My mother, Malka Brandsdorfer, lived in a small Polish town near the German border. At the start of World War II she was married and had a young daughter. During the war her married name was Goldratt. She recorded her recollections of the Holocaust. The conditions in the town. Her family's struggle and the ghetto and camps she lived through. She tells of how many of her family died and how only she and one sister survived. Her recollections are told in Yiddish. There is a written version of my mother's story in English that can be downloaded at the website.
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My mother, Malka Brandsdorfer, lived in a small Polish town near the German border. At the start of World War II she was married and had a young daughter. During the war her married name was Goldratt. She recorded her recollections of the Holocaust. The conditions in the town. Her family's struggle and the ghetto and camps she lived through. She tells of how many of her family died and how only she and one sister survived. Her recollections are told in Yiddish. There is a written version of my mother's story in English that can be downloaded at the website.
Leaving Poland for good, my mother travels looking for surviving family and friends. She finds very few, learns of the fate of many of them. Settling in a displaced persons camp in Wesbaden Germany, she meets my father and starts a new family before moving to America.
Returning home after the war. My mother travels on foot and by train through war torn Germany and Poland. She finds other survivors, among them her younger sister Fay. Her homecoming is bitter sweet with the realization of how few survived and the hostile greeting the returning Jews received from the Polish townspeople.
The labor camp at Neustadt is unexpectedly liberated when the German guards abandon the labor camp. The Germans move west to excape the advancing Russian army.
With the Russian army nearing Auschwitz in January 1945, the Germans evacuate the camp and force march the prisoners to the concentration camp at Gross Rosen. Known as the Death March, it lasted many days with the prisoners walking through the bitter cold and heavy snow. Many did not survive, as the German guards killed any who stopped walking.
With the fires in Birkenue burning all the time, to dispose of the bodies of the murdered Jews, the ash turns the evening sky blood red. My mother describes this vision of hell that was Auschwitz.
Yenta and Sara, my mother's 2 youngest sisters come to Birkenau. The three of them are reunited, but only for a short while as disease and the gas chamber take both of them.
My mother is rescued from the gas chamber by Mala Zimetbaum. Later Mala Zimetbaum escapes from Auschwitz with a male accomplice. After a few days they are caught and executed in front of the whole camp.
Needing labor, the Germans transfer my mother and a number of other inmates of Majdanek to the Birkenau section of Auschwitz. My mother works in a number of jobs in and around the camp.
Packed into a crowded freight car my mother is sent from Warsaw to the Majdanek. Majdanek was the major concentration camp on the eastern side of Poland.
In April 1943, the Germans conduct a final aktion to clear the Warsaw ghetto. The Jewish partisans of the ghetto create the Passover uprising and my mother goes into hiding with the other Jews in her building.
An aktion was what the inhabitants of the ghetto called the German military operations to capture and remove the Jews from the ghetto. My mother describes the aktion that catches the last of the children and sends them to Treblinka.
After most of the Jewish population of the ghetto was removed, my mother was assigned to a work detail that would go into the emptied sections of the ghetto and search through the apartments for any left over values (Werterfassung in German). The group would gathered anything that was of value to be carted away by the Poles and Germans.
My mother and her daughter are captured in the Warsaw train station, trying to get to the east to find her brother. They are put in prison with other Jews caught outside the ghetto.
The last Jews of the town and region are rounded up for deportation. My mother, fearing for the life of her daughter, goes into hiding. One of her sisters joins her as they move from place to place seeking refuge.
With the Jews in larger cities being put into ghettos, the Jews in smaller towns are assembled to labor for the Germans and for deportation. The first deportations were to labor camps and to the larger ghettos. The later assemblies were to send them to death camps.
My mother, Malka Brandsdorfer, lived in a small Polish town near the German border. At the start of World War II she was married and had a young daughter. During the war her married name was Goldratt. She recorded her recollections of the Holocaust. The conditions in the town. Her family's struggle and the ghetto and camps she lived through. She tells of how many of her family died and how only she and one sister survived. Her recollections are told in Yiddish. There is a written version of my mother's story in English that can be downloaded at the website.
