I was born in Poland in 1924 in a little town called Sopoćkinie (now Sapotskin). It’s about 25 kilometers from Grodno (now Belarus). We lived in one house along with my grandparents, and didn’t have much food. Meat was a delicacy for us. My father worked though, and I belonged to a Jewish organization. We did all kinds of things together. We used to go to the forests and sing and dance around a fire.

      A couple days before World War II began, Stalin and Hitler signed a pact to split Poland.[1] We ended up on the Russian side of Poland. From September 1939 to June 1941, I learned the Russian language, was tested, and ended up in a junior college. I entered a three-year program for teaching. I went to Grodno, stayed in a dormitory and didn’t have to pay for school. At that time in Russia they even gave me some spending money.

      The school year was over in June, 1941. I liked singing and was asked to enter a singing competition in Bialystok.[2] I had to go there on  Saturday, but my mother was very religious and wouldn’t let me go until Sabbath was over. We got to Bialystok at about one o’clock in the morning and were put up in a large room with other children from different places. As we settled in, we started hearing the bombing. We learned later it was Hitler attacking Russia. We jumped from our beds as the windows broke, but we didn’t know what was happening. The doors were locked – they wouldn’t let us out at night. When the sun rose we were finally able to go out. People were running all over but no one was running away. They were just running from one place to another, screaming as the bombs fell. I saw a woman in a long dress with a child about three years old holding onto her mother’s dress. The woman was holding a piece of wood, a plank or something, to her chest. She was screaming, “This is all I have left, that’s all I have left.” I think she lost her mind. Her little girl was running next to her. I have had nightmares about this all my life.

      We performed on stage this same morning. After the performance we went to a train station to go home. We were all happy because we did so well at the competition. Before we got on the train, however, there was an announcement that everybody had to leave the station. We ran very fast while the Germans bombed that station to smithereens. We ended up on a little hill in Bialystok, all us kids, and we couldn’t lift our heads up because the bombs were falling. They just kept coming. After the attack we tried to figure out how to get home, though I never did go back. I never saw my family again.

      The children were crying, calling for their mothers, but our teacher went numb. She was a young Russian woman, about 25 years old. She had left her three-year-old baby, her husband and her mother at home. It took a few days for us to get on a passenger train. We were told we were going deep in Russia. We went to a city called Baranovichi, where we got off the passenger train and onto a freight train.[3] We were given newspapers to put on the floor so we could lie down on them when we wanted to sleep. I don’t know how long we traveled, but I do remember that my hunger went away; I didn’t feel hungry anymore. We had no water either. We just cried, all of us, until we arrived at Minsk, Belarus.

      They put all us kids in a cellar as the city was being bombed. We could hear it all happening. We had a little food there. There were two other girls in the cellar around my age, and as the three of us talked we decided we had to get out to see where we were and to figure out how to get all the kids out of there. We went out to find that everything around us was burning from the bombing. We could only take a couple steps at a time, and had to get down on the ground every few steps to protect ourselves from the falling bombs.

      We finally stopped some soldiers who took us to their officer. They put us and the other children on a freight train with an open platform that we shared with soldiers from the hospital who were already wounded. I don’t know how far we traveled or how long it took, but we finally got off the platform. They put us in a train station to wait until we could take a train to Stalingrad. It was a very long and awful trip: We were hungry and thirsty, full of lice and dirty.

      When we arrived at Stalingrad we were sent to Uryupinsk, where we were put on a ox-drawn wagon.[4] After traveling this way for seven hours, we finally arrived at a village where we were placed with families.

      I worked on the farm there and received food and shelter. There were a lot of evacuees, and the government was trying to reunite people with their relatives. I knew I had an uncle in Chkalov (now Orenburg), and asked the authorities to get in touch with him. I received a telegram from my uncle that he would take me in, but I had to wait. I waited for a little while, but couldn’t wait any longer. I decided to go there by myself. There was another little girl who had a grandfather in Stalingrad who went with me.

      It took us a day, but we walked back to Uryupinsk, where we took a truck to Stalingrad. We arrived during day, though it was dark. There were no lights, nothing, just bombs falling. We would drop to the ground to try to avoid the bombs, and run behind buildings as well. We didn’t know what else to do.

      We finally found the office building where we could get appropriate paperwork to travel further and join up with our families. We stood in a huge line for a long time. I thought that this line would never end. We finally got down on our hands and knees and crawled under everybody’s legs, but when we got to the man who was directing people to the appropriate workers he turned out not to be much help. He wanted to send us to another city, even though we had relatives someplace else. We left that office building not knowing where to go next.

      We found another official building, but were told by the woman working there that nobody would be able to help us there either. We had no place to go, and I told the woman we would stay there until we got help. When the door opened, I saw that there was a man sitting inside. I had no idea who he was, so we just walked right in and I put the paper on the table. He said that he would take care of things. He took us to eat first and then back to the same office building we were before. This time we went with a government official and were able to get the appropriate paperwork in order to join our families. They also gave us 40 rubles each. They provided an escort for the girl that was with me to make sure she got to her grandfather (he worked on the railroad).

      They took me to a ship on the Volga River, put me in the berth and told me not to get off, otherwise someone would take my place. We traveled along the Volga River for 10-12 days. My legs were oozing with dirt from working in the fields, and a nurse came in every day to bandage them. I was really scared throughout the trip. There were young, drunk airmen who had just graduated, and another man asking me to marry him so he could take me to his mother. I was going to Kuibyshev (now Samara). There was a long line to get off the ship, so I did the same thing I did before: I crawled on my hands and knees and got up in front of the person who was letting people through to the railroad station.

      I was told to stand in a very long line. They put a number on my coat, number 504. I stood there for 72 hours without food or drink, but after that I could no longer stand. I sat down on the floor and leaned against a pole. A policeman came over and told me that I was not allowed to sit there. I just looked at him and said, “just pick me up and put me someplace else,” and then closed my eyes. He went down on the floor and asked me my name and where I was from. He said that he was from Bialystok and that he was Jewish. I asked him to help me get a ticket, so he went to the cashier who told him there were no tickets available. We walked outside and saw a train carrying factory equipment and people being evacuated to Tashkent. Chkalov (where I was going) was one of the big stations on the way to Tashkent. I again repeated my trick by going under the legs of the gate keeper while the policeman distracted her.

      I tried to get on one of the train wagons filled with people and their belongings, but they wouldn’t let me in. I cried and they pushed me off. I tried another wagon and got the same result. The train was starting to move, but I still couldn’t get in. I got in between the wagons (where they connected) and sat there as the train left. When the train stopped, I crawled up to the roof of the wagon and laid down there. I rode like that through the cold night, and when the train stopped I tried to get in the wagons again. I couldn’t, even as people were getting off to use the bathroom.

      One elderly man saw me and took me with him. He brought water and told me to wash my face (I didn’t realize I was so dirty). He then took me with him inside the train wagon. He had his wife and another girl with him. People started screaming, “Every time you go out, you bring some strangers.” He said, “Please be quiet; I have five sons, they are all at the front. These are my two daughters, I found them.” I rode with him and the other girl, whose name was Tanya. We were all going to Orenburg.

      Tanya didn’t know where to go once we got to Orenburg, so I invited her to come with me. We walked into my uncle’s one-room apartment around six in the morning. He was standing in Tefillin and a shawl, and when he saw me he started to cry.[5] We stayed there. I was able to get a job in a fabric factory. You had to have a job to get a ration card, and without a ration card you couldn’t eat. So I needed to work.

      I worked on on four different machines at the factory. The needles were breaking, and they taught me how to fix the machine. It took me an hour to get to work because there was no transportation, and I worked 16 – 18 hour days. I never had time to sleep. In the winter I had no appropriate clothing, even though it was at least 50 below zero. My legs bled from the cold.

      I worked with swollen legs, but because I didn’t have a fever I had to stay at work. Walking away from the job was not allowed. Once, when I became sick with a slight fever, the doctor gave me a little booklet stating I had a fever. That was my permission slip to stay home from work. Once in a while I changed the dates in the booklet to take a break and not go to work.

      Tanya and I slept on a hope chest that stood between an oven and my uncle’s bed. Tanya was a nurse. She got a job in a hospital and eventually joined the army. Somebody gave me a winter coat and we shared it.

      We didn’t have enough fuel in the factory so they sent a group of 21 girls to the forest to cut trees; I became a lumberjack. I climbed up trees and cut branches. We would get together after work and share a big pot of soup. At night, young people from the nearest farm would join us and we would sing and dance. We stayed there for a month before we got the order to go back to the factory.

      I went back to work. At the end of 1942, I met my future husband, who’d been caught by the Germans in Warsaw and forced to sweep the sidewalk with his hat. He escaped from Warsaw, and when he entered Russia he was drafted into the Army and sent to the front to fight the Germans. He was one of only four survivors in his unit of over 1,000 soldiers. He eventually ended up in the same city in Russia (Chkalov, now Orenburg) after he was medically discharged from the Russian army. We got married in February of 1943, and my son George was born in 1944.

      I still went to work after getting married. I got sick once but didn’t go to the doctor. I tried my trick with the booklet, but this time it didn’t work – as I was erasing the doctor’s note from the booklet, it ripped. At work, I was called to the office for this. I was working in a pair of slippers with an apron that held tools and my ration card. After work, I decided not to go to the office. I just started walking. Once I got home, I went into hiding. They could have taken away my ration food card or even put me in a labor camp.

      My husband knew where I was. He used to come to see me. One day I thought I had a stomach bug and was in a lot of pain. When my husband saw how sick I was, he told me I had to go home. I had a miscarriage that night; I didn’t even know I was pregnant. I went home, but I never went back to the factory.

      My husband decided to go back to Poland, though I didn’t want to go. I had a big family with many uncles, aunts, and cousins, and I was told that none of them survived. Not a soul. Either at the end of 1945 or the beginning of 1946, we moved back to Poland. They put us in a house in a town near Czechoslovakia. We then were given money, and with a group of other people we rented a little boat with oars. Some people were supposed to take us to Czechoslovakia by water, but left us in the middle of the river and told us that we were on the other side of the border. We couldn’t take any clothes with us, only what we had on. As we walked in the woods, we realized we hadn’t crossed the border and were still in Poland.

      We finally crossed the border on foot, and went to Bratislava, where we stayed until HIAS illegally got us to Austria.[6]  We went on foot again, this time to Vienna, and from there we went to Germany. After staying at four Displaced Person camps (Poking, Bad Reichenhal, Gabrisee, and Lehfeld), we were able to go to the United States.

            We lived in the Bronx in New York, and I worked at Chase Manhattan for 25 years as a bookkeeper. My husband got sick and I was his caregiver for 14-15 years. I moved to Tucson in the spring of 2013 to live closer to my son and his family.

[1] Ms. Goldman is referring the the Molotov-Ribbentrop Non-Aggression Pact of August 23, 1939, wherein Germany agreed to accede a part of Poland, the Baltic States, and Finland to the Soviets once the war began.

[2] Bialystok is the largest city in northeastern Poland.

[3] Baranovichi is a city in the Brest Region of western Belarus.

[4] Uryupinsk is a town in Russia, located 340 kilometers (210 mi) from Stalingrad (now Volgograd).

[5] Tefillin are two small black boxes containing scrolls of parchment inscribed with verses from the Torah. Jewish men are required to place one box on their head and tie the other one on their arm each weekday morning during prayer.

[6] HIAS is an American nonprofit organization that provides humanitarian aid and assistance to refugees.