Lalechka: A WW2 Jewish Girl's Holocaust Survival True Story by Amira Keidar

Author:Amira Keidar [Keidar, Amira]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-11-12T00:00:00+00:00

Dear Madam,

Shedlitz, August 1942

As you may know, it is possible that soon there won’t be any Jews left in our beloved town. Conditions in the ghetto have become untenable and every passing day brings us closer to extinction.

On Friday night, the Germans initiated the liquidation of the Jewish ghetto. According to what we’ve heard, the Nazis have assembled most of Shedlitz’s Jews in the town square (as they have done in other places) and sent them by train to a camp, most likely Treblinka. It is possible that my beloved parents have gone with them, I still don’t know for certain what has become of them. During the first night of the Aktion, my husband managed to bring me and our child to a shelter. We are staying here together with about one hundred people. Conditions here are exceedingly difficult, we hardly have any food or water, there’s barely enough air to breathe, and the place is choking hot. Once a day someone brings us a pittance to eat.

One day they demolished the stores in the street below us, and the terrible noise made my daughter start screaming so much, that one Jewish woman attacked her and threatened to strangle her. To keep the child’s crying down, they pushed both of us into a closet.

The sights we see from the attic window are too difficult to describe, but still, I will try and tell you the short version, so you’ll comprehend our situation: the ghetto streets are completely deserted, save for the Jewish policemen who are hurrying every which way, carrying carts loaded with the dead bodies of Jews who had been executed merely for being Jews. Many corpses are still strewn in the streets, waiting to be removed. Most of the houses and the stores in the ghetto have already been completely destroyed. The sound of stomping boots in the street, the noise of destruction of homes and shops, and, foremost, a terrible fear of things to come—these are the components of my daily routine. At any moment, they are likely to break into our hiding place, too, and bring the end upon us.

I’m telling you all this so that you’ll understand I had no other choice. I hope that from this letter you’ll find out what the Nazis are doing to the people who used to be your neighbors and friends. My husband and I have decided to take the child out of the ghetto and bring her to you in the hope that this way we would save her from the miserable fate awaiting her here. We didn’t reach this decision lightly, as you surely can imagine. My husband objected to giving away our little one, saying that if we were destined to die, let us die together. “Even if we manage to get her out of here, I’m still concerned for her fate. How can I be certain she’ll live?” he asked, quite rightfully.

I responded that any solution we’d find outside the ghetto would be preferable to the fate that awaits her here, but my husband still wouldn’t calm down.

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