My mother-in-law talking about her life in Poland

[seemunkee]

She doesn't usually open up about her childhood and the war but she was playing with our dog and started talking about the dogs she grew up with. She kept going and we got some more details about her experiences. We write them down and piece them together whenever she does this so we can eventually get the full story.

In 1939 R lived on a farm in Rovno Poland. Her father, uncle and grandfather jointly ran the farm. They owned the local mill and also bought wool and had it spun and woven into clothe. The farm did well enough that they occasionally bought some exotic fruit like oranges and bananas. When Poland was partitioned they were in a section of the country that become Soviet controlled. People stopped coming to the mill and the farm declined to the point that the family left and moved to Malynsk. In 1941 when the Germans invaded the family was forced to move to a Jewish Ghetto in the city of Bereszne. Her father was forced to work on a farm outside the city and she was allowed to stay with him and her uncle. One night the Germans started rounding up the Jews that were living in the Ghetto and deporting them to the concentration camp. A villager came out to the farm and told them what was happening. They fled into the woods. Her uncle believing the families had been killed went into the forest and picked out 10 trees to hold a minyan and recited Kaddish. Fortunately, they had escaped and they all met up in the forest. The families joined up with a partisan group headed by Dmitri Medvedev and lived in their camp for over a year. Her father went out to fight and bomb railroads and she helped out in the camp hospital. In 1943, R and her mother were flown to Moscow to work in a munitions factory where she stayed until the end of the war.

[BelleCarolinaPeridot]

1. That's an amazing story.

Thank you for sharing that.

[kiraboo]

2. Wow. Thanks for the story.

It's particularly poignant/interesting because my MIL is German and has never been shy about discussing her childhood and teenage years during and after the war. She has a rather myopic view but that is in accord with her personality. A good woman, but not a deep thinker, maybe out of necessity.