Worn Stories by Emily Spivack

Author:Emily Spivack [Spivack, Emily]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
Published: 2014-08-26T00:00:00+00:00

Dorothy Finger

Life was very good until September 1, 1939. I was an only child, and my parents had a small department store in Chodorow, a part of Poland that is now in Ukraine. They called us bourgeois, but we weren’t wealthy. We were upper middle-class Jews. When the bombing started we were occupied by the Russian army. Before we went into hiding, and before the Russian army put a lock on the department store and said it belonged to the people, my parents managed to get a few things out. They gave some of their belongings to gentile families for safekeeping.

We were in hiding in a barn for a while. I lived in three ghettos. My father was the first one killed. He was almost beaten to death and then sent to an extermination camp. Later, my mother was shot. I was sent to a labor camp, where we were made to build roads. I had to carry buckets of stones and pour tar over them. I was beaten by the Nazis. It was slave labor.

July 27, 1943, is the day I went into the forest. They started shooting in the labor camp. We heard machine guns and we ran. Somehow I managed to get under the electrified wire at the edge of the camp; some people were electrocuted. The camp was very close to a forest and I ran into it with my aunt and two second cousins. It was warm that time of year. I survived on wild berries and I climbed trees for wild nuts. Those who were older would sneak out of the forest to beg or steal corn or potatoes from nearby crops, but I never left. The villages surrounding the forest hated Jews. They’d been fed propaganda that the Jews killed Christ, so they didn’t understand us.

In the beginning, it wasn’t so bad, but when winter came, it was awful. I had only one dress, a uniform I was issued in the camp. Ten or twelve of us would sleep in some kind of bunker together to keep our bodies from freezing. I don’t know how I didn’t freeze to death.

When we heard shots, we knew that the Nazis had come into the forest. Everyone ran. They killed my aunt and my male cousin who was seventeen years old. I was shot in the ear and I fainted. It just grazed my ear, but the impact of the explosion threw me on the earth and I was unconscious. I swear I saw my soul go to heaven, white angels and things like that. I thought I was dead and that when you’re dead you see yourself go to heaven. Of course, I understand now that I was not conscious. When I came to, I was even more upset. “God, why didn’t you finish me off, why didn’t you kill me, rather than slowly starve me to death? I have nobody. No parents.” I just had my second cousin in the forest with me.

The Nazis came back a second time.

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