For Nicholas/Steven, from a Polish refugee
Tom Holloway (xuegx@CSV.WARWICK.AC.UK)
Tue, 26 Nov 1996 13:01:48 +0000
Hello Nicholas and Steven - I am Feliks and I was deported
with my family when I was 14 years old. You asked us...
>Q:Which countries were the most successful at smuggling out their Jewish
> citizens?
Judging by a memorial I have seen in Jerusalem, I would say
that my own country, Poland, deserves a special mention.
The memorial commemorates those who helped Jews during the
war and Polish names are in the majority.
>Q:Are the black and white stripes that are used in prisons today come from
> the clothing guards and prisons wore in the camps?
In my own camp (a Russian slave labour camp in the Ural
Mountains, near the City of Perm) we wore the clothes we
were wearing when the soldiers pushed us into the cattle
trucks.
They weren't much but we made the best of what we had. I
can remember that my shoes were useless in the forest and
most of us made our own footwear by binding our feet with
strips of old rugs and over the top we put big moccasins we
made from birch tree bark.
>Q:What methods did people use to locate lost relatives at the conclusion
>of the war?
I was in a work camp in the Urals. When Germany attacked
Russia many hundreds of thousands of Polish people were
moved south to Uzbekhstan. In the Polish camps for
displaced persons (those deported to Russia) we would ask
newcomers for news of friends and families. Sometimes we
were lucky, but many had died.
After the war quite a lot were found by the Swiss Red Cross
service, but many thousands of children had lost their
parents by then.
Feliks Chustecki
Coventry, England