p 21

Kasriel K. Eilender, M.D.

THE BARBER OF GOERLITZ - A MEMOIR

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Chapter Six

Place "where you will live for a while,

but you will not have any desire

to make love."

...a boy saw me

and started to

scream

"Jew! Jew! Jew!"

I thought

...before I die...

I would

kill him

too!

In May 1942, the council of the Ghetto of Slonim was ordered to send out letters demanding that 800 young people should come to a designated area of the city with food for three days in order to be shipped out to work in occupied Soviet White Russia.

Since less than the demanded number of young males did appear at the designated time, the German SS, together with the local police, surrounded the ghetto and started a manhunt in order to increase the number of people needed for the transport. The search was intense and brutal and took place house to house with beatings and abuses.

At this point, I ran out of the ghetto and hid in the machine shop where I used to work part-time. I was not surprised to find it closed, since at this point, practically the entire city was under siege; however, with more scouting, I found an open window through which I entered the shop. I found three men hiding there already. When they saw me, they warned me that this place was also very dangerous; however, if I wanted to stay, I was welcome.

As the time passed by, it was depressing that although we had been outside of the ghetto in the so-called Aryan sections of the city, there was still increasing noise, screams and even shootings. Up to this day, it’s hard to understand that I remained calm and collected. I found a book among others lying around in the attic and started to read it. It was a little historical book written in Yiddish, "The Ten Days That Shocked the World." It was about the Bolshevik revolution in Russia.

I sat quietly and continued to read in spite of the fact that the noise and shootings outside started to increase. There were already a lot of murders, since some people resisted being sent to so-called work camps in view of bitter past experiences and lies by the Nazis ending in mass executions of the potential workers.

Finally, the other inmates said, "Let’s get out of here since it’s getting hot around us." So I left the shop and climbed to the attic. I took off the yellow patch from the front and back of my jacket. As I peeked through the small window, I saw German soldiers, German military police, as well as the auxiliary police and some Russian Army defectors wearing their uniforms, pushing and beating people, and gun shots ringing out constantly.

These Russian solders defected to the Germans and very willingly helped them to murder not only Jews but also their own fellow citizens, Russian prisoners of war. While I was observing through the small window what was going on in the streets, I saw a lot of local gentile people standing and cheering while the Jews were being rounded up and beaten.

Apparently, one of them, a stocky, young, short-size boy saw me and started to scream, "Jew! Jew! Jew!" This was not enough for him; he ran up to the attic to get me. I confronted him and I thought before I die, I would kill him too. I started to choke him when two former Russian soldiers with rifles, who had joined the new regime, came up to the attic.

One of them shouted to me, "Who are you? Are you a Jew?" I said, "No" in Russian, since I spoke the language fluently. He said, "OK. We will take you for interrogation to our superior."

The other soldier was taking the boy down from the attic ahead of us and went out. The soldier, who spoke to me said, "Come after me" while going down the steep stairs.

As I saw him heading down, I reached a landing where a big piece of iron was lying; by reflex, I grabbed this iron and hit him over the head. He fell down and apparently was killed.

Having no other choice as to where to go, I immediately ran out into the street where I was picked up by a group of Russian soldiers. They ordered me to lie flat on the sidewalk. After a half an hour, I was picked up by a former Soviet soldier with a gun in his hand and he said, "Follow me."

We passed by a cemetery where many executions took place. I thought, "If he takes me there, I will try to kill him if I can."

However, he just took me to a truck. There were many others and we were driven to the railroad station. Naturally, the oppressors did not know what I did at the attic and later when they found out, they shot 15 Jews in the street as revenge.

The scene at the railroad station was horrible. About 400 young men had been sitting on their knapsacks on the ground and they had been heavily guarded. Behind the fence there were family members: parents, wives, sisters who were petrified, very worried and many of them crying since they knew that whoever the Nazis took away, never came back alive.

They were there to say their last good-byes.

It did not matter that many of them were still laborers and had worked for some other companies supervised by the Germans to help with the war effort. However, there was intense competition among the directors of these companies for cheap slave labor. There were cases where some of the managers of the shops and factories evacuated their Jewish workers a day before the action in order to prevent them from being captured and sent out. This was not because of good-hearted intentions, it was only because they’d been busy running factories and other important enterprises, and this kept them out of going into the front lines. Since I was captured outside of the ghetto, I didn’t have any food with me. There had been some kind of exchanges and negotiations, and a number of guarded men had been taken back into the ghetto to perform more skilled labor.

next >