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Paula Goldhar

Goldhar thumbnail Final

Born: Kielce, Poland, 1924

Wartime experience: Ghetto and camp

Writing partner: Chana LeBowitz

Paula Goldhar (née Lwowski) was born in Kielce, Poland, in 1924 and was the youngest of eight children. Paula’s family lived in Lodz for several years before World War II started and until early 1940.

Then her family moved to Stopnica, which was soon turned into an open ghetto. In 1942, Paula and three of her siblings were deported to the Skarżysko-Kamienna forced labour camp, and in 1944, Paula and her two surviving siblings were sent to the Częstochowa forced labour camp. Paula and her sister Rivcha were liberated by the Soviet army on January 16, 1945, and were then reunited with their brother Yechezkel. They stayed in the city of Częstochowa for a year and a half, but after a pogrom in the nearby city of Kielce, they fled the area and lived in two displaced persons camps in Germany. Paula obtained false papers showing her age to be seventeen rather than twenty-one so that she would be allowed to enter Canada under its strict postwar immigration policies. She immigrated to Canada in October 1947 and lived with her aunt and uncle in Toronto. Paula married her husband, Yitzchak, in 1950, and together they built a family.

Holiday Memories

Lodz was a huge city with some predominantly Jewish districts. Where we lived, it was all Jewish. Life in Lodz was wonderful. My father and mother said, “It’s such a Yiddishe city.” There were Jewish butchers and bakers, and we would see people going to and from shul, synagogue. On Shabbos, the Sabbath, all the businesses were closed.

My brothers all learned in the yeshivos, religious schools. In my family, I was the only schoolgirl. Jewish girls went to public school because there were no Jewish day schools in Europe before the war. But in Lodz, the Jewish kids had their own public schools. I went to school six days a week — Monday to Friday and Sundays too. The gentile kids had school on Saturdays. I was in school from 8:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. with two breaks in the middle. At 1:00 p.m. I would come home and we would have dinner. Around 1:30 p.m. I would sit down to do homework. I was a good student. I didn’t have much room to do my homework in our small apartment, but in the kitchen there was a small table next to the stove where my mother chopped and prepared things. Attached to that table was a small board that could be pulled out, and that was my place to do homework. Then at 5:00 p.m. I would meet up with some friends and we would go together to Bais Yaakov, an Orthodox Jewish girls’ school, until 7:00 p.m.

The Winds of War

In Lodz, we didn’t feel antisemitism until close to the war; we hadn’t felt it in 1933, when Hitler came to power. But by 1938, after Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, it felt as though the Poles had been influenced by Hitler to harass the Jews. The Polish shkutzim, gentiles, threw stones at us Jewish girls. We were afraid to wear our Bais Yaakov clothes out in the street. But they could tell we were Jewish anyway. One of my brother’s friends was beaten up and died. My brothers were afraid to go out in the evening. Sometimes they would still go to the bais midrash, the study hall, to learn or go to a shiur, a religious class. But eventually my mother stopped letting them go. It was not safe.

We knew everything that was going on in Germany from the newspapers. Not instantly, but a day later. There was a Yiddish newspaper called the Haynt (Today) that my father read. He was always sitting with a sefer, a holy book, in his hand, but he also read the Haynt. He was always tuned into the news and the happenings. My brother used to read the paper aloud for everybody if he found a good article. At that time, a lot of German Jews were running away from Germany, and many came to Lodz. They thought that the persecution was only going to happen in Germany and that the rest of us were safe. They didn’t expect that there would be a war.

Sometimes we talked while on the bunks: “Maybe a miracle will happen and we’ll come home and our parents will be waiting for us with open arms! They’ll be so happy that we survived.” That’s how we talked among ourselves. We were daydreaming that someone would be happy if we survived. And that helped get us through.

Holding On

Between the day and night shifts, the barracks had to be empty. If someone stayed behind in the barracks and could not go to work, we never saw them again.

We were in the Skarżysko-Kamienna camp maybe three months when we were struck with a typhus epidemic. Typhus is a horrible disease that comes with a very high fever. Of course, whoever got a fever couldn’t get up to go to work. One day, I, too, couldn’t get up to go to work. So I told the kapo, “I’m sick. I have to go to the hospital.” She sent me to the “hospital,” which was just another barracks with bunks for isolation. Survival was pure luck. They didn’t give us any food or water. They just left people lying there until they either got better or died. Girls were dying all around me. I knew they were dead; I touched cold hands, cold feet. I sometimes opened my eyes and saw two orderlies taking out a girl who had died. Outside of each barracks there was a wooden box with dead bodies in it. In the beginning, we looked away, but later on we got used to it. It just became a part of our lives.

12 Paula and Yitzchak 2021 01 26 221931
Paula and her husband, Yitzchak.
9 First wedding in DP camp
The first wedding in the Windischbergerdorf DP camp. Germany, 1946.
10 Paula and Yitzchak with Paulas aunt and uncles in Toronto
Paula (third from left) and her fiancé, Yitzchak (second from left), on the occasion of their engagement with Paula’s aunt, uncles and a cousin. Toronto, 1949.