I Shall Live: Surviving the Holocaust Against All Odds

By Henry Orenstein

I Shall Live tells the gripping true story of a Jewish family in Germany and Russia as the Nazi party gains power in Germany. When Henry Orenstein and his siblings end up in a series of concentrations camps, Orenstein's bravery and quick thinking help him to save himself and his brothers from execution by playing a role in the greatest hoax ever pulled on the upper echelons of Nazi command.

Orenstein's lucid prose recreates this horrific time in history and his constant struggle for survival as the Nazis move him and his brothers through five concentration camps. His description of their roles in the fake Chemical Commando sheds new light on an incredible and generally unknown event in the history of the Holocaust. This edition of I Shall Live contains new evidence about this false Commando, including letters signed to and from Himmler himself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Beaufort Books
• Release date: Oct 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9780825305986

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I SHALL LIVE

Surviving the Holocaust Against All Odds

HENRY ORENSTEIN

Foreword by

Claude Lanzmann, creator of Shoah

Copyright © 1987 by Henry Orenstein

First Beaufort Books paperback edition 1997

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Orenstein, Henry, 1923-

I shall live : surviving the Holocaust against all odds / Henry Orenstein.

  p. cm.

revised and updated edition.

ISBN 978-0-8253-0597-9 (alk. paper)

1. Orenstein, Henry, 1923-2. Jews—Poland—Hrubieszów—Biography.

3. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)—Poland—Hrubieszów--Personal narratives.

4. Hrubieszów (Poland)—Biography. I. Title.

DS134.72.O74A3 2010

940.53’18092--dc22

[B]

                                                  2009046948

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Published in the United States by Beaufort Books

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Designer: Elyse Strongin, Neuwirth & Associates, Inc.

Printed in the U.S.A.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To the members of my family

murdered by the Nazis

and

to my beloved wife, Susie,

without whose urging and inspiration

this book would not have been written

Special thanks to Dr. Lucjan Dobroszycki,

Professor of History at YIVO and Yeshiva University,

and editor of The Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto,

for his invaluable help in the search

for documents and verification

CONTENTS

Foreword by Claude Lanzmann

Introduction by Malcolm Hoenlein

Publisher’s Note

Preface

Hrubieszów: Before World War II

World War II Begins

Under the Soviets

The Germans Attack the Soviet Union

Under the Germans: Ołyka

Włodzimierz

Uściług

Back in Hrubieszów

Budzyń

Majdanek

Płaszów

Ravensbrück

Sachsenhausen

The March

Free

Epilogue

Postscript

FOREWORD

Throughout the years I spent in the preparation and making of Shoah, one question emerged as central for me, a question that neither the many firsthand accounts and scholarly works I read nor the testimony from survivors ever really and completely answered: How did the Jews of the villages and small ghetto towns of Eastern Europe (Poland, the Baltic countries, Byelorussia, the Ukraine) live from one day to the next during the periods of remission that followed the liquidations—or actions, as the Nazis labeled them—in which their families and friends were brutally slaughtered on the spot by specialized teams of killers or sent off to the gas chambers of the death camps? Although the frequency and pace of extermination varied considerably according to the time and place, one general principle nevertheless prevailed: In order to deceive and lull the victims, and also because Jewish manpower was needed, the SS never cleaned up a ghetto in one fell swoop. Between one action and the next, life went on for those initially spared, days filled with anguish and terror, dominated by the anticipation and certainty of an inescapable end, yet permeated with dreams and hopes more tenacious than death, and without which their doomed existence would have been impossible.

Henry Orenstein is the extraordinary painter of this anguish, conveying a picture whose truth and sensitivity are to my mind exemplary. He makes us experience—and this is what is most profoundly unique in his story—the passage of time, the passing of days, weeks, and months, the deceptive calm before and after the savagery of the actions and executions. Quite simply, he recreates for us the sense of duration in the extermination of the Jews. He does so with perfect economy of means, in a spare style, without overstatement. His intellectual rigor and honesty, his accurate memory, and his keen skill for description enable us to relive each moment of this relentless martyrdom as if we ourselves belonged to the Orenstein family.

This book is above all the saga of a wonderfully united and closely knit family in which each member is prepared to give his life to save the others. Lejb, the father, Golda, the mother, the four sons—Fred, Sam, Felek, and Henry—and lastly, Hanka, the little sister, all obey the same law of love—paternal, maternal, filial, and sibling love—which bids them always to risk their own safety in order to keep the family together or to find each other again despite enforced separations, even at the price of the ultimate sacrifice. The most poignant episode in the book is undoubtedly the surrender to the Nazis on October 28, 1942, of the entire family, together for one last time in their home town of Hrubieszów, after having miraculously survived for three years. By the very austerity of its narration, the book here attains a tragic grandeur. We are witness to the final action, the ultimate liquidation of the ghetto, the shipment of thousands of Hrubieszów Jews to the gas chambers of Sobibór. While the SS were outside with their dogs and with Ukrainian mercenaries, flushing out, house by house, the Jews who had failed to appear at roll call, the Orensteins remained hidden in a skrytka, a narrow concealed place behind a false wall. For eight days and eight nights—the duration of the action—they waited. Henry, the youngest son (who was nineteen years old in 1942), escaped implacable reality by devouring a Polish translation of Gone with the Wind with its last twenty pages missing. I shall never know the end of the story, he thinks, indicating thus his sense of impending death. Dirty, starving, with their strength and hope exhausted, the Orensteins decide to make an end of it and surrender to the murderers. Golda and Lejb are taken to the cemetery and killed with a bullet in the neck. The mother, before being dragged away from her family, cries out to her oldest son the four piercing words which express the most absolute gift of self: Fred, save the children!

For the five children, the hell of the camps would now begin. Until now, we have been reading a meticulous account of a manhunt, rich with fresh insights into relations between Jews and Poles, the habitual anti-Semitism of the Polish population, but also the simple heroism of a handful of men and women who risked their lives to help the victims (Mrs. Lipińska remains unforgettable); we learn, too, about everyday life in this part of Poland, occupied by the USSR between 1939 and 1941, during which period anti-Jewish discrimination was banned, and lastly about the solitude and the unbelievable feeling of abandonment experienced by Jews desperately trying to survive in a totally hostile environment, a desert bereft of all humanity.

But then the tenor of the book suddenly alters, and in trailing the path of Henry Orenstein, we plunge into the most harrowing of adventure stories. An adventure of horror to be sure, as lived hour after hour for thirty interminable months, but at the same time, one that is almost novelesque in the extraordinary succession of miracles which enable the young man to remain among the living so as to eventually tell his story forty years later, with Voltairesque ferocity and often with sheer and invigorating joy. From one ordeal to another, outwitting death time after time, Henry Orenstein, an intelligent, soberly pessimistic Candide, is possessed by a will to live so prodigious that he seems able to maintain his spirit while overcoming the most improbable odds. One of the most hazardous of these was his enrollment in an ultra-secret Kommando of phony chemists, engineers, and mathematicians, whose task was to employ Jewish intelligence for the purpose of inventing a unique gas that would save the Third Reich from disaster by paralyzing the engines of enemy tanks, aircraft, and all other motorized vehicles. Readers will have to discover for themselves this truly delusionary scheme, a sheer product of the Nazi phantasmagoria. As a member of a Chemiker Kommando, our hero was sheltered to some extent in each of the five camps to which he was deported: Budzy’n, Majdanek, and Płaszów in Poland; Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen in Germany. The news from the front, Hitler’s defeats, the advance of Soviet troops (he rightly considers the battle of Moscow in the winter of 1941–1942 to be the decisive turning point of the war), together with the Allied landings helped sustain Henry Orenstein during his worst moments: The reader must imagine the horrible torture in Ptaszów of being confined in the Stehbunker (a tiny, foul, coffin-like cell with barely room to stand), waiting his turn to be hanged, escaping in his imagination into the realm of military strategy, identifying with the generals of the victorious armies—Zhukov and Eisenhower, Montgomery and Rokossovsky—correcting and perfecting their battle plans, but also maintaining his equilibrium when on the brink of death by visualizing Hitler’s suffering on seeing his world crumble.

The end of the book is admirable. In a series of hallucinatory scenes which would lend themselves to cinematic treatment, the author has us relive the death march of the prisoners from Sachsenhausen during the last days of the war. At that point, impelled by an overwhelming need to tell, Orenstein attains such perfect mastery that his work achieves the rank of literature.

CLAUDE LANZMANN

Translated from the French by Toby Talbot

INTRODUCTION

I am writing this introduction to add another dimension to the masterful foreword by Claude Lanzmann. This renowned artist and author has captured the special significance of this book and it cannot be improved upon.

I have been privileged to know many of the most outstanding personalities of our time, from world leaders to renowned religious figures and cultural icons. None has had a greater impact or more profound impression on my life as did Henry Orenstein. Beyond my deep affection and admiration for Henry and Susie, I have come to rely on his incisive and substantive command of world events. Henry is a keen observer, largely self-educated, with remarkable insight sharpened by his life experience. His remarkable story is movingly recounted in I Shall Live, but it offers only part of the full account of this unique and special man.

His resourcefulness, creativity, and intellect are evident in his ability to survive against the greatest odds. Only those who had firsthand experience with the unfathomable evil of that period can fully appreciate the miraculous nature of his survival.

I Shall Live is much more then another personal account of that terrible era. Rather, it is the inspiring story of the remarkable triumph of an individual who by virtue of extraordinary will and courage was able to overcome incredible challenges that would have doomed a lesser person. He repeatedly faced almost certain death, yet by his wit, courage, and determination he confounded the plans of his Nazi tormentors. Not given to despair or self-pity, despite his incredible experiences, which might have deterred those lacking his zeal for life, he went on to establish a family, successful businesses and engage in significant philanthropic endeavors. These qualities enabled him as well to overcome reversals of fortune, from which he emerged stronger and went on to even greater accomplishments. His creativity and imagination continue to produce new inventions and innovations up to the present time.

While I Shall Live is largely Henry’s story, he places the events in an historical context, enhancing the reader’s experience and education. The lessons of Henry’s life are particularly important for the younger generations. The increased visibility and vociferousness of Holocaust deniers underscores the importance of his work. Similarly, the mood of our time makes his real-life demonstration of the indomitable spirit so vital.

The word chosen to symbolize the Holocaust was "zachor," remembrance. In our tradition, remembrance is also about the future, because only those who learn the lessons of the past are able to meet the challenges of the future. I Shall Live sounds an alarm for this generation so that the pledge of Never again! will be fulfilled.

I hope—I urge—that young people of every faith, ethnicity, and national origin, in and outside of the classroom, will be encouraged to read and benefit from I Shall Live. I have no doubt it will inspire, sensitize, and instruct them as they draw lessons for their own lives.

Henry’s caring for so many individuals from every walk of life, his devotion to Israel and the Jewish people, his love for and commitment to the United States and the vitality of our society, cannot be adequately recounted in this volume. Perhaps it is best left for others to recount. Henry never sought recognition, thought it was rightly earned. In fact, he shunned the limelight, preferring to have his deeds speak for themselves.

We are indebted to Henry for sharing his life story and for enabling us to be, directly or indirectly, part of it. May he and Susie be blessed with many more years of health, happiness, and good deeds.

MALCOLM HOENLEIN

Executive Vice Chairman,

Conference of Presidents of

Major American Jewish Organizations

April 2009

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

I Shall Live was originally published in 1987 to great critical acclaim. Henry Orenstein’s extraordinary account of the way he and his family struggled to survive the atrocities perpetrated on European Jews by the Nazis has resonated with readers ever since. The narrative opens on Henry’s domestic life with his family in Poland prior to its invasion by the Germans and the Russians in 1939. His words portray in brutal detail the nightmare that descended upon Poland and the rest of Europe.

Throughout his book he sets his personal struggle against the larger backdrop of war-torn Europe, giving readers a better perspective on the war as he and his siblings are moved from one concentration camp to another.

Since the original publication of I Shall Live, more information has come to light about a specific aspect of his story. When the Nazis ordered all scientists to sign up for a special assignment, Henry, his brothers, as well as a number of other Jewish prisoners who were not scientists, signed up anyway. They gambled their lives hoping that the war would end before the SS found out that they were not who they claimed to be.

The idea of creating the scientists Kommando was originated by a number of German professors who worried that they would be drafted into the German Army and sent to the Russian front. After the professors interviewed the Jewish prisoners who enlisted in the Kommando, they realized that these were not real scientists. They were so anxious to avoid fighting the Russians that they decided to gamble themselves and give the prisoners make believe scientific work.

After the war Henry Orenstein engaged two German historians, Dr.Gotz and Dr. Strebel, to conduct a search in the German archives to try to find documents relating to the phony Kommando. The enclosed letters show how far-reaching the deception was. In one of them, the head of SS in Poland, Wilhelm Koppe, writes to Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, asking him for permission to move the Kommando to Germany, and telling him how important its work is to the German war effort. In another, Himmler, apparently very impressed, writes to Pohl, a key SS leader in Berlin, and asking him to set up an advisory committee to supervise the Kommando.

I Shall Live puts a very human face on those who survived the camps and those who were not fortunate enough to make it. At its root, it is a story of a bright young man who grows into adulthood in the most unimaginable circumstances, but somehow becomes a good and decent man who puts the love of his family above all else.

Beaufort believes it is important to keep alive this unique story of strength and survival. For this new edition we have kept the original introduction by Claude Lanzmann, creator of Shoah, and included a brand new introduction by Malcolm Hoenlein.

ERIC KAMPMANN

President, Beaufort Books

PREFACE

I wrote this book primarily from my own experiences, which for the most part are etched in my memory with unusual clarity. Some of the people and events from more than forty years ago are more vivid to me today than are those of only yesterday.

At times I was aware, while they were happening, that I was a witness to extraordinary events, and I tried to remember them as fully and as accurately as possible, with the conscious intent of recording them, should I be fortunate enough to survive the war. Such an event, for example, was Dr. Blanke’s selection in Płaszów.

A few events were so terrible and were buried so deep in my memory that only when someone who had shared the experience reminded me of them would the whole scene suddenly flash before me, intact in every detail and as fresh as though it were happening at that moment.

In many cases I verified my recollection by conversation with other survivors who had been with me during the extermination actions and in the concentration camps. These included Adam Folman and Clara Herman, now living in Israel, both members of the Chemiker Kommando.

I describe my personal experiences against the background of events on the fighting fronts during various stages of the war, because of their crucial importance to our chances for survival and because the gigantic struggle between Hitler and the coalition of western countries and Soviet Russia became almost an obsession with me.

The following pronunciation guide will help English-speaking readers to pronounce the names of Polish locales that figure prominently in the story:

I shall not die

I shall live

I shall tell the story …

Hrubieszów:

Before World War II

When they met for the first time, my father, Lejb, took one look at my mother, Golda, and promptly fell in love. And no wonder: Golda was a beautiful young girl with a sweet face, perfect features, big brown eyes, brown hair, and a peach-like complexion.

Lejb was an aggressive, impatient young man who didn’t believe in the customary matchmaking; he decided on the spot that Golda was the girl he would marry. Since he was on a business trip from Łęczna, where he lived, to Hrubieszów, where Golda lived, he couldn’t stay long that first time, but as soon as he returned home he began writing her love letters every day. Unfortunately he could write only in Yiddish, and not very well at that. His youngest brother, Moshe, remembered Lejb sitting for hours writing letter after letter, tearing each one up and starting again. Moshe, a mischievous and inquisitive boy of six, would later collect the torn bits, and with the help of his older brother, Hejnach, try to decipher the language of their brother’s ardor, but they never succeeded.

It took a couple of years, but at last Golda succumbed to Lejb’s persistent courtship. They were married in 1908, when both were twenty-six. Golda’s one condition was that they make their home in Hrubieszów, to which Lejb agreed.

Lejb’s father, Jankel, and his mother, Sarah (Surcia), were money lenders and dealers in grain; they also held an exclusive license from the Russian government to sell salt in Łęczna. Jankel and Sarah were unhappy with Lejb’s decision to move to Hrubieszów, which was fifty miles away, but they knew that once he had made up his mind, no amount of persuasion would change it. Of their seven children—Usher, the eldest, Lejb’s younger brothers, Bucio, Hejnach, and Moshe, and the younger sisters, Golda and Ryfka—it was Lejb who showed the greatest promise as a businessman.

The Strum family had been in Hrubieszów for many generations; Golda, her parents, Mordche Hersh and Sarah, and her brother Abraham (Abuś) were all born in Hrubieszów, and the family had lived there from as far back as anyone could remember.

At the turn of the century Hrubieszów was a sleepy town, built around a central square where the important stores and the best apartments were located. The rest of the town, consisting mostly of small one-and two-story houses and shops, fanned out from the square. Only a few streets were paved, and most of those were of cobblestone, over which horse-drawn carriages clippity-clopped. On rainy days in the spring and fall the mud in the unpaved streets was so deep that wagons often got stuck and had to be pulled out.

Jews had been living in Hrubieszów since the Middle Ages, the first Jews having arrived there not long after the village was granted the status of a town by the king of Poland in 1400. The first historical reference to a Jewish settlement in Hrubieszów dates back to the year 1444. Mention is made of a Hrubieszów Jew, Eliaser (Elias) who in 1445 made a trip to Kiev to obtain merchandise from the East. He and the other Jews in Poland were part of a Jewish migration from Western Europe to the East which began in the eleventh century and continued for hundreds of years, under the pressure of massacres by the Crusaders and of many other religious persecutions.

Polish Jews and Gentiles alike suffered the depredations of successive waves of invaders—Tartars, Cossacks, Turks. But the Jews had always lived almost totally separated from the Gentile population, as was the case in most of the towns and villages of Poland and Russia. Many Jews did not speak Polish at all, or at best only broken Polish. At home they spoke Yiddish, and their customs and culture were different, too, as was their appearance: most of them wore beards and long earlocks, yarmulkes on their heads, and black caftans.

Their religion was the key to their existence, and precluded any assimilation; life on earth was secondary in importance to the one hereafter. Because they had caused them so much misery, Christianity and Christians were viewed with deep suspicion. Although Jews had lived in Poland for centuries, it was still to them a foreign land. Many civil rights, privileges, and sources of income were denied them; to earn a living they had to depend on crafts and trade. They were the tailors, the shoemakers, the candlemakers, the money lenders, the tradesmen, and the storekeepers. By 1897, Jews constituted about half the population of Hrubieszów, more than 5,000 out of 10,500.

Life was hard in Hrubieszów, as there was virtually no industry. The Polish peasants were poor, and opportunities for Jews were limited. There were a few well-to-do families, but most lived in poverty. The daily diet consisted of bread, potatoes, herring, and soup; the more fortunate families had chicken and fish on Saturdays, but for hundreds there wasn’t even enough bread, and many Jewish children were undernourished, pale and hollow-cheeked.

These conditions and many restrictions caused a few of the Jews to resort to questionable business practices. This gave the anti-Semitic Poles a reason to brand all Jews as dishonest. Most Poles viewed the Jews with suspicion; to them they were a strange people, a foreign body thrust into the midst of Polish society. They couldn’t understand why Jews held to their traditions and religious beliefs with such fanatic dedication, and they resented them for it. Danger was everywhere: Polish hooligans threatened pogroms and Catholic priests spread anti-Jewish propaganda, poisonous lies, even telling their congregations that Jews killed Polish children and used the blood to make matzohs for Passover.

But later, when some Jews tried to become assimilated into Polish society, the Poles resented that too. Jews were thus faced with a dilemma: If they kept to their traditional language and culture, they were hated and mocked for being different; when they tried to behave like Poles, they were laughed at and rejected.

The relationship between Jews and Poles had become a vicious cycle. Each had good reason to mistrust the other, but it was the Jews who bore the brunt of the abuse because they were the minority. And the centuries of invasions, destruction, and mass killings in this part of Europe had hardened the local population to bloodshed, which was an all-too-common sight. It didn’t take much to start a fresh outbreak of violence against the Jews.

This, then, was the town Lejb came to settle in. Golda’s family was poor and could do little to help the young couple. Her mother, Sarah, had borne sixteen children, but in such primitive conditions that only Golda and Abuś had survived, the others having died either at birth or as infants. Golda’s father, Mordche Hersh Strum, was a likable and respected man, but he never made much money; he dealt in grain, occasionally selling it to the army, but that wasn’t enough business to support a family. He was also an eytse geber (adviser) to people with problems, and although he didn’t charge for his services, neither did he protest when a client discreetly left some eggs, a chicken, or a loaf of bread with Sarah; after all, a man had to feed his family. And he was a specialist in repairing hernias, at which the townspeople believed him to be more expert than any doctor.

The first few years were hard for Lejb and Golda. They lived in a small cottage on the outskirts of town, and there were many days when they had no other food than milk from their cow. But gradually, with Lejb’s industry and intelligence, their situation improved.

At first the Jews in Hrubieszów were suspicious of Lejb, but he was smart and energetic, and soon people began to take notice of the hard-driving young newcomer who often beat his competitors to the punch. It was not long before he won their respect and even admiration, which was not unmixed with envy. Here was a young man without connections who was making more money than most of the established businessmen.

With the outbreak of World War I, Lejb, Golda, and their three small children—Fred (Niuniek), born in 1909, Felix (Felek) (1910), and Sam (Shlojme) (1911)—faced many dangers. The opposing armies—first the Germans and the Russians, later the Poles and the Russians—were often fighting in and around Hrubieszów, and whenever the Cossacks were in the neighborhood they ran amok, looting and burning houses. My parents liked to tell of an incident that occurred during one of the Cossack raids. A huge Cossack armed with a rifle came into their house, put some of the family’s valuables into a sack he was carrying, and was about to take the only loaf of bread they had. Food was scarce during the war and the children started to cry, so Lejb with great courage pleaded with the Cossack to take pity on them and leave the bread, as he had nothing else to feed his children. At that the Cossack pulled out a large knife. The children started screaming, but the Cossack smiled and cut the loaf in two, saying, I’m a fair man—half for me, half for you.

It was at about that time that Abuś, Golda’s younger brother, whom she loved very much, was arrested by the authorities on suspicion of being a Leftist and jailed in Lublin, the largest city in the region. Ignoring the dangers of an area that was infested with bands of army deserters and bandits, Golda left the three small children with Lejb and went to Lublin on foot, hitching a ride by horse and wagon whenever she could. In Lublin she went directly to the chief of the Russian police and made an eloquent plea on behalf of her brother. Impressed by her courage, the chief promised he would release Abuś soon, and indeed did so.

On her way back home Golda heard rumors that there was a food shortage in Hrubieszów, so she bought as much food, mostly bread and potatoes, as she could carry. With twenty or thirty miles to go, she couldn’t get transportation and had to walk, carrying about forty pounds on her back. When she finally arrived back in town, she learned that there had been no food shortage after all, and her Herculean effort had been unnecessary. She did, however, win the admiration of many for her courage and tenacity.

The war brought not only danger but opportunities as well. In the winter of 1918, all supply routes to and from Hrubieszów were cut off, causing a severe shortage of coal and wood. Houses went unheated in bitter cold weather. A neighbor happened to mention to Lejb that he had heard of an area not far from town where the soil was especially rich in peat; supposedly the local farmers were burning it in their stoves to heat their houses. Lejb immediately went to see for himself, discovered that the story was true, and set about hiring farmers to dig the peat. He organized a caravan of thirty wagons to carry it back to Hrubieszów, riding at its head. At first the townspeople were skeptical, but Lejb showed them that it worked, and they gladly bought the peat from him for fuel.

Lejb repeated this operation several times, making a good profit on the venture. By the end of the war he was prosperous enough to buy the largest building in Hrubieszów. Real estate prices were then very low, and he knew a bargain when he saw it; he bought the only three-story building in town and moved his family into the second-floor apartment, which consisted of six large rooms and a maid’s quarters. This was by far the most luxurious apartment in town, since most of Hrubieszów’s houses amounted to little more than one-room shacks. Soon after that, Lejb took on a partner, Moshe Lichtenstein, a dealer in fabrics, and in one of the shops on the first floor of Lejb’s building they opened the largest fabric store in town.

After the war ended Lejb continued to prosper; he was quick and decisive, and not afraid to gamble when the odds were in his favor. He began buying great quantities of corn, wheat, and other grain from the local Polish gentry, who owned most of the land. Most of the grain he sold for export, but he also opened his own granary and bought a half interest in a local flour mill.

Lejb and Golda had wanted a little girl, so they may have been disappointed at the first sight of me, on October 13, 1923. By then Lejb had become the wealthiest man in Hrubieszów. My first memories are of being catered to by servants and being made much of by my parents and three brothers, who were twelve to fifteen years older than I. My parents still wanted a girl, however, and at last their wish was granted in February 1926, when my sister, Hanka, was born. My mother was forty-three.

Hanka was a beautiful little girl, fair-skinned, with large, shining brown eyes and straight brown hair.