The Strange Ways of Providence In My Life: An Amazing Holocaust Survivor Rescue Story (World War 2 Memoirs) by Krystyna Carmi

Author:Krystyna Carmi [Carmi, Krystyna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: eBookPro
Published: 2015-04-10T23:00:00+00:00

There was no way for food to be delivered to the ghetto. Stronger professionals who went to work outside the ghetto could buy some food for lots of money or clothes. Others fed themselves with rubbish; you could forget about a piece of bread. The poorest people suffered the most because they couldn’t get anything; most of the Obertyn Jews died of hunger. After April 14, 1942, Obertyn became Judenrein (“clean of Jews”).

I remember another distinctive event that stuck in my memory. It’s a memory about a seller of “molasses” (black candies). My father would take my hand and we would go for a walk. A walk in the ghetto could turn out many different ways; but somehow, instinctively people sensed – or maybe there was some warning news that something was coming and tried at that time not to be on the streets. Sometimes the days were calmer. On such a “calm” day, father took me for a walk. We met a molasses seller on our way and I still remember him. He was rather young; I’d describe him today as 35-40 years old. He wore a black, ragged coat that looked like a Chassidic smock, a cap on his head, a plank hanging around his neck, and he was selling “goods”.

He was really skinny and pale like these corpses lying on the streets. I can’t forget his big, black eyes; they showed the sorrows of a broken man. Father went up to him and bought a candy for me. I held the candy in my hand but couldn’t take my eyes off the sad seller, I was almost crying and I wanted to scream; however, I did control myself because I didn’t want to make him any sadder. I thought that if I cried, he would too. I looked at father; he had tears in his eyes. He squeezed my hand and firmly told me, as he used to in the old days, to take this delicacy (molasses candy). We understood each other – father, like me, was moved by his look, especially the sad, desolate, and helpless eyes of that poor seller. Years later, I wrote a poem for him and others from Kołomyja ghetto. When I wrote the poem, I hoped it would free me from this memory – a memory about what the eyes of a 10 year old girl had seen. This memory and those eyes are unforgettable – it’s all even more preserved. The pictures of Josef Berger always remind me of the eyes of “my” molasses seller, as well as of the eyes looking from the heads of dead people, which were taken out from the ghetto in Kołomyja and placed on a trailer – sad, black eyes of poor Jews.

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