דן הדני

Our Polish family friends - a member of the German NSDAP.

My parents had a Christian family acquaintance. Between his family and our family was in  a very close friendship. We used to visit at their house and of course they visited with us. We my sister and I, played with children of acquaintances. In those days we thought it was an ordinary Polish family.

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The man, however, would sometimes disappear for a few days or weeks. We thought he was traveling as part of his commercial work. After the Germans entered Lodz, he seduced us. He showed up at home in the middle of the day alone in secret. He was wearing the NSDAP uniform of the Nazi organization. We barely recognized him. He locked the room with my parents. He explained to my parents that he was in Poland actually, planted, by the Germans. It was clear  for us, that the connection was in principle severed.

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A few weeks later, and shortly before the Ghetto was closed, the man appeared with us again unexpectedly, in the late afternoon. He was very nervous because of the curfew, which it  was about to begin at 5:00 PM. The Jews were forbidden to roam the streets. He ordered us to pack some things. He begged us to flee towards the ghetto, which was about to close in the next few days. He added that he had prepared a carriage with a horse for us, which was waiting for us, down the street. The carriage man knows where to go. We did what he said. The carriage took us into the ghetto, to the apartment he had prepared for us. It is true, he saved us.

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The next day, it became clear to us. Last night a special SS unit had broken into our building we lived in and carried out a pogrom. That night, more than 10 Jews were killed, and many others of the occupants of the house were injured. We never saw them any more.an anymore...

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So, we left our new apartment with all the contents in the city center and reached that evening the ghetto, to a one-room apartment only. About a month later, the ghetto was hermetically closed. No one came or went.

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Since the food supply was very limited, my sister and I took advantage of the shape of the house structure. The house had two floors. A total of two apartments on the ground floor and two apartments on the top floor. The roof of the house was sloping, with the addition of  a small storage place under the roof.

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In the ghetto, our apartment had a single room, with only one window. It overlooked on the roof of a nearby house. We collected soil from the yard, put it on the roof, made a small flower bed and grew some vegetables in it, and hid it so that it would not be visible from the outside.

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I mention here the storage place that was adjacent to the apartment. This is important, because on my visit to the apartment after the war I found it empty and almost demolished. However, when I looked into  the storage place, it was empty as well, but I found photographs thrown on the storage floor. These photographs taken I the ghetto, I present herewith.

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My father died in this apartment, in April 1942. We stayed in this room, for 4,5 years, until August 1944. The deportation took us to Auschwitz.zzz