A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy Read Online Free PDF

railroad station,
     where our transport was to be put together, the people from the British consulate told us that it was no longer possible to
     leave from a Polish port. Arrangements had therefore been made to get us to England via the Balkans. Despite the onrush of
     people who were trying to leave Katowice that morning, probably because it was not far from the German border, we eventually
     got to board the railroad car that had been reserved for us and for some other refugees who had also received their visas.
     Finally, after a long delay, the train moved out of the station. We seemed to have made it.
    I don’t know how long we traveled on that train. For the most part, though, the train was stopped more than it moved, waiting
     for other trains loaded with soldiers to pass. The roads along the railroad lines were crowded with people walking or riding
     in horse-drawn carriages and wagons. Everywhere there were long columns of soldiers, marching and on horseback and in trucks,
     pulling artillery pieces and supplies. The soldiers were moving toward the front in the direction opposite that of the civilians,
     who had to make room for them to pass, not always an easy task on the narrow roads.
    For me, all this commotion was very exciting. I spent much time waving to the passing soldiers and admiring their uniforms
     and three-cornered hats. And then, suddenly, the fun stopped. Our train had again halted, this time next to a Polish military
     train. That train was filled with soldiers and military equipment. On each side of the tracks were open fields. We had probably
     not been there for more than a few minutes when we began to hear the far-off sounds of approaching airplanes. Then they were
     above us — two or three planes. People began to scream,
“Niemcy! Niemcy!”
(“Germans! Germans!”), and the air resounded with the rattle of machine-gun fire and the thump of exploding bombs. The train
     began to shake. The noise was terrible.
    My father grabbed my mother and me and pushed us out of the train. “They are attacking the military train!” he screamed above
     the noise. “We must get out, we must get out.” Some people had already jumped from the train and were scrambling across the
     tracks into the fields. We followed them, pushed on by others. The Polish soldiers began to shoot at the German planes with
     rifles held out of their train’s windows. They did not have much luck. The planes kept swooping down on the trains and the
     railroad tracks, blowing up some of the carriages. They kept repeating this maneuver for what seemed like a very long time.
    Once we managed to get to the nearby field, my mother threw herself on top of me while my father shielded both of us with
     his body. People were screaming as the planes flew over us with their machine guns blazing. They could easily have killed
     all of us, but it seemed we were not their targets. Then, just as suddenly as they had appeared, the planes were gone. We
     waited for a while for them to return, and when they did not, we got up and started to look around. No one on our side of
     the field seemed to have been hit, but people were wailing, and a few children were crying. Some railroad cars were on fire;
     there was smoke everywhere. Many injured and dead soldiers were lying on the other side of the tracks and near their train.
     The tracks had been destroyed as far as the eye could see.
    After a while, my father went to look for our belongings. He found some bags and dragged them back to the field. Here we were
     soon joined by others from our group. “What now?” was the question being asked, and “Where are we?” Nobody seemed to have
     any answers, and except for my father, no one in the group spoke Polish. He soon learned from some passing farmers that we
     were not far from Sandomierz, a town some two hundred kilometers east of Katowice.
    We stayed overnight in a barn, and then our little group began the trek east to the Russian border,