| Len's cousin
The war starts I
M: This is a story that's of interest. You see, in our home town, the war really started a week before the war started. They declared sort of like [pauses]uh -- in Yiddish it's called kiptsushtand [phonetic]
Sonia: That you can't go in the evening out
Len: Oh, curfew.
M: No, that's not curfew. It was declared like a, see in Yiddish it's called kiptsushtand, you know. In other words, it's preparation for war, you know. Like, we knew the war is coming, you know, and we were ready.
Len: Mobilization?
M: No, mobilization has got to do with the army, only. And this has to do with the civilian population. Anyway what had happened was, Hitler tried desperately to provoke the Poles, in order to justify his war against Poland as a provocation that the Polish people started the war instead of the Germans.
L: He faked that, didn't he?
M: Yes, that's exactly what he did. And what he did was in three places in Poland, a week before the war started, they took out criminals from the jails who were under death sentences, and they put them in German uniforms, and they sent them across the border, and they told them to shoot at Polish soldiers or border guards. If they managed to get away with it, they are pardoned, you know, from their death sentence. If not, they are going to die anyway. So, they might as well do a patriotic thing and serve the Germans their purposes. And our town was elected to be one of these three places.
And they sent over a German, in a German officer uniform, with a machine gun, and somehow, a soldier noticed him coming across the border. And he yelled to him in Polish, "Stop!" And he yelled in German "Stop!" The guy didn't stop, so he shot him. So, of course, they brought the body to our home town. We didn't have cars, so they brought him on a wagon, of course, and the whole town was running after the wagon.
And some of the Poles, of course, they got very worked up with it, and they were yelling, "You Hitler, you," You this and you that, all kinds of names. And the, what you would call, the chief of police of our home town, was going behind, and did everything he could [to keep them] from abusing the body. He tried to keep the Poles away, he tried to calm them down. And he tried not to let them even touch the body. That was Friday night. The was broke out a week later. That's exactly a week, Friday, a week before the war, and I believe it was Monday a policeman from our home town took the body to take him across the border, back to Germany.
What it turned out to be was that the chief of the police was a German spy. When the Germans came in, the first thing they did is, they put in a sign on his home that nobody is allowed to get in because they used to loot places, and stuff like this. So, right away there was a sign out, "This is forbidden territory." Loot the next door neighbor, but you can't loot that fellow, you know.
And during this week, the women and children were evacuated from the city. There were only left men. Like in our case, I was the oldest boy, so I and my father were left at home. But mother and the children were already evacuated. They crossed the river, across the bridge.
Now, when the Germans came into our city, what had happened was, they were looking for a priest, and they found them in a village, hidden. And that priest, what had happened was, exactly the week before the war broke out, he took out from the telegraphing, the Polish telegraphing agency, which was a little panel talk [unclear] with telecommunication equipment. He took it to the border, and he delivered a speech to Hitler. The priest. And he said, "You Hitler," he said, "you want the corridor." You see, that was called the Corridor, the Danzig Corridor, where the Poles had and outlet to the sea, to the Baltic. He said, "You Hitler, you want the Corridor? Sure, we'll give you the Corridor. But we'll also give you a broom to sweep it. The only thing we could give you," he said, "is we got three and a half million Jews, you could take them all. All the Jews of Poland, you could have them for free. But otherwise, you won't get nothing, you won't get a button off our shirt. That's it."
When the Germans came in, they went to look up that priest, you know, and they found him, and he was the first victim. They hung him and a Pole in the market place. The whole town had to go and look, and for three days, they didn't let them take it off. It was still warm, the body was decomposed, it started to smell, and on the top of it, they shoot him through with machine guns. You could recognize nothing. It was just a skeleton here and there. The clothes was the only one that kept it together. And for three days, he was hanging there. He was the first one that got shot in town.
As a matter of fact, the same priest, you know, that was in the summer, must have been June or July. Where we lived, across the street was a little bush-like you know, a nice little piece of forest without pine trees. It was beautiful. At the end of the street, there lived, what do you call him, a notary public. And one day, this fellow had a party, and we were boys, and we were playing around in the bush, and we saw benches, and all the cream of the town was there. The Chief of the Police was there, the judge was there, the lawyer was there, and also teachers from school were there, the principal. In other words, the cream of the town.
And they had a little party, and the same thing. And that same priest delivered a very anti-Semitic speech, with slogans like, "Out with the Jews," and things like that. And two teachers, a man and a woman, couldn't take it anymore, and they were Poles, actually, Gentiles. Because Jews are not invited to this party. So, these two people got up and left the party. Coudn't stay. They couldn't stay.
And then we found out these two teachers, when the Germans came in, when they expelled us from our town, they left, too, and they went over to the Russian side. And these people were exiled, the same as we, to Siberia, and somehow, they made it through the War. But, after the War, they were very disappointed. I contacted them, actually, I met them in Stettin after the war, like, in the Russian system. Apparently, they were Communists. They must have been, because otherwise they wouldn't go to Russia, and probably they thought it wasn't safe for them to stay in Poland, because the Germans fished out all the Poles you know. But they were very disappointed. Apparently they didn't want to have any thing to do with the Russians anymore.
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