Transcript for the Piece Audio version of Warsaw Ghetto Survivor Remembers

Intro:

Today marks the 65th anniversary of the end of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. In 1940, Nazis crowded more than 400,000 into a three and a half square mile area in Warsaw, Poland. Gradually the Nazis restricted movement of the Jews in and out of the ghetto and cut off food and water. Tens of thousands of residents died of disease and starvation, or were sent to concentration camps. IN 1942, after hearing that the 300,000 ghetto residents the Nazis took away were deported the Treblinka concentration camp, there was a call for resistance. What followed, the Warsaw ghetto uprising, became the most famous attempt by Jews to resist the Germans during the Holocaust.

Lewanda: There wasn?t a chance in hell we?d win. But we decided if we have to die take some Nazis with you.

Among the inhabitants of the Warsaw ghetto was Ruth Lewanda, then in her 20s [and married]. She?s now 94, and one of the few people left to talk about what it was like to live through the uprising. Until now, she has chosen to speak about it only to school groups, refusing interviews with historians or the media. But she sat down recently with WSHU?s Naomi Starobin to share her story.

Ruth Lewanda remembers. She remembers when her family was forced to leave their apartment and move into the ghetto. She remembers at first it was crowded but there was food.

Lewanda: The Poles would come in, friends, our friends, and bought food and brought books ?

But things got worse and worse

Lewanda: But then they weren?t allowed either.

The Germans expected it would take only a day or two to kill or deport, but the Jews fought back with smuggled weapons and homemade explosives.

Lewanda: I didn?t shoot, I didn?t fight, I took care of the wounded, which didn?t help either. I wish I could. There wasn?t enough ammunition for everybody. Only men.

The resistance lasted nearly a month.

Lewanda: Houses burning and falling, people crying , screaming?.

By May 16th, though it was pretty much over ? 13,000 Jews died, almost all the leaders of the uprising were captured or killed. And the 50,000 Jews remaining in the ghetto after the uprising were deported.

Lewanda: They took us to concentration camp. With the trains, the feed trains. Two days because it was 1943 and all the places were filled, so they had to travel around Germany to find a place for us. Two days without food and water. When they opened the trains, half fell out dead, and half, half- dead.

Lewanda and her husband were separated, and she was taken from one camp to another. At the labor camps, she and the other prisoners were forced to work under terrible conditions, many starving or dying from disease.

Lewanda: When I came to America I was really speechless when they said, ?oh I work so hard.? You don?t know what is hard work! Or ?Oh, I am starved.? You don?t know what is hunger.

In the end, more than 90 percent of Poland?s 3.3 million Jews were killed.

Lewanda and her husband found each other after the camps were liberated, moved to Albany, New York, and raised two sons. She says at first she wanted to tell people what happened in Poland, but people didn?t seem to be interested.

Lewanda: they told me ?Oh forget about it, you are in America, is a good country.? How can you not think, how can you forget if the family you had, sisters and brothers and sister-in-law and brothers-in-law and nephews and nieces, how can you forget? So I stopped talking.

After some time, though, Lewanda found that people did want to hear about the Holocaust from survivors. And she was in demand as a speaker to school groups. And today, at the age of 94, she remembers, word for word, the Warsaw Ghetto Partisan Song.

Lewanda: I will sing for the six million Jews what were murdered Nazi?s but the most important is the million and a half Jewish children.

[Lewanda sings in Yiddish, translation read over singing]

Never once say you walk upon your final way
though skies of steel obscure the blue of day
Our long awaited hour will draw near
and our footsteps will thunder - We are Here!

This song is written with blood and not with pencil lead
it's no song sung freely by birds flying overhead.
So a people among the falling walls made their last stand
and this song they sung with pistols in their hands.

Lewanda: And now I understand. I ask everybody why I am alive, I understand that I have to do as long as I live and as long as I can speak. And I do.

Naomi Starobin, WSHU news.

Back