facilities for Jewish prisoners. When prisoners had an opportunity they could sneak down to the stream within the camp boundaries to wash their clothes and clean themselves—without soap.
Lack of water in Blizyn was a huge problem, especially since many prisoners also suffered from typhus (a symptom of which is terrible thirst). One of the few reliable and accessible faucets was in the tailor Werkstatt. One day a woman came in with an empty bottle, asking for water. Uncle Jozef was ready to fill it for her when a man from Tomaszow, known to be an informant to the Nazis, told him, "The commandant said you're not supposed to take water out."
"I said, 'Why not give her water? There is typhus here,'" remembered Uncle Jozef. "Since I knew he was a squealer, I said, 'Take off your hand from the bottle. If not, I'll give you [a hit] over the head.' So another man came and said, 'Mr. Tenenbaum, please don't get angry. You go away. I'll bring a bottle of water.'"
Sure enough, the squealer (whose name Uncle Jozef did not recall) told the camp officials. Two days later a guard came into Uncle Jozef's barrack and called out his name along with several others.
"They took us out. They put us to the wall standing with the hands [hands raised] so we thought right away they're going to shoot us, they're going to kill us. Meanwhile there was a lot of commotion in the camp," remembered Uncle Jozef. "We didn't know what's going on, what's going to be. Then they took us to an empty barrack [and] took us off the shoes." The guards confiscated their shoes, a severe punishment because without shoes one could not survive in camp.
When Jozef's wife, Andzia, found out that his shoes had been taken from him, she frantically ran through the camp searching for some footwear to help her husband. Finally, she got hold of a pair of wooden clogs from one of the shoemakers in the workshop and threw them over the fence to Jozef.
"A German saw that and pulled out a board from the fence and he started beating her. She would not cry—very stubborn, my wife. He shouted, 'Why don't you cry?'" said Uncle Jozef. Instead Andzia fainted—the German had broken several of her ribs.
SS abuse of prisoners in Blizyn was so widespread and conditions so oppressive that Tomaszowers who were imprisoned there and later in the infamous Auschwitz death camp said that Blizyn was a far tougher camp, particularly because of the lack of food and sanitation.
Though it was a death camp, Auschwitz was clean. A sign there warned prisoners, "Keep yourself clean because lice is your death," meaning camp officers would kill you if they detected lice on your body. As meager as meals were, at Auschwitz at least they came regularly.
"You got your ration every day, you got your portion, you got a piece of bread, you got a portion of soup," said Josef Zamulewicz.
"That they took you to the crematorium there was nothing you could do about it. But when you were alive at least you got your portion. . . . It was little but it was something," recalled Josef. "Over there in Blizyn there wasn't."
The perspective of having survived Blizyn led Cousin Hanka to recall Auschwitz-Birkenau as almost tolerable.
"Auschwitz was not so bad," said Cousin Hanka. "You had a shower. . . . You had a ration of a piece of margarine, bread, potato soup."
Blizyn's Feared Commander
Blizyn's commander, Untersturmfuhrer Paul Nell was particularly mean and brutal. Nell appeared to be in his early sixties and about five feet eight inches tall. He would walk about camp slowly with his hands behind his back, accompanied by his German shepherd who, upon Nell's command, would instantly attack prisoners.
"This Nell was a beast. He was a very bad Lagerfuhrer. He killed quite a few people," remembered Josef. "There were whippings. Every day you had whippings. . . . Almost every second person got whipped. They said we didn't work enough, we didn't produce enough, every excuse. If you look for an excuse, you find always an excuse to hit somebody," said Josef, who suffered the fate himself.
Nell called his dog "Mensch" (person), while referring to a Jew as a "Hund" (dog). He would command the dog, "Mensch, beis den Hund!" ("Person, bite the dog!"), and in response the German shepherd would chomp into its victim, sometimes ripping off flesh.
"He was a monster," said Genia Rozanski of Nell. "He was so bad. We were afraid to look at him. He sent people to the forest nearby to dig their own graves. Someone did something wrong, they'd be forced to dig a grave and they [Nell's troops] would shoot them. A boy from Bialystok had a spool of cotton he was caught with. Nell sent him to the forest with SS men, and he had to dig a grave. And then he was shot," remembered Genia.
Once, Genia was found taking a piece of white fabric from the workshop. For that she received sixteen whippings.
"I still have marks from this," she said, displaying her scars, more than half a century after the assault.
Still, Genia would sometimes say to her bunkmates, Zlacia and Frymcia Warzecha, "You will see, we will survive."
"You're a meshugah [a crazy person]," they responded. And indeed, Genia didn't have confidence in her optimistic prediction.
"They didn't believe it. I didn't believe it. But I said it. I said, 'Let us feel good for a while.' Really, how did we?" asked Genia of her survival.
Nell sometimes toyed with prisoners, once offering a loaf of bread to the person who would jump head first off a bridge that spanned a particularly shallow portion of the creek that ran by Blizyn. Szmul Szampaner, the Z.T.G.S. athlete, took the challenge.
"He said, 'Who's going to dive from that bridge to the water will get a bread,'" remembered Szmul. "I said, 'I'm going to do it.' The water was this deep," said Szmul, measuring five inches. "You jump down, it was about two floors high. I knew I could do it. I trained in Z.T.G.S. So when I dived down, I turned. I went with my feet down. If I went with my head down, I would get killed. I went with my foot down. I was alive. I got a bread. He [Nell] was thinking I'm going to get killed. He was a sadist. He was looking just for dead people. But I knew how to jump."
Jewish security personnel, functioning under German supervision, helped to enforce camp rules. Fishel Samelson suffered a severe beating at the hands of one of them. After working a full night in the tailor shop, he was sent on a work detail to unload newly arrived coal off a train. Weary, Fishel was able to sneak away to his barrack for some sleep. As the work detail was about to return to the barracks, guards counted one man short.
"They came back to the barrack where I was sleeping, and they arrested me and they brought me to the train," said Fishel. "There was SS, four SS guys with their guns drawn. They had those huge dogs with them and then they had a few Jewish policemen. This Jewish policeman, his name was Mintzberg, he was the head of the Jewish police. . . . He jumped on me with his whip. He started to hit me so bad, he knocked my teeth out. I was bleeding all over the place."
It was a vicious assault, but Fishel believed if the Jewish policeman had not attacked him, the SS guards surely would have shot him to death. "When the Germans saw the way I was bleeding . . . they thought, well, he did the job," said Fishel.
Jews picked to lead their barracks sometimes brutalized their fellow prisoners. The Blockdlteste (head of the barrack in German or blo-kowa in Polish) supervised food distribution, which gave them power and privileges. Overseeing the daily soup rations, a Blockalteste could retain extra soup for herself and sell it for a ring, a watch, or any other valuable. Blockaltestes also had living quarters that were partitioned from the rest of the barrack, and at night SS men would sometimes visit their favorite Jewish Blockalteste for sex.
While the barrack supervisors took advantage of their positions of authority, other prisoners went hungry.
"My friend said to me, 'Can you give me a piece of bread? I will give you back,'" recalled Genia. "So my cousin said, 'Where you will buy? Which bakery?'"
"Organizing"
To gain more food some prisoners would "organize," the euphemism we used to describe filching from the camp for the sake of survival. Aunt Eva was among the best.
"I was an organizer," proclaimed Eva. "Let's say they came with a wagon with potatoes. I run, I took a few potatoes, and ate the raw potatoes, was so good. . . . I risk, of course. If the SS man would see, he would kill me."
Eva sewed a gap in her coat, to hide a pot for "organizing" soup.
"When they came with the soup . . . I met them on the way from the kitchen to the barrack. And I was prepared. I had a pot and right away I put in the pot, and I took some soup. And later the people who carried (the soup), I gave them some too. I had a big pot."
Eva's courage was magnified by her conviction that none of us would survive.
"I wasn't afraid at all," added Eva, "because I knew sooner or later we'll go the same way as the people who went to Treblinka."
Eva would sneak items from a camp warehouse, stuffing them under her clothing so they could be traded for food with Poles who came to the camp fence. One of the traders was Eva's husband, Uncle Meylekh. He would throw any valuables that Eva or someone else might have organized, and in turn the Poles at the fence surrounding the camp would throw a salami, bread, or other food in exchange.
"Furious trading would go on for ten minutes, the prisoners throwing their clothes over the fence in exchange for food. 'One jacket,' a prisoner would shout through the wires. 'One loaf of bread,' the answer would come back. And the items would fly in opposite directions over the fence," recalled Cousin Fryda.
It took a lot of bravery to break camp rules in this way. One day a Ukrainian guard in a watchtower saw Meylekh near the wires and shot him in the arm.
"I was standing next to Meylekh Plachta," remembered Fishel Samelson. "The bullet went into one of his arms; it almost ripped his entire arm off. The other bullet went next to my leg, didn't touch me. The bullet just went into the ground."
It was a traumatic event for Uncle Meylekh. A Jewish doctor looked at the arm but could do little since he had no medical implements or supplies. Eventually, though, the bullet came out by itself and his arm healed.
Other people who were caught trading at the wires were beaten in public during the Appell, receiving forty lashes, sometimes more, even those who had bribed the guards.
As bartering took place, prisoners would watch out for each other, using code names for the officers of the camp. "Skurka" was a German who always wore a leather coat. "Kolebaica" was a guard who had a limp and walked like a penguin. "Issac" was a German civilian whose real name was Meyerling and was head of the tailor shop.
The uniforms we had to repair frequently came back from the front splattered with blood and infested with lice. Such an unsanitary working environment, combined with filthy conditions in the barracks, led to the typhus epidemic in camp.
Both my father and I caught the disease at the same time and were sent to the hospital barrack. It was so crowded with ill prisoners that many were lying on the floor. I was on one side of the hospital barrack, among the women, and my father was on the men's side. One day I got up from my bunk bed and walked over to say hello to him. I was very weak, and on my way back I swooned and fell down right in the middle of the barrack floor.
Soon afterwards, a woman who slept near me on the third tier of the hospital bunk received some seltzer from her husband, an especially valuable gift because of the unquenchable thirst that typhus causes. It happened that another woman took the seltzer and drank it. But I was accused of drinking the soda on the assumption that a child would not hesitate to take someone else's property. I was not accustomed to being blamed for something I had not done, so this false accusation made me very upset, and I cried bitterly. Eventually it was discovered that a woman named Rozka Garfinkel had actually drunk the seltzer.
Food was so scarce that I remember once—just once—someone gave me some maize, and I cooked it in the can over the stove that heated the hospital barrack and ate every piece straight from that container. Maize was usually used as chicken feed, but in Blizyn I was glad to get even that.
There were Jewish doctors in the hospital barrack, but they had no medications. Even so, Papa and I recovered, but many people there died of typhus fever.
One day, Untersturmfuhrer Nell called for an Appell to make a selection of children and old people. My father hid Romek and me among a pile of uniforms in the tailor workshop so that the Germans would not find us.
Cousin Fryda recalled being in her barrack when the terror began:
I heard a truck rumble into the Appell Platz and idle to a halt. A gunshot rang out, then I heard another gunshot and screams.
The next thing I knew, I heard Papa whisper my name: "Fryda! Fryda!" I was surprised to see him, because I knew the SS would punish him if they caught him in my barrack.
"Out quick!" he said. He grabbed my arm and out we ran, dodging from barrack to barrack to avoid being spotted by the guards, and we slipped into his workshop. Shelves piled high with German army uniforms lined the room. Papa pulled out a stack from the bottom shelf and told me to lie down. "Don't move until I come back!" he said. He threw one stack on top of me and piled the rest in front.
From under the uniforms I could hear muffled sounds of gunshots and screams. Hours seemed to pass. I lay there motionless, trying to breathe under the crushing uniforms. Finally I heard Papa whisper my name again: "Fryda." His voice sounded heavy and unnatural.
"I'm still here, Papa," I said, hearing my own muffled voice under the pile of uniforms. Papa pulled the uniforms away and helped me out of my hiding place.
"What happened?" I asked.
"They took the children."
"Where's Dorka?"
"They took her, too."
Papa knelt down and held me close. I could feel his body shake.2
Cousin Dorka had been in the camp infirmary, ill with diphtheria. She was among those selected, taken on the truck to a forest near Radom.
"Instead of crying," recalled Fryda, "I imagined Dorka jumping off the truck and hiding in the woods and somebody finding her and taking her in. I kept replaying the scene in my mind with many variations. I never told Mama about my fantasies, but I wondered if she had them too."
If only it were so. Noah Greenspan, a Blizyn prisoner, was ordered onto the truck along with several other men. He witnessed the SS forcing Cousin Dorka and the other children off the truck to face an open pit, then shooting them in the back of their heads. Then the SS ordered Greenspan and the others to bury the bodies. Cousin Dorka was only four years old.
Decades later Cousin Fryda finally learned of the eyewitness account of her sister's murder.
"My fantasies ended and my grieving began. I was finally able to cry for my little sister," said Fryda. "When I was growing up, I had to repress so many tears."
"You had to stay in control. If you were not in control, that was it. If you became hysterical, that was the end. My mother warned me, 'Don't cry. Don't make noise.' I couldn't cry for decades after that. It took many years to thaw out," said Fryda.
In the spring of 1944, a young SS officer by the name of Heller became Blizyn's new Lagerfuhrer, replacing Nell. Heller was tall and walked upright, as opposed to Nell, who was short. More importantly, Heller brought improvements to camp life. He ordered guards to treat prisoners more humanely and permitted those still suffering from typhus time to recover, excusing them from work.
"This guy changed around the whole situation," said Josef Zamulewicz. "You have to say the truth about it. You understand he was a German, everything. But it was no comparison. . . . He was much better than Nell. For example, people organized a piece of bread. By Nell, if you got caught, they killed you right away. By him, he said, 'Oh, let it go.'"
As the Russian army advanced west, the Germans decided to liquidate Blizyn. So, on July 30, 1944, the SS sent us to Auschwitz.
Heller promised us that we would go into Auschwitz without a selection, which is exactly what happened. Rather than parading before Dr. Josef Mengele upon arrival, we went straight to the Birkenau camp of Auschwitz, which most likely saved our lives.
Indeed, after the war, when Heller stood trial in Germany for his part in the Nazi atrocities, several former Blizyn inmates testified on his behalf, which led to a pardon and his release from prison.3