Tag: Revenge

Unrelated to writing, I was going over some older emails and came across a fragment of part of my family’s history surviving the Holocaust. My mother, Renee, worked slave labor in the ghetto of her home town, was in the work parties that pulled all the contents of houses and apartments after their owners were sent to Auschwitz for murder, and then survived eleven months at Auschwitz and the subsequent death march. Here is the bit, including what I was able to thread together:

Unrelated to writing, I was going over some older emails and came across a fragment of part of my family’s history surviving the Holocaust. My mother, Renee, worked slave labor in the ghetto of her home town, was in the work parties that pulled all the contents of houses and apartments after their owners were sent to Auschwitz for murder, and then survived eleven months at Auschwitz and the subsequent death march. Here is a chunk of a story my mother told me:

“We were hiding Rosenzweig (sister: Blanca), who was selling forged food stamps unbeknownst to us. His daughter said they didn’t know why the Gestapo was looking for him, so we said he could hide.

A Jewish informer (Tadek, who was a bouncer before the war, obese) told the Gestapo who came and took the whole family away after killing (my mother) Renee’s mother and wounding Renee. Kuhne (rang: Zollfadungstelle) (who did the killing) had a brother killed on the Russian front two weeks later.

Angry, he told Tadek to meet him at an empty lot, and shot him. Renee saw the body the next day, revenge because Tadek said he’d arrange for his brother not to go to the front. The forger was hidden in another room under the bed, and wasn’t found. He left after the shooting was over and everyone was taken to jail.”

Not fully coherent, but my mother was already deep into her dementia. And spent years reliving her tortured history as the woman she had been melted.