deported to Auschwitz. Except for a small team that was to be the clean-up team
and was supposed to collect everything that was left over in the apartments. We
decided at the last moment to join these clean-up teams and try
to get down there. Unfortunately, most of us did not succeed. Some were still
sent to the ramp where the carriages to Auschwitz were waiting. One of our friends,
one of the bravest was Hippie Glitzenstein. Unfortunately, he also had to go in that direction. He
tried to escape along the way.
They shot at him, he shot back
until he lay there dead.
Here, from the house.
He, Janek-Zimmermann, was the first to open the window and look out onto the street.
Only Poles stood here.
He saw no uniformed man and jumped out and tried to slowly get into the city
because you couldn't run and avoid being noticed when going into town.
I realized I jumped as the second.
From a distance, I noticed two Poles approaching him and then walking beside him.
When he reached the end of the street, two uniformed men
and the Poles, the two who were walking next to him,
handed him over to the Germans.
I heard a shot. Two other Poles were suddenly next to me.
I showed them my gun and said, you can't do that to me.
You will walk very slowly next to me until we reach the corner,
and then you will go left and I'll go behind you.
They walked slowly beside me, which was a kind of a cover for me,
and we reached the corner.
They went left from there as I had ordered them,
and I went right toward Mrs. Bozsodaj’s apartment,
where we had a place to stay.
After the escape from the ghetto, we had a shootout here.
I went with Bolek, the younger of the Koschow brothers,
Josef was already dead and we headed toward the ghetto.
We thought that if we met someone else there
on the way, that we would take them back with us and bring them to our hiding place with Mrs. Bozsodaj.
We were walking along here, just on the bridge, and a plainclothes policeman came, stopped us and asked for our IDs.
I showed my ID and he gave it back to me.
Then Bolek showed his ID and I said, you're Jewish.
Then he says, no, that's not true.
At that moment, someone who came riding from there on a bicycle stopped the man and said,
Wait, buddy, look, they're Jews.
He said, yes, so-and-so too.
At that moment, I ripped Bolek’s papers away and drew my pistol.
As we ran away, we fired until the magazine was empty.
We only had one shot at them and that's how we escaped.
Then we sent a girl here to find out what really happened.
Then she came back and said there was a huge crowd.
People were saying that partisans shot two Germans.
We didn't pass by here anymore.
All the people who came out of the ghetto knew where they could meet me that day.
The meeting point was different every day.
I picked them up from there and took them to Mrs. Bozsodaj’s house.
But the house wasn't big enough to accommodate a lot of people.
She also didn't know that sometimes there were 17, 18 and even 20 people under the floor.
We sent some of
the people who came out of the ghetto to the Slovakian border, where Jakob Rosenberg received them and then sent them to Slovakia with smugglers he had found.
I wanted to ask you, your name is Kubaščik.
Kubaščik Roma.
And you were born here?
Yes.
And you know that during the war in 1943,
there was a young man here who called himself Józek.
I know him.
That was me.
That was you.
I know him well.
I was the son of the Polish general.
I was here on the platform to bring the people
from our families to Slovakia.
Yes, that was so.
And my father was here.
And my father was here with Józek and two others.
What was the name of the third one?
The third?
Matuszny Ludwik.
They took him in the other direction.
And what did you bring back?
Back? Yes.
He brought me a coffee.
He worked in Oswiecim.
There were still such costly corners in such yellow papers.
You were here too.
And the Germans came from Mieluwki.
Yes, there was a Kosteck in the Kameschnitze.
I know it exactly.
What happened to the people you met here?
They went straight to Oswiecim.
But the people you met here,
why did you meet them here?
You met them here,
as a man met them here.
And he brought them to Oswiecim .
You said they met people here.
How many were there?
I think there were twenty.
Nine.
There were nine.
And what happened next?
Now this is written in the Oswiecim.
Do you see this Kurowski Leon?
His name was Samek Majklis.
He came to me when he had to leave me
because they arrested me
because I am an alien here and so on.
And the two who did not tell each other,
one was called Boim, the other Friedman,
because they didn't want to tell each other who they were.
And then they were taken from there and brought here.
It was like this.
We were the den of the Sosnowiec-Bedzin underground party.
And they were Jewish.
They were Jewish.
And I came here as a delegate and took care of all this.
Everything I had,
my name, my title, that I was the general's son,
none of that was true.
Do you understand?
That is the whole truth.
That's the truth.
We are here in Kosaschisko, where I lived and this is the house.
The groups from Sosnowiec and Bedzin always arrived in Zwardon in the late afternoon, which is behind me,
someplace three kilometers from here.
The shepherd was waiting for him at the station. He was a boy of 13, 14 years old
and the characteristic identifier was that two people from the group would be holding a newspaper in their hands.
And then he approached them and asked them if they had come to the Yuser.
And when they said yes, he told them to follow him and took them into the forest.
The beginning of the forest where we went to the border was in Piekow.
And then he took them to a safe place where we then transported the people further from that place.
Late in the evening, around 9 or 10 o'clock, the group of smugglers went out.
There were two main smugglers, one called Schwerjoch and the second called Kubaschik
and the people were led into the forest, deep into it, about a kilometer.
And there was a forest path where the German patrol of the border police was positioned,
one went from west to east and the second from east to west.
And the patrols met in the middle of this forest
and the group was always located a few hundred meters from them near the same place.
So when the two patrols split up again, that was the place where we went through.
They also had with them, each patrol of two people, a dog, a wolf.
And they were trained so that they could sense people by their smell.
That's why we always waited for them to go away. When they parted ways, we went through.
And after about two kilometers, we were already on the Slovakian side
and the village was called Skalite. It is still there today and the same people still live there.
And from there, the people were loaded onto wagons full of straw for the next day.
So under the straw?
Under the straw. They were taken to Tshatsa, and they were given train tickets from Tshatsa.
And then they came to Zilina, where the Jewish community was already organized.
And there were people from the movement, secret work, and one gentleman was called Dr. Erwin Steiner, and the second Wertheim.
And after one or two or three days, the people were transported again, or to Presov, from Presov, through the border to Hungary.
And the second group went through Pressburg and also to the other side.
So that’s how the transports were organized and I gave the Polish smugglers 100 marks for each head
and they shared it with the Slovak smugglers.
So everything was paid for and I gave them various gifts from time to time.
Josef Rosenberg sent me and my mother together with Leon Blatt's parents to Slovakia.
The plan was that the Polish smugglers would take us to Slovakia, to the Slovakian border
and from there, the Slovak people were supposed to take us further to Zilina.
But we experienced a great, severe disappointment in the Slovakian hut.
The Slovak smugglers locked us all underground and demanded a lot of money from us
and they threatened that they wanted to hand us over to the Gestapo.
We were sitting upstairs at night and we all decided together that I must go and seek out the Jews who were in Slovakia.
I convinced the Slovak murderers that I had acquaintances in Zilina and that these acquaintances would definitely give us money and then they would get money for us.
I went out and I headed to Zilina, to a strange city, a strange country and I will not give details, but by chance and luck I met a couple.
She was a Jew and he was a Catholic, a Slovakian Catholic, and I told them my secret and I asked them to help me save my three people in the hut on the border.
And this unknown man, his name was Alex Hauser, came to the border that same night in a Jeep, he introduced himself as a German and he looked after our three parents and brought them to his home.
Since then, from that day until January or February, he led our entire group from the border at Zilina to the Jewish aid organization, which of course rewarded him afterward.
We also had another escape route. Fredka Oschenhandler crossed the border to the General Government
and brought papers for Polish workers who were going into the labor service from the employment offices there.
We sent our young people to Austria on these papers.
They were given the papers the day before so they could learn the names, memorize them.
The next day, we met at the train station in Katowice. They got the tickets from me there and went directly to Vienna.
Chaim Tennenwurzel was in one of these groups, the third or the fourth.
I walked down from the platform. As I came out of the station hall onto the street, I suddenly saw
that two uniformed officers had arrested one of our Chaverims, Chaim Tennenwurzel, and were heading in that direction.