Bob was born on August 3, 1935 in Poland to a relatively wealthy family. At the start of the war in 1939, Germany and Russia had made a deal: one half of Poland would be controlled by the Germans and the other half would be had by the Russians. Bob, his mother, father, and brother, lived on the German side and were forced to move to the Russian border, to a city called Stanislawow. They settled there for a while until, in 1941, the Germans decided they no longer wanted to keep the deal the Russians and they had; they wanted all of Poland. In 1941, the Nazis began a Blitzkrieg because, as Bob told us, they wanted to take Poland in as few days as possible.
As the bombs were falling in the middle of the night, Bob's father wanted to protect the family by covering the windows. This would ensure that no broken glass would shoot out and seriously hurt the family. The stress of that night (imagine the fear of knowing that a bomb could bring down your home in a second)caused Bob's father to get a heart attack. He died the night of the Blitzkrieg. The Germans marched through Poland victoriously the day after that.
Bob's grandfather and grandmother had been living with the family since they had all moved to Stanislowow. After the Nazi occupation, however, Grandfather Geminder was murdered by the Nazis: they pulled him out into the street and shot him. Soon after Bob's grandfather's death, the 20,000 Jews estimated to have been living in Stanislowow were taken first to the central square of the town by the Nazis. After they had come together there, they were told they had to go to the nearby cemetery. Bob's mother, his brother, his grandmother and he had been among the first to have arrived to the cemetery. The family knew of the Nazi cruelty; Bob told us it was custom for the Nazis to walk through the camps killing people. What happened that day at the cemetery was perhaps beyond the evil and trauma seen before, though: the Nazis machine gunned between 12,000 and 14,000 Jews that day.
Bob didn't give too many details. He spoke about it with a type of historical objectivity. The Nazis knew they simply could not deal with 20,000 plus Jews. However, by killing between 12-14,000 of them, they made sure they would be able to control the 6-8,000 Jews left. The only reason why Bob's family and he survived was because they had arrived first. This meant they were in the back of the crowd. Those in the front were the ones who were killed first. It was all luck.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
The tragic parts of bob's life really depressed me. The way his father died and the way those people died at the cemetery must have been so dramatic for him. Knowing that the only reason he survived and not those people was luck must be hard for him to imagine.
ReplyDelete