"When the
Germans came into Czyzewo, they made an announcement that everybody should
report to the marketplace. So my father had gotten word from somebody that
we shouldn’t do that. So in our house we had a double wall. We had a
double wall with supplies maybe for a couple of weeks, a month. And we
stayed in there, and my grandmother went to the marketplace and of course
was—she never came out of there. And we stayed there until we were told
that we had to get out of there because the Germans might start looking
for us. So then we went into the woods--my father, my mother, my sister,
my brother and I. And my uncle Harry, and his wife and his daughters were
there with us, and they went somewhere else. And they got captured and
they—we don’t know what happened to them. But we were in the woods and we
had some people—a Polish woman whose name was Maria Grutzca (sp). And she
helped us out where she’d give us a piece of bread here and there, and we
were in the woods until—oh, for a long time—until I think it was maybe a
year of less before the war ended..."
Sura talks more about
this day, how her father and siblings were killed by a Polish neighbor,
and about how she and her mother survived the war.
Listen to it.
--photo: The Spalaniecs at Motel
Szczupakiewicz's
Lumber Yard, cir 1936-7. Schleime Spalaniec (Sura's father), and Pearl (Sura's
mother), with Sura's siblings Chana and Yosel. |