I

World

The Day The World Went Mad

Detroiter recalls the horrors of the invasion of Poland 70 years ago.

Sally Horwitz
Special to the Jewish News

Z

wolen is a small town in central
Poland with Radom to the west,
Lublin to the east, Warsaw to the
north and Krakow to the south. On Sept.
1, 1939, World War II
started when Hitler's
Germany invaded
Poland. Three giant
armored Nazi armies
pressed to encircle
Radom. Zwolen was
caught amid a Polish
collapse. I was 11.
On Sept. 3, I was
visiting my girlfriend,
Chancia Ajdelman,
who lived on the same
street. Before school
had ended for the
summer vacation, we
Sally Finkelstein
were given Red Cross
Horwitz, in 1945
instructions and other
and today
lifesaving methods
in case war erupted.
Naturally, as children, we could not com-
prehend the magnitude of what war was
all about so we played at it. I always had
dreamt of becoming a nurse, which meant a
need for bandages. I did find a bandage that
must have been more than three yards long
and proceeded to bind up Chancia's leg. We
made believe that she had been wounded.
Suddenly, we heard sounds that sound-
ed like thunder, yet the sky was very blue.
Mrs. Ajdelman ran to the balcony window.
Quickly, she came running back to us,
grabbed her smaller children and yelled at
us to go downstairs. Then bombs started
to fall. It seemed as if each bomb was
going to hit the house.

Well, Chancia's leg was bandaged all the
way up to her thigh; I held most of the
bandage in my hand. She couldn't bend
her knee, but tried to hobble down the
stairs. I followed her, hanging on to the
bandage as she dragged the one stiff leg
behind her. We were terrified, but I prom-
ised that I would not leave her. Little did
I know that this was the last time I ever
would be playing as a child.
The bombs started to come down
steadily, seemingly aimed right at us. I
ran outside trying to reach my own fam-
ily, but flames were all over the area and
the heat was so great that I hardly could
see or breathe. The pilots in the Stuka dive
bomber were flying so low that I could see
their eyes. I saw that our house was burn-
ing so I dashed straight to my Uncle Velvel's
home, which was upstairs from his bakery
across the way. How relieved I was to find
my family gathered inside and how glad my
mother was to see me. She then and there
made us promise to try to stick together.
After a lull, the planes came back about
3 in the afternoon; now the bombs started
falling again. At this point, it seemed as if
everyone in the town had begun running
towards the thick forest a few kilometers
away. We started to run, too, mingling
among the mostly women and children.
The Stukas, diving low, turned their atten-
tion to chasing us as they sprayed our paths
with bullets from machine guns. Again, the
faces and eyes of the pilots were in full view.
Human targets were being hit and began
falling all around us.
We had our grandmother, Bubbie
Rochel, in our midst. My sister, Mania,
held her under one arm and I under the
other, really pulling her along. She was
old and did not see well, hardly able to
walk. She kept crying to us: "Go ahead,

Isis use

ow sea ow assi sow oat tweit

Our new location is
now open!

leave me and save yourselves." Of course,
we couldn't; we loved her too much. She
always had lived with us. (She died later
in the ghetto and was buried in our cen-
turies-old cemetery, which eventually was
desecrated and taken apart by the Poles.)
We struggled, but succeeded in making
it into the woods safely. It already was get-
ting dark and we were out of breath. We
had to hunker down under the trees. The
entire population of the town must have
been there. Not long after, we could hear the
rumble of gunfire getting closer and closer.
My father hastily covered us up with
leaves and branches, supposedly to shelter
us from the whirring bullets. It was a night-
mare coming true; but worse was quick to
come. In short order, German soldiers were
on hand and began chasing everyone out of
the woods. I don't know how we came out
unharmed when so many were being killed
and wounded. Not daring to go back home,
we wandered to the house of friends in a
nearby village. That is where we were put
up for the next two days.

Creating A Ghetto
We could not tarry there for long, so we
started the trek back to Zwolen. What a sight
greeted us! I could not believe my eyes when
I saw the devastation, with so many homes
burned out and destroyed. More than that
was the dodging of human guts hanging
from electric wires that were dripping onto
anyone or anything underfoot. The soldiers,
in complete control, began questioning in
German those returning from the forest.
"What is your name?" More intimidating
was "Eist du ain Yude?" (Are you a Jew?) It
was a signal of what was to come and what
would not end for six long years.
Without wasting time, the soldiers
managed to push the Jews into a small,

untouched, segregated area of the town.
This newly formed ghetto was horribly
crowded. There really was not enough
room for anybody. Up until this point,
we had managed to live for generations
among Polish neighbors with no such
thing as a separate Jewish area. With our
homes destroyed, we now were seeking
shelter in an overcrowded Jewish ghetto.
Fortunately, my mother had good friends
in the Goldfarb family who had a home, still
intact, within the ghetto. They welcomed us
into any small space that could be found.
Seven in our family came in to join the eight
of the Goldfarb's. Bubbie Rochel, who had
been with my Uncle Velvel, came to join us,
too. That made 16 human beings where
even the original eight had been a crowd.
Before we even could settle down to the
new situation, the German soldiers took
to grabbing people for forced labor. That
included me at 11 years of age, who had to
do rounds of digging ditches, washing floors
and peeling potatoes.
The winter came early, and found us
stuck with not enough food nor enough
warm clothing. Men were disappearing,
being deported to parts unknown; this led
my mother to urging my father to go into
hiding and take my little brother, Meier,
with him. He obeyed and fled with Meier
to seek safety with some Polish people we
had known for the longest time. Saying
goodbye was difficult. To me, my father was
the most beautiful human being on Earth,
and his image always would be dwelling in
my mind. When would we see him and my
brother again?
Thus World War II began, with so many
more horrors to come. ❑

From her immediate family of eight, Sally and

two of her sisters survived the Holocaust.

Mimi Cohen Markofsky

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