The Bleeding Sky-Recollections of the Shoah
Summary: My mother, Malka Brandsdorfer, lived in a small Polish town near the German border. At the start of World War II she was married and had a young daughter. During the war her married name was Goldratt. She recorded her recollections of the Holocaust. The conditions in the town. Her family's struggle and the ghetto and camps she lived through. She tells of how many of her family died and how only she and one sister survived. Her recollections are told in Yiddish.
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- Artist: Louis Brandsdorfer
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After most of the Jewish population of the ghetto was removed, my mother was assigned to a work detail that would go into the emptied sections of the ghetto and search through the apartments for any left over values (Werterfassung in German). The group would gathered anything that was of value to be carted away by the Poles and Germans.
My mother and her daughter are captured in the Warsaw train station, trying to get to the east to find her brother. They are put in prison with other Jews caught outside the ghetto.
Having no place left to hide near her home town, my mother and her daughter travel around Poland looking for a safe place from the Germans.
The last Jews of the town and region are rounded up for deportation. My mother, fearing for the life of her daughter, goes into hiding. One of her sisters joins her as they move from place to place seeking refuge.
With the Jews in larger cities being put into ghettos, the Jews in smaller towns are assembled to labor for the Germans and for deportation. The first deportations were to labor camps and to the larger ghettos. The later assemblies were to send them to death camps.
After the Polish defeat in September 1939 the Germans occupied Poland and started to make the lives of Jews more and more difficult.
The lives of my mother and her family in a small Polish town near the German border. Her town and region are one of the first to experience the strength and speed of the German attack that started World War 2.
