Rena Finder short

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Rena Finder

When I was a little girl growing up in Cracow, Poland, I had a wonderful childhood. I am an only child. I lived in a beautiful apartment building right around the corner from my school, right across the street from the river, right near an ancient castle. I loved the city of Cracow and I loved living there. I did all the things that children do everywhere. I went to summer school and camp and to Sunday school. I went skiing, sledding, and skating in the winter and swimming in the summer. And life was very, very good. Of course, I also remember being exposed to racial slurs and my mother telling me stories about pogroms when Jewish people were being attacked. I always knew that being Jewish in Poland was not really as good as being a Pole in Poland, but still as a little girl, I didn’t pay much attention to politics.

All of this changed on September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland. Within days, the victorious Nazi army marched into Cracow. Overnight, from being a little girl, I became an enemy of the state. Our civil rights were taken away from us immediately. Jewish children were not allowed to go to school. Jewish people were not allowed to own businesses. Our bank accounts were confiscated. Our pets were taken away. Our right to public transportation was taken away; but most of all, we were told we could not remain in Cracow. The Nazis goal was to segregate, separate, isolate, and to kill us. In order to remain in Cracow and be allowed to go to the ghetto, you had to be over 12 years and under 55 years. I was only 10 but was lucky because I was tall for my age. My father was able to falsify my birth certificate. And so when I went to the German headquarters, I did get my permit, but hundreds and hundreds of people did not. While we were waiting in line to get our permits, we were surrounded by German guards, heavily armed, with dogs that were trained to attack. The guards were grabbing people out of the line, taking children out of their parents’ arms. We were crying; we were begging for mercy. Families wanted to stay together, and yet there was no mercy coming from any of the German soldiers. Cracow, my beloved city, had about 250,000 people living there and about 38,000 were Jews. We had lived in Poland for centuries. Jewish people were very patriotic. They fought for the independence of Poland. And yet, in the hour of our need, our neighbors turned away from us, against us, and were happy to see us being tortured and murdered. There we were in the middle of the busy city where everybody could see and hear us, and yet, they said they didn’t know, they didn’t hear, they didn’t see.

We resettled in the ghetto which was in the older part of town. There was a brick wall around an area about two avenues wide, about four blocks long. We left our apartment behind, the only place I had ever known, the only place I had ever lived. That was where I was born. We each packed a small suitcase, leaving everything else behind: my Shirley Temple dolls in my bedroom, my collection of Charles Dickens’ books, my mother’s china, most of our clothes. My father was able to get a small pushcart and we were able to put a few pots and pans and some bedding in it. We marched into the ghetto where we had to share a tiny room with two other families. It was extremely difficult. We didn’t have enough food, we didn’t have enough electricity, and we didn’t have enough water. We all worked in workshops and we thought that as long as we worked—we were slaves, not getting paid—the Germans would need us. Surely, we thought, somebody would find out what was happening to us; somebody would come and save us.

As a survivor of the Holocaust, I am an eyewitness to some of the most horrible murders committed against innocent people, but as a survivor on Schindler’s list, I am also an eyewitness to what can happen when people make a difference, when people get involved. If it were not for Oscar Schindler and his wife, I would not be here. I would not have been given the chance to grow up, to get married, to have children, and to have grandchildren. Oscar Schindler was an amazing person. Everything that you may have heard about him and everything that you may have seen about him in the film is true and even more so. Oscar Schindler joined the SS party because he wanted to become rich. He wanted to be successful. When he came into Cracow, he took over a factory called Emalia, which had been making pots and pans before the war. He converted part of the factory to making ammunition so that he could employ more people and get more contracts. Because he needed a lot of influential friends, he befriended many high-ranking generals, captains and lieutenants in the German army, in the Gestapo, in the S.S. Everybody adored Oscar Schindler because he was so friendly and generous. He was forever bribing the Germans, entertaining them at fabulous parties and bringing them expensive presents. They loved him and so it was easy for him to get permission for more people to come and work for him. For those who went to work for Oscar Schindler, it was heaven because life in the ghetto was so terrible. Every morning and every night, there were selections. The soldiers came into the houses, into the workshops, pulled people out, and then gathered them in the middle of the ghetto in an old marketplace. People were crying and begging for mercy, not wanting to be separated from their families. Yet, nobody heard them, nobody saw them.

There were selections every day… I lost an uncle, an aunt, my grandparents, and my cousin. One horrible day, the Germans came for my father. When they took him away, I could not imagine being able to survive without him. Then the time came to liquidate the ghetto, and we had to go to a concentration camp, Plashov, which we had built about 7 kilometers from the ghetto. The commander was Armon Ghett, a vicious, sadistic murderer. Just as it was depicted in the movie Schindler’s List, Ghett stood on the balcony of his villa and played with his long-range rifle, shooting people whenever he felt like it. And then when he got tired of that, he would come down on his horse and ride behind the women who were at work building the road with crushed rocks taken from the cemetery and beat or shoot these innocent victims.

When the time came for us to leave the ghetto behind, children were not allowed to go with us. Anybody under 12 or over 55 had to remain in the ghetto. There were so many children in the orphans’ home including Jenny, my little five year old cousin whose parents and sister were killed in a previous selection. She had blue eyes and was blond. She looked very much like the pictures of the Aryans that Hitler wanted to produce. And yet, as you all know, Hitler certainly did not look like an Aryan with his black hair and black mustache. Our children were beautiful, our children were so smart, our children knew they had to be quiet and they had to do what they were told. We all thought that as long as we did what they told us to do, we would survive. The war would end or somebody would come and save us. When I left my little Jenny in the orphan’s home and I ran to the corner of the street to meet my group that was already running towards the camp, I realized that some of them were smuggling their little children in their backpacks into the camp. The children were drugged. Some of these people knew that they had Polish friends—those we call the Righteous Gentiles—who would take their children and try to save them. These Righteous Gentiles risked their lives, not only because of the Gestapo and the Germans, but because of their neighbors. If their neighbors suspected them of harboring a Jewish child, they would report them to the Gestapo. As we marched in to the camp that night, we heard yelling and screaming from the ghetto and realized that the Germans lied to us again and killed the children in the ghetto.

Plashov was a horrible place. Men and women were separated. We didn’t have enough food and water. We didn’t have enough clothing. There was the constant danger of being selected by the SS and Armon Ghett. Although Ghett stood in front of me so many times, I never knew what he looked like because I never made eye contact with him. I thought if I don’t look at him, he won’t see me, and then he won’t be able to kill me. Oscar Schindler did not like the idea that his workers had to stay in the concentration camp and walk to work everyday. He knew how dangerous it was. He knew that as they walked through the gate, Ghett might decide to kill all or some of them. So Schindler made a deal with Ghett to build a camp next to his factory so that his workers could live there. My mother and I were so lucky to be sent to work for Oskar Schindler. It was like going to heaven…to be able to leave the horrible place, Plaszov, behind us and live in the barracks next to the Emalia factory. Oscar saw to it that the guards were not allowed on the floor of the factory or in the camp. We had barracks that were much smaller than in Plaszov. We actually had bunk beds. Schindler made sure that we got a little more food, that we got a little meat once in a while, and that if we needed warm clothing, he found it for us. Oscar Schindler was a very handsome man and he was always smiling. He was our god, our hero, our angel of mercy. We knew that he was trying to help us and to keep us alive.

Unfortunately our heaven did not last very long because the Germans began liquidating the camps in Poland. Again, Oscar made a deal with Ghett for all of his people to come to work in the factory that was being moved to Czechoslovakia. Emalia was closed and we were sent back to Plaszov where were loaded onto trains. We were packed like sardines. We couldn’t move; if somebody moved, everybody else had to move. We didn’t know where we were going. After a long journey, the train finally stopped, the doors opened, and we were told to jump down. There in front of me stood my nightmare: miles and miles of barbed wire, hundreds and hundreds of guards with dogs trained to attack. The dogs were muzzled but they were ready to kill. We were told to jump down and run. Some woman could not jump and run. We had arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau. There was such stench in Auschwitz and so much smoke. Even though it was midnight, I could feel the smoke. My eyes were burning, my soul was hurting. Ashes covered us. At first, I thought it was snow, but they were ashes. I could see in the background the outline of the chimney. The stench was so overpowering that the wife of the commander of Auschwitz would complain to the visitors from Germany that she couldn’t let her children play outside; she couldn’t hang up her laundry.

We ran, that horrible night. It was late October; it was very cold. We came to stop in front of a bath-house. There stood a well fed and a well dressed Nazi officer. With the flick of his wrist, he sent some women to the left and some women to the right. I realized that those going to the left were women that could hardly walk, and so my mother and I pinched our cheeks to look healthy, to look good. We were pushed into this huge barrack and were told to strip. We were then shaved form head to bottom with scissors that were so rough that they almost cut our scalps as they were cutting our hair. Then we were herded into a big bath house. It was dark and we didn’t know what was going to happen. We were so afraid because the prisoners who shaved us had pointed across the street to a barrack that looked just like ours. They told us that was not a barrack, but a gas chamber and crematorium where they killed the people and burned the bodies. We asked them if they had seen my father, and they said, yes, my father was here. We stood in this dark room shivering and then the light came on and the cold water came down. I looked around, at my mother, at my friends, at the people I had known all my life, and I did not recognize them. I saw those faces, those heads without hair, totally dehumanized, humiliated. We were so traumatized that I truly thought we were dead. This couldn’t be happening if we were alive. And then they pushed us into another room, not the room where we folded our clothes, not where I tried to smuggle a picture of my father in one of my shoes, but into a room where women S.S. guards were yelling and screaming at us to “hurry up and get out!” I was so frightened in all this confusion. I grabbed from a pile of wooden shoes and clothing. I stepped into a pair of wooden shoes that were way too small and took a dress with yellow and red flowers that reminded me of a dress I once had. It was a summer dress, way too big. I tried to tie it up so I wouldn’t trip on it. I then walked to the other side of this hell of Auschwitz - Birkenau. I looked around. The mud was seeping into my shoes and I could barely walk. There were women’s barracks on each side and the inmates came out and looked at us. They were hairless skeletons with sunken eyes that looked dead. They wore striped uniforms with numbers painted on. Surely I was dead, surely I couldn’t be alive. I was pushed into the barrack. There was no place to sleep, only a stone floor. There was no food. There was no water. All night we tried to find a place to sleep and during the day we had to clean the streets. Every time we went out we were in danger of being shot or being selected and taken to the gas chamber.

The women on Oscar Schindler’s list were in Birkenau for three weeks. Three weeks is a very long time to be in Birkenau. People were only kept there until there was room for them in the gas chambers. We were sick, we were starving. We had dysentery. We could not go on much longer. And then the orders came for us to leave. We had no idea where we were going, but this time we were loaded onto the boxcars and at least could sit on the floor. One of my girlfriends who was very ill with a high fever was lying on my lap. There was a little window behind me that was open and I tried to get some icicles and snowflakes to put on her lips. About an hour after we left Birkenau, she broke out in Scarlett Fever. If the rash had appeared out while we were in Auschwitz-Birkenau, we would not have been allowed to leave.

After what seemed like a very long journey, the train finally stopped, the doors opened. There on the platform stood Oscar Schindler in his green Tyrolean hat with the feather, his green Tyrolean coat, his shining boots, and his ever present cigarette. He was smiling and said, “Well, welcome. You are finally here and I will take care of you.” And take care of us he did. It was then that we found out that he had sent somebody to Auschwitz with diamonds to bribe the commander to let his three hundred women come. In Brinnitz, Oscar Schindler had asked his wife to come and help take care of us. Even though they had a beautiful villa nearby, they stayed in a little apartment in the factory because we were afraid that if they left, the guards would kill us. Mrs. Schindler was a beautiful young woman and only about thirty years old at the time. She reminded me of a rose among ashes. Everything was so gray and there she was trying to take care of us, trying to bring us a little more food. Oscar Schindler used his own resources and all of his own money to try to keep us alive while we were in Brinnitz. He was arrested twice, but because of his connections, was released.

During the last seven months of the war, hundreds and thousands of our Jewish brothers and sisters were murdered in the most horrible, cruel way. The Germans were determined to win the war against the Jews even though they were losing the war with the allies. They marched the starving, sick prisoners in the most severe winter of the twentieth century, the winter 1945. People were freezing to death. They couldn’t walk. They were dying and they were being shot. The road from Poland to Germany was littered with blood and corpses. Those of us on Schindler’s List were warm. We were hungry, but we didn’t starve. We had Oscar Schindler to take care of us. And then, finally the war ended. Oscar Schindler called us onto the factory floor and told us that he was going to have to flee and give himself up to the Americans. We were going to be liberated by the Russians who would shoot first and ask questions later. Oscar and Mrs. Schindler left for Linz, Austria. We wrote affidavits for them explaining how they had saved our lives. Twelve of our young boys went with them as witnesses. I cried. We all cried, because it didn’t’ seem possible that I was losing my father again.

Finally we were liberated by the Russians. They told us, “Don’t go back to Cracow. You won’t find anybody there.” But of course we did go back to Cracow because that was our home, that’s where we lived, that’s where we were born. My mother, my grandfather, and I came back to Cracow. The three of us had survived on Schindler’s List. We learned that my father, his six brothers, their wives, and children, my mother’s parents, her two sisters, her four brothers, their wives and children were all dead. I stood in front of the building where I was born, where I had so many friends. I walked through the streets of Cracow where there were so many people I used to know; on every corner I had an aunt or an uncle or a cousin. They were all gone. There was nobody left.

If it were not for Oscar Schindler, I wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t have been given the chance to grow up, to have children. My children, my grandchildren, all our family would not be here. Oscar Schindler is proof that one person can make a difference. Oscar Schindler did not want to be a bystander. He chose to participate. He risked his life. Mrs. Schindler risked her life. After the movie, Schindler’s List came out, she was asked, “Why did you do that? Why were you so brave? Why were you such a heroine?” Mrs. Schindler said, “There was nothing else we could do. This was something we had to do.” I only hope and pray that all of you who read this will remember that each one of you us has the power to make a choice, has the power to participate, has the power not to be a bystander. This is the only way that you will be able to save the world. This is the only way to ensure that horrible things will not ever happen again.

Transcription from testimony recorded on November 9, 1998.