Gitla Rosenblum

Interview with Survivor of the Grande Rafle - Pithviers and Drancy   

[Photos added to enhance the text]

“My parents came to Paris from Poland in 1930 and had twelve years of very difficult life. Mother had a grocery, at night she went to Les Halles, and in the morning she did her baking. My father worked in a butchers, they each did an eighteen-hour day. 

I had a brother who was much older than I, he was twenty-five, married with a child. He was arrested in 1941 and interned in Pithviers. It begun like that, life was very perturbed.

We sent him parcels – his wife and child had not been taken. I know my sister (Sarah) and I were due to go to a holiday camp by the sea. My parents had bought us each a little suitcase to pack our holiday clothes in, and those suitcases served us for our arrest. I was ten, Sarah was five.

On July 16 the French police knocked at our door and asked us to prepare. We’ll be back to fetch you in two or three hours, they said, we’re taking you for checking your papers.

It is untrue that many people understood what this meant, did not wait for the return of the police, but escaped. It is probable that some policemen did not do it light-heartedly, but very few gave a warning that lives were at risk.

My parents were very religious, observant: they were people of great probity. They decided they would wait – they had done nothing wrong and there was nothing to reproach them with.

So they stayed got dressed, and prepared a small bundle. My father went to the synagogue to fetch a scroll, the Torah, which a pious Jew ought to have on him, if he is going away.

The police returned and took us on foot, about 500 metres to a collecting place in the Rue des Rosiers. We lived in the fourth arrondissement, at 18 Rue Saint-Croix de la Bretonnerie. There we were escorted into buses, along with thousands of children who were crying, and old people, some being dragged in pitiful states of health.

We were driven to the Velodrome d’Hiver, a big arena for bicycling races, and there we remained in the most atrocious conditions. There were a few Red Cross helpers, but we were under the French police.

Rumour and propaganda was out of control, people screamed all night long. Women threw themselves off the top of the stands. I still hear the screams. I can see the scenes today. We stayed there eight days, the conditions were dreadful, the lavatories were the worst, blocked and the smells and the filth was pestilential. There was no room, we were cramped together.    

Then we were taken again in buses to the station and piled into cattle trucks, one on top of the other. The journey to Pithviers lasted a few hours. There my father and another brother, age thirteen were separated.

My mother, a sixteen -year old sister the little one and I were put into huts. After two or three weeks there was an assembly, and my mother and sisters saw my father and brother. Their heads had been shaved. That was the departure for Auschwitz.

We were separated again, this just my little sister and me, I can see the roll call of the crowd. My father wore a beard and it had been cut off too – it was an atrocious sight. They were taken off in transports whose destination nobody knew. Not one of them came back.

My sister and I were born in Paris, we had French nationality, and this time they were taking foreign-born Jews. We stayed for weeks with a multitude of children at Pithviers, until we were taken to Drancy, where we lived for some weeks in terrible conditions.

Read more here: http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/survivor/rosenblum.html

The Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team
www.HolocaustResearchProject.org

Copyright Carmelo Lisciotto H.E.A.R.T 2009