"My private hell started six months before the war began. In February 1939, I was drafted into the Polish army. The army was the first time that I associated with Poles. In Vilna, the Jews lived on one side of the street and the Poles lived on the other side. We spoke Yiddish and Russian. My Polish accent was not that great. The Polish soldiers laughed at me. On September 1, 1939, the war started when Germany invaded Poland. Poland lost the war in sixteen days. I was with the 77th Pulk Piechoty (77th Infantry Regiment). Our unit was captured near Radom. We were sent to a prisoner-of-war camp near Kielce. I remember that the Jews had already been separated from the Polish soldiers. The Germans could not tell the Jews apart from the other Polish soldiers. They depended on the Poles to tell them that. Vilna at that time was technically located in Lithuania which was not at war with Germany. I was classified as one of the so-called Lithuanian Jews and not as a regular Polish soldier. So I was sent to a POW labor camp. This saved my life. The other Jewish soldiers were demobilized and sent back to Poland. There they faced almost certain death. I was in various labor camps for five years and seven months. We belonged to Stalag VIII A. But we did not stay there. If we had stayed in the Stalag (prisoner-of-war camp) we would have starved like the Russian POW's we saw because there was not enough food there. They sent us to many different places to work. International law required us to kept in humane conditions, and it forbade Germany from forcing us to be slave laborers. I was forced to work on the Autobahn near Krems, Austria. I was forced to load coal at Ludwigsdorf. As Jews we were singled out for special treatment. At Goerlitz the Jews had to clean excrement out of the slit latrines with our hands. The Jews were always given the dirtiest and most dangerous jobs. Our lives were threatened and we were beaten. We were always hungry, and many of us did not survive. Near the end of the war we were marching two or three days without stopping. The Germans told us to lie down in a field. We slept. The Russian calvary woke us up. About 30 of them on horses rode up to us. The first thing they said to us was, I will never forget it, "Give us your watches." We learned that they were crazy for wristwatches. We told them who we were, and they left us alone. They smiled and rode away. That was our liberation on April 22, 1945. There were eleven of us Lithuanian Jews together at this time. We were free. No Germans. We went into the villages and there was plenty of food there. One of us died from overeating, and then we were ten. When the war was over, we thought we had survived because we were smarter than other people. Then we talked to other survivors. Plenty of smart people died. We learned we were just luckier than they were. Once a year we commemorate the Holocaust at a ceremony held at the Jewish Community Center on the 27th day of the month of Nissan, the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. My part for the last few years has been to lead the singing of the Hymn of the Holocaust Survivors, the Partisan Song, Zog Nit Keyn Mol. It was written by Hirsch Glick, a poet and a partisan fighter. He was born in 1922 and was killed in 1944. He was 22 years old. He was a young fellow, brilliant. He was also from Vilna."
-Shep Zitler (Holocaust Survivors: Survivor Stories)
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