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Before All Memory Is Lost: Women's Voices from the Holocaust

If the World Had Only Acted Sooner by Rebekah (Relli) Schmerler-Katz

After two or three weeks in the ghetto, we were gathered and taken to a cemetery. We were a few hundred people lined up in fives, standing and waiting. It was the month of May, on a beautiful sunny and warm day. Everything was green and in full bloom. In spite of the hundreds of people lined up, there was no sound, except for the birds chirping and here and there a cry of a baby. In front of us, the Hungarian gendarmes started to line up machine guns. Every few minutes, they adjusted their guns aimed at us again and again. It seemed like those sadists enjoyed seeing the fear in our faces. Someone in the crowd dared to ask one of our tormentors what would happen to us. The gendarme answered clearly and loudly, “By tonight, all of you will smell the violets from the bottom.” This inhuman explanation was not needed. We all understood what would follow.

I was young and loved spring, my favourite season of the year. I looked around and wanted to take in everything around me for the last time. But our journey didn’t end at the cemetery. We were taken away one by one and our pockets and bodies were searched for valuables. I was standing next to my father. He had our five citizenship papers in his breast pocket. As I mentioned before, these papers meant life to us. When the police touched my father’s breast pocket, he frantically uttered, “These are our citizenship papers.” The police tore out the documents, threw them to the ground and yelled, “You will not need these anymore!”

The gendarmes marched us through some tents until we arrived at a field where there was a long freight train. We were counted and a number of people were sent into each railway car. The five of us were holding on to one another. As we were counted, they stopped right after my parents and my sister and loaded them into the boxcar. That meant my brother and I would have to go in the next one. At this point, my parents and I started to beg to be together. Although two people offered to change places with us, they were not allowed. Again, I pleaded with the gendarmes, and this time they beat me up with a club.

My brother was quiet and sad during the whole journey. He looked as if he knew that this was our last trip and that we would never see each other again. I told him to remember the words Duparquet, Quebec. This was a little mining town in Canada where my uncle, my mother’s brother, lived. If we survived, I said, this should be our meeting place.

I can’t recall how many days and nights we were on the train sleeping on the floor without any food, only stopping once a day when the pails, which were given to us to relieve ourselves, were emptied. We realized that we kept going north, toward Poland. We saw cities destroyed completely, only shells of buildings after heavy bombardments. I remember seeing the city of Krakow black from smoke and fire. We kept going north, and then west.

One early morning the train stopped. We looked out and saw young men in striped blue and grey pyjamas, cloth caps on their heads. I soon figured out that what I had considered to be pyjamas were prisoners’ uniforms. It took a few hours until our turn came to be unloaded. My brother and I met with our parents on the platform. The men in the striped clothes helped us off the train. There was a lot of noise, screaming and yelling. We were completely confused. There were Germans in uniforms holding big dogs walking up and down the platform. The prisoners in the striped clothes were Polish Jews. They yelled and hurried to line us up by fives. Amid the terrible panic, I realized that our group was separated from the children, the older people and the men.

One of the prisoners looked at me and asked me to show him my mother. When he saw her he told me, “Kiss your mother; kiss her again.” I suddenly realized that this was a goodbye forever. I asked him, “Will we stay alive?” He answered emphatically, “You young ones, yes.”