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

temple, and the temple was on fire, and I remember that the adults crying and saying the
Germans are burning the temple, and that's how I remember the beginning of the war. And
that's how I recall the beginning of trouble.
PR Do you remember when your father made the decision to move your family into hiding?
AL There's a lot more before that. What happened was, when the war first broke out, we were
left, my mother, my sister, and myself, we were left in Lodz, and my father, a lot of the men
left and they went towards Russia. Because they were saying, “Well nothing will happen to the
children and the women, but the men would have to go into the army or the Germans would
get them.” So my father disappeared, it was just the three of us that were left, and we stayed
in the apartment in Lodz, and then I remember that my mother told us we'll have to leave,
well first we would have to wear the yellow star, you know, whether a child or adult, we had to
wear those whenever we were out.
PR And you remember the moment when your mother sewed that yellow star?
AL I remember that I had it on, yes. And ah (emotion)...
PR Was that the first time you realized you were Jewish perhaps?
AL Well, maybe now that we talked about it, I guess so, because then I was different, you
know, where ever I went in the street people were able to say (emotion) I was Jewish, but
(emotion) um...I'll have to catch my...but anyway, when after that passed things were getting
bad, and because we lived in this big building, one day my mother said she had to clean the
apartment, and put out the best china, and best linens, and you make up the beds, and make
the table up with the best that she had, and that we would have to leave our homes because
Germans were taking over the apartment, and after that from what I recall, she was trying,
she had family in Warsaw, she had two brothers, and they were married, one was a doctor, one
was an engineer. And they were in Warsaw, so here she was with just the two kids, so she
wanted to go be near her family, and somehow she took us out of Warsaw, I mean out of
Lodz, and I remember we were riding in the wagon and all kinds of stuff, through the country
till we got to Warsaw, and we were with some family, I remember that.
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