teaching the holocaust 2004 summer workshop - Southern Institute ...

JP The ways how the children get to our organization were very strange and very different,
very various. You know, I was working in this department for social care, so for example there
get some children from all over, and also Jewish children, somehow. were getting there. So but
also with whom we had contacts they were simply from our the children who had contacts
with our friend we then realized we should form a kind of emergency that there was a problem
where to hide them, what will be the place in which they can be living. For example, it could
be a family, or convent, so we had to prepare them for that, and we had to make a special
papers and documents for them. For example, it was our friends who were also in ghetto. So I
remember that once it was a small child and another it was a small boy another it was the
whole family that was here. So it was many different ways, I can't remember very well now.
But I also visited ghetto at the beginning, but I didn't take any child with myself. For
example, at the beginning I got the paper allowing me pass to the ghetto, and there we were
bringing medicaments and documents, then we had to find where we could put the children.
And sometime they were found simply on the wall on the Aryan side sometimes they left the
ghetto with those who were leaving the ghetto for labor. Outside the ghetto, and once it was a
child who was thrown over, and was tied with cushions.
PR So the children often times were brought here to this house, and shelter was found for
them elsewhere? Is that correct?
JP Yes, yes, yes. The children were here for some moments and then they were looking for the
shelter for them but sometimes it was it didn't last so short time. The finding the shelter
sometimes it was even three years that we had here a child. Two years I remember. One was
four years, to the end of the war even. And after the war, so another situation was when they
were looking for the shelter and they asked a lot of convents which with which they had
contacts, and none of them never denied help. The limit of the age it was from one year a
until fifteen, sixteen. So as a matter of fact it was not any limit, and for example she I had a
child who was sixteen year old and she stayed after the war here.
PR Did you have to teach these children how to be Catholic children? How to say the
prayers? How to genuflect? How to be a little Catholic child?
JP They had to be baptized, and because there is such in Catholicism there is such a rule
facing the death they can be baptized from the water, so I myself did it, I baptized them and I
said that it is done, so asked they were asking me, “Now are we now just the same like the
25