Claims Conference Holocaust Survivor  Memoir Collection  Access to the print and/or digital copies of memoirs in this collection is  made possible by USHMM on behalf of, and with the support of, the  Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.  The  United  States  Holocaust  Memorial  Museum  Library  respects  the  copyright  and  intellectual property rights associated with the materials in its collection. The Library holds the  rights and permissions to put this material online. If you hold an active copyright to this work  and would like to have your materials removed from the web please contact the USHMM  Library by phone at 202-479-9717, or by email at [email protected]. "Every town has a different story, but my story is this." Some Jews were in concentration camps, some were partisan fighters, some carried Irish passports and fled. But my story is one of hiding. Of the 3,000 Jews that lived in my hometown of Kozowa, which was then in Poland but is now part of Ukraine, only 46 survived the war. Kozowa is now home to a grave site of about 1,400 people. BEFORE THE WAR My family had five children, and in total there were seven of us. I was the oldest son. I had a sister who was older and three younger siblings; a sister and two younger brothers. Poland had 33 million people before 1939. We had a home in the town of Kozowa, Poland and a farm outside of town. We had two homes because my mother was from the town and my father was from the village. The part of the country we lived in had black soil, very fertile land. Everything was grown in that area. There were frequent pogroms. The farm we lived on was bought by my father’s father, who had eight children -- four sons and four daughters. My father worked as a veterinarian and he had fought in World War I. We had a cow, we had a horse and buggy. But in those days, only 5% of Jews had this. Most of them were workers, but we lived on the farm. Our diet was simple; we had challah on the Sabbath, some chicken. In those days, to take out a tooth, the doctor would pull it out with a piece of string. Before the war, I was a good student. Not exceptional, but a good student. There were quotas in the schools and they only accepted 10% Jews. Most people in the town would finish seven years of school, in the village four years. Very few people finished more than seven years. I didn't have the chance to learn. Today they have so much education but we did not. We were Orthodox. The Jewish towns in that area were centered around the synagogue. As Orthodox Jews, we were always separate from the rest of society. But living separately wasn't bad. In the village was a greater mix of people than in the town. The town was mostly Polish. Our neighbors in the village were both Polish and Ukrainian. We were farmers, but luckily the neighbors didn't take away the farm. We were still there in 1941, when the Nazis came. In 1939, Germany and Russia made a deal that the area by Tarnopol would be Russian territory. The two years under Russian rule after 1939 weren’t bad. But in 1941 Hitler took the area back. At the time of the war, there were 3.5 million Jews in Poland. Before the war, Poland wasn’t bad for the Jew because the kings were more tolerant. Everyone was poor because the land was so coveted there were always wars. It was an agricultural place where people grew enough to eat. But when the war happened, your neighbors suddenly turned against you, beating you up. The Germans created a law that deprived the Jews of rights. This was implemented as soon as the Germans came. The Ukrainians, even though they would marry Polish people, they were still prejudiced. I don’t know why. The Ukrainians nearby were very anti-Semitic, and they helped the Germans persecute Jews. The local people did not have to kill us, but they did. They killed us in unbelievable ways. They would line people up on a desk and kill five with one shot and throw them in a grave. This was life. They killed people with drugs or gases or threw them into ditches. If someone was left in the forest, they would hunt them. There was a punishment that if someone kept a Jew, they would pay with their lives. If someone came and said that he had killed a Jew he would get an award. GHETTO Six weeks after the Gestapo came, the first thing say said was that they wanted Jews to be in ghettos. Before they put us there, they said they needed workers for the highways for the army tanks. Instead of working, the people who were taken were beaten. They killed Jews right away. On Yom Kippur everyone over the age of 18 had to come out to the market place. We, the Jews had built this market place. They picked the 400 best, strongest people, and put them in the truck. They said they were going to take them to work, but instead they put them in a ditch and killed them all. This was the first thing the Germans did. We all moved into a ghetto in the town that was the about a quarter of the town size. There was only one exit for this whole area. My family’s house was already in this area. When people moved to the ghetto they were only allowed to take what they could carry. In a small living room you would see ten or fifteen people living their whole lives there. We had about $80 when were entered the ghetto, but hunger was a terrible problem. Sometimes we were able to bake some bread for ourselves, but there was little food. People would become so swollen from hunger that they couldn't even get up. They had to just had to stay sitting and they would die like that. People were laying in the street. Every morning you would see people dead from hunger. We didn’t wash in the ghetto. The lice was unbelievable. This was the Germans' plan. They took the young people to the “work camp” where they could live three or four weeks. The next plan, since it isn't easy to kill 3000 people, was to leave the rest of us to die in the ghetto. The winters were brutal. We had no heat and there was terrible typhus. In the ghetto we made bunkers, tunnels from one house to the next. All of the buildings had stores on the street level and we dug the tunnels under the floors. We had towers on the buildings to look out. The Gestapo was not in our town, they were in Tarnapol. They came with trucks from the north. They came from the west. When we saw them coming, these secret tunnels helped us hide. Germans would come some time during the day, let's say from six in the morning until noon. They would make the people they caught take off their pants, and checked to see if there was any money or ammunition in the pockets. In September 1941, the Germans took a few hundred people in trucks to gas them. We had a famine year in 1942. At that time we were already there for a year and so hungry. We did not think about life. We thought about death. My father was in World War I. He told us that he knew what a war was. He knew that we wouldn't all survive. He said, “Everyone should try to save himself, do not worry about the family.” Families that tried to stick together didn't make it. “Any time you are in a scary situation do not try look for each other, but run. Maybe one of us will live to tell this story.” This kind of thinking saved our lives. Once, in March 1942, the Germans came and so we hid. We were in two different tunnels. I was 22 and I was with my two sisters, who were 18 and about 7 or 8 years old. The older sister started to run and the German shot her. I stayed with the younger sister and didn't know what was going to happen. The Germans were in the ghetto for about two hours to kill Jews. They gathered all of us in a backyard with walls as high as a ceiling and my little sister started to cry. "Izzy, what's going to happen to us?" she asked. I still remember this. I thought, "This is my last minute. I will be killed soon." I don't know how, but I got up the walls and got to the other side. I don't know if the German guard looked, but no one shot at me. I escaped. Those days we had toilets outside the town since there was no running water. We had to go to the pump. I left the backyard and I hid in the toilet. He didn't see me and that is how I survived that time. This is only one story of my survival during the war. I can't figure out how many times I was running away during the war. One time we were in a tunnel and the German knocked on the door, telling us to leave. We stayed in the bunker and the German went away. It was scary to have the German stepping on the floor right above your head. It was luck. The cruelty at the time was unbelievable. A baby would not be killed by a bullet, but taken by the legs and knocked into the wall. Sometimes they would take a baby and try to shoot it in the air. I saw this with my own eyes, but I don't like to talk about it because it comes back to me during the night. We didn't think we could run away. We all thought Hitler would lose the war, and we were just fighting to outlast the Nazis. For the three years I experienced the war (1941-1944) we were fighting with death. In June 12, 1943 the ghetto was liquidated. At the last minute the captain of the police came to the ghetto. We were outside and he said this is the last day. Until noon you can try to escape if you want to. Then they came back the next day around six in the morning and rounded us up. The ones that were chosen at that time were taken to dig their own graves. HIDING My father was born in 1891. This was 1943. My father was 52 years old. In those days that was old. My mother was six years younger, 46 years old. She wasn't young anymore. They were sitting in the ghetto. When they killed my two sisters, my two brothers ran away to the village. At the time they were not in the backyard with my sister and me. This was lucky and part of my father's plan to stay divided during the war. It was about 7 or 8 miles from the town to the village. We were not in the ghetto too long. If we had, we wouldn't be alive today. I looked out for myself the whole time. Two weeks before, my brothers had run away. My father and my mother were together. We knew there was an empty house in the woods. We knew that we could meet there. We escaped and made our way there. We were in an empty stable in the outskirts of the city. Many of us were trying to leave the ghetto and many were killed. We were lucky. We moved at night. It was only about seven miles, but my parents were already old and my mother got lost somehow. In the end we found each other and my two brothers in the village. The Ukrainian police, if they caught you, would kill you. But we managed. We had a bridge to cross but we didn't cross it. Instead we went across the water because we knew an area where it was not deep so they wouldn't catch us. But sometimes the police would come close. The dogs would bark and we would have to lay down and wait until they left. My father had a rich Ukrainian friend. He called my father Abram-shu, like friends. He said that he couldn't take my mother because she wouldn't be able to escape if something happened. He was worried about getting caught. So he sent us away after three months. Next door was the Polish man who saved us. His name was Jan Urban and he lived with his mother, Anna. Jan was very poor, but his mother was born from the Intelligensia. Jan played the organ at church. He was very talented, even if he only had four years of school. He was the same age as me. I asked Yash (Jan) if he could keep us. We wouldn't have anywhere else to go. He said, "If I'm going to live, you're going to live." That was a righteous gentile. Jan’s house was not a house, but a shack. He had nothing-only a few chickens. I went to him with my father and we said "Yash-u (Jan), please take us in." This man was the poorest in the village. We went to him and he welcomed us. He saved us. He said, "I knew you were there." He had been coming at night to take corn from the rich man and he had seen us in the attic. The Urbans kept us in small underground cellar with an opening no larger than a few sq feet; kept in barn-like building. The house had a dirt floor, which was typical for that time. We went into the hole and covered it over. In that hole we lived, all five of us. We were there for nine months, from June 1943 to March 1944. One time Jan came down to the hole with us. There were six of us in there with one pail for garbage. We did this for about three months. We were there for most of the day, 18 hours, and would come out at night. We had enough room to sit, but not to lay down. We had so much lice in this hole. The Pole had no food to give us because he was afraid the police would see the chimney or lights at night and would know we were there. We had only one meal a day, so we would eat lice to survive. He himself lived off potatoes and hot water during the day. In the day time my mother went to the neighbor's to make clothing. Some nights we would go to the Ukrainian's house. We had a signal and sometimes he'd come out and give us some food. He told us about a horse cemetery where a cow would sometimes come at night. And that could be food. But that was one thing we didn't do- there was another house by that cemetery and we didn't want to get caught so we never went. I never saw a German in the whole time I was hiding. We stayed in the hole all the time, eating food, everything for months. Jan was afraid that he would get caught. Once we tried to give him some money to go buy bread in the town. They would see that he got money and it would look suspicious. They're going to see the chimney and they will think something is suspicious. “I can't do it because I want you to live through the war,” he said. I will never forget him. We brought him to America. We brought the family. We helped him all the time. I had two uncles who lost their lives in the ghetto. They were also in the village. We had $80 all together. One uncle was very poor, his wife had died from illness, and he had two young children. My father had 8 siblings. This one uncle was starving. I don't know why I did this, but I went to another uncle who was rich and had a few hundred dollars and I asked for $5. That was a lot of money in those days. The poor uncle gave me a blessing. He said, "Izzy, I know that you will live through the war. But I don't know if I can live through the war." He was a pious man. This was only a few months before the war ended. I was wondering why I did this, because they would know I did it because he was so poor and now he has money. Once we heard that everybody from the village was being asked if they had Jews. This was an Ukrainian policeman who was looking for Jews. At this point the Germans were already losing the war, the Russians were already by Kiev, 1000km from us. You would hear the bombardments. The priest said that Jews were a curse from God and should not be saved, that if they survived they would take advantage of others. In the few remaining days of the war, the policeman, this murderer, killed the remaining Jews in the town. He killed them with a piece of iron. He killed my uncle and others. AFTER THE WAR Jan told us when the Germans had left. We were liberated in March 1944 by Russians marching west. The first Russian patrols we saw asked for water and bread. Out of 3000 Jews in the Kozowa area, only 46 survived. There was a mass grave of about 1400 people. We were technically Polish citizens, but the area we lived in was up for grabs. After 1945 we were given the option to move to territories of the re-formed Poland. But my family did not like Stalin and we were anti-communist like most Jews. We decided to go back to Kozowa. There was a pogrom after the war against the Jews. Polish people raided our houses. In those days even our shirts were worth a lot. They were afraid we would tell the truth of what happened. My cousin went to Israel through Cyprus and my brother and I wanted to go to Israel to fight, but my parents wanted to stay together. So we wandered across Europe after liberation until June 1949. First we moved to western Poland, which used to be part of Germany before the war. The people there were too anti- Semitic and we decided to leave. By 1946 most Jews from Eastern Europe were heading for Soviet or American-occupied areas. Refugees recommended that we went to internment camps. We traveled to Czechoslovakia, to Prague. We were helped by some Jewish organizations, which were mostly young people who helped refugees cross borders and find shelter. Some of these organizations helped people go to Italy, but we went to Austria. The border patrols in Czechoslovakia took us into custody because we had no papers. We said we were German Jews who wanted to return to Germany, The police probably knew this was not true, but they let us go anyway. We were handed over to Americans when we arrived and we stayed in a refugee camp. This camp was in a building that we shared with other families. We were told there were too many refugees and so we went to Munich. We traveled separately through the forest during the day but we met up in Belzheim, Germany. We arrived in Germany in the winter of 1945-46. We stayed in a school room with two or three other families. The army supplied food and the building had a kitchen. By the end of 1946 we were still in Germany. AMERICA In 1947, the US passed a law allowing refugees to emigrate without papers. We decided to go to New York because there were many Jews here. Our family was brought to America by the US Army and we traveled on a warship. We arrived in June 1949. We had no belongings, no skills, no English. I wanted to work on a farm, but we were discouraged from doing that. We were ready and willing to work for minimum wage. We went looking for work at neighborhood businesses. My youngest brother, who was 21 years old, found a job at a butcher shop. We did little jobs like deliveries and managed to save money. We were able to rent an apartment with three rooms for $45 a month. Eventually we had enough money to start out own butcher shop. By 1951-1952, there was a meet up for former refugees on the East side once a week. We would go to these meetings. Soon my brothers and I were dating American girls. But my father wanted me to date a European girl. He knew a girl named Lena who lived with an aunt in Brooklyn. She was a Polish girl, and we had happened to be in the same camp in Europe in 1947, although we didn’t know each other then. She was from a larger town in Poland and had more education than I did. I called her and we went on a date. We were married when I was 31 and she was 27. We were married for 55 years until she passed away and those 55 years felt like 1 day. We had two daughters. One is a principal at Yeshiva and another daughter passed away at age 36 from breast cancer. I have five grandchildren, three from one daughter and two from another. Now I am 91. I have had a heart attack. I have had kidney cancer. Now they find cancer in my spine. I have had 33 radiations. I still take pills. I’m not a well man, but now I feel better.