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

sometimes in hired horse-drawn
     wagons and other times on foot. The roads were teeming with civilians and soldiers. Like us, most of the civilians were trying
     to get away from the invading Germans. Every day there were more people on the road. We slept in open fields or in barns and
     made little progress in our move east. The farmers would charge us for the use of their barns and sell us food. Often, the
     barns would already be rented out by the time we got there, and then we would have to sleep outside. Some farmers were kind
     to us; others were not. The latter frequently called us bad names. Here I first learned that we were
“Parzywe Zydzi”
— Scabby Jews.
    There were rumors that German spies were everywhere. My father heard that the public was being warned by the Polish government
     to be on the lookout for German spies. Our little group was suspect because, except for my father, its members spoke only
     German. With increasing frequency, my father would have to explain who we were and show our English travel documents to suspicious
     Polish officials. After a while, only he would go out to the villages to buy food for our group and to get the latest news.
     I would sometimes accompany him. There we would listen to a radio or talk to the farmers. The information we would bring back
     seemed always to be the same: “Things don’t look too good. The Germans are advancing; the Polish army is retreating.”
    Every so often, my father would speak with somebody who had recently come back from Russia or had news from there. Here too,
     the story was usually the same. “Terrible things are happening in that country. Not a good place for foreigners; many of them
     are being sent to Siberia.” Nobody in our group wanted to believe these reports since we had hoped to escape to Russia. Finally,
     my father decided to see for himself; we were not very far from the Polish-Russian border. He was back a few days later and
     announced that it would be better to take our chances in Poland. I don’t know whether he had actually crossed into Russia
     or whether he had spoken to people at the border, but he was convinced that it would be a mistake for us to try to get into
     Russia. “Conditions are terrible,” he reported, “particularly for foreigners. A lot of people are getting arrested or deported.
     The lucky ones are turned back at the border.”
    “If not Russia, then what?” somebody asked, prompting a long and often heated discussion about the fate that awaited us in
     a Poland under German occupation. It continued into the night. When I woke up the next morning, the decision had been made.
     Instead of seeking to enter Russia, we would try to reach Kielce, a city west of Sandomierz with a large Jewish community
     that might take us in.
    Little had changed on the roads. They were even more congested. We were being stopped often and asked to produce our papers.
     At times, there were tense moments as my father tried to convince Polish military officers that we were not German spies.
     The news from the front was not very good, my father told us. It was getting worse every day. The Poles were blaming German
     spies for their military setbacks and the rapid German advances.
    My father tried to cheer everybody up by telling us that we would soon be in Kielce and sleeping in real beds again. That
     was great news for me, but it had little effect on the grim mood that had gripped our little group. I heard someone say that
     we did not have much to look forward to. “We will either be shot by the Poles as spies or by the Nazis because we are Jews.
     What is better?” one of my adopted uncles asked with a grin, and everybody laughed. After a while, though, nothing seemed
     to be funny anymore.
    A few days after our decision to walk to Kielce, we began to hear what sounded like a distant thunderstorm. “Artillery fire,”
     my father told me, “but it is far away from here. Listen.” And he showed me how, by lying