Out of the Inferno: Poles Remember the Holocaust

Konstancja Marzec

124 Out of the Inferno KONSTANCJA MARZEC The event took place in Wolyn, on the outskirts of the small town of R6zyszcze. One day my father brought home a sixteen-year-old girl from the woods. She was Jewish. Her name was Eugenia Katz. My family sheltered her in our home during the German occupation. After the war, she emigrated to Israel. Quite often we helped other Jews who came to us for food; there was the late Mr. DoXgopoluk and others, whose names I don't recall because my parents never asked them. I remember one young Jew named Geniek, who stayed with us for three months. In the region where we lived, many Jews were saved by Polish families, although every Polish family risked their lives in doing so. Marzec, who is in ailing health, lives in retirement in Poland. She visited Katz and other Jewish friends in Israel in 1980. LEOKADIA MIKOLAJKOW Together with my husband and sons, I lived during the Nazi occupation in the town of D~bica, where we had a clinic. Next to our home were the local Gestapo and the criminal police. Opposite our home was the gate to the Jewish ghetto, established by the Germans in D~bica in 1940. Jews from far and wide were brought together in this ghetto. Here the Germans selected strong and healthy women over sixteen years of age and men over fourteen for work in the concentration camp in Pustkow. All working Jews, registered in the Arbeitsampt (Bureau of Labor) and other workshops, received basic medical care in a clinic offered by me, a qualified nurse, and my husband, Aleksander, a physician of great learning. Other residents of the ghetto and working families also received examinations. In 1940 a Jewish woman by the name of Reich came with her son, Froimek, for an examination. She appealed to my husband to save her son from certain extermination. Froimek, who was physically weak, would probably have been shot by the Germans in several days ...