The Strength of Hope by Abram Goldberg

Author:Abram Goldberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Affirm Press
Published: 2022-07-23T00:00:00+00:00

19

SEARCHING FOR SURVIVORS

Apart from enjoying fun drunken nights with my friends, there was really nothing left for me in Łódź. I had no emotional connection to my town anymore and just being there was a painful reminder of everyone and everything I had lost. So, when an opportunity to leave Łódź and travel through Europe presented itself, I jumped at it.

After the war, all Jewish political parties were still active in Germany, so the Bund were looking for volunteers to go from camp to camp, searching for friends and fellow Bundists. They were keen for us all to amalgamate and organise ourselves into groups again. Despite all we had been through, we were proud Jewish people and knew that we had to keep fighting for our rights. It wasn’t over yet.

The destruction of the Jews had not been a surprise to those of us in the Bund. We had never had any illusions about how many Germans perceived us and had seen evidence of it for many years before the war. But now, our goal was clear. We had to rebuild. This was the most important thing. Hitler would never be victorious or have his wish of erasing the Jewish people from the world. Therefore, I, along with my friends Jack Lewin and Abram Jakobowicz, volunteered to head back to Germany to search for our people.

We set off from Łódź in July 1945, hitchhiking and jumping trains once more, finally arriving in Berlin three weeks later. At that time, Berlin was divided into four zones: American, British, French and Russian. We wanted to get into the American or British zone, but as we had come from Poland we were automatically placed into the Russian zone. These different zones all had border controls in place, so we were told we’d have to wait another three or four days before we could cross the border into the American zone.

We settled in to wait in a big empty hall that was housing many other Bund members and their friends. We talked and sang songs together but waiting around was something none of us were particularly good at. An older person who was rugged up in the corner of the building was Jacob Clemenski, who would go on to become a noted resistance fighter. We were young (Jack was only eighteen) and we had just survived a war, so we became bored very quickly. On our second night there, Jack and I decided to head out into the city, or what remained of it, not in the habit of sitting around and doing nothing. Abram decided to stay back at our lodgings.

I wanted to get myself a watch, so Jack and I found a local German watchmaker. While we were there a Russian soldier came into the shop carrying a huge grandfather clock.

‘I cannot carry this clock back with me,’ he told the watchmaker in Russian, ‘so I want you to use the parts from it to make me a wristwatch. You can keep the other parts.

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