The Bleeding Sky-Recollections of the Shoah

My mother begins her recollection of the Shoah with a conversation she had with a friend and fellow survivor.

Leaving Poland for good, my mother travels looking for surviving family and friends. She finds very few, learns of the fate of many of them. Settling in a displaced persons camp in Wesbaden Germany, she meets my father and starts a new family before moving to America.

Returning home after the war. My mother travels on foot and by train through war torn Germany and Poland. She finds other survivors, among them her younger sister Fay. Her homecoming is bitter sweet with the realization of how few survived and the hostile greeting the returning Jews received from the Polish townspeople.

The labor camp at Neustadt is unexpectedly liberated when the German guards abandon the labor camp. The Germans move west to excape the advancing Russian army.

My mother spent the last few months of the war in the labor camp at Neustadt, which is near Hamburg.

With the Russian army nearing Auschwitz in January 1945, the Germans evacuate the camp and force march the prisoners to the concentration camp at Gross Rosen. Known as the Death March, it lasted many days with the prisoners walking through the bitter cold and heavy snow. Many did not survive, as the German guards killed any who stopped walking.

Toward the end of 1944 my mother's kommando is moved from Birkenau to the main camp in Auschwitz.

My mother bribes her way into the Blue Affect. It was the building where the clothes of Auschwitz's victims was sorted for use by the Germans.

With the fires in Birkenue burning all the time, to dispose of the bodies of the murdered Jews, the ash turns the evening sky blood red. My mother describes this vision of hell that was Auschwitz.

Yenta and Sara, my mother's 2 youngest sisters come to Birkenau. The three of them are reunited, but only for a short while as disease and the gas chamber take both of them.