The Bleeding Sky-Recollections of the Shoah

My mother is rescued from the gas chamber by Mala Zimetbaum. Later Mala Zimetbaum escapes from Auschwitz with a male accomplice. After a few days they are caught and executed in front of the whole camp.

Needing labor, the Germans transfer my mother and a number of other inmates of Majdanek to the Birkenau section of Auschwitz. My mother works in a number of jobs in and around the camp.

Packed into a crowded freight car my mother is sent from Warsaw to the Majdanek. Majdanek was the major concentration camp on the eastern side of Poland.

In April 1943, the Germans conduct a final aktion to clear the Warsaw ghetto. The Jewish partisans of the ghetto create the Passover uprising and my mother goes into hiding with the other Jews in her building.

An aktion was what the inhabitants of the ghetto called the German military operations to capture and remove the Jews from the ghetto. My mother describes the aktion that catches the last of the children and sends them to Treblinka.

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.