I was born in Lodz, Poland my parents and I left Poland due to antisemitism when I was young. So we moved to Metz, France where my parents siblings were living. While we were in France, my mother became sick with tuberculosis, so we went to Davos, Switzerland for a year so she could receive treatment at a sanatorium. I was young and don’t remember much of that year. Afterward, my parents decided we should return to Lodz, Poland but my mother was still too ill to care for young children. My younger sisters stayed with relatives in France. We planned to return to France to retrieve them. My sisters were placed in a convent by our relatives for five years.

In 1930 or 1931, my parents and I returned to Lodz, Poland. We had no idea what lay ahead or that we would never be able to bring my sisters back. I was seven years old when we returned. I started school but was behind because I hadn’t attended school while we lived in France. I was fifteen, when the war began, I had only completed five years of school.

When the Nazis invaded Poland, we were moved into the Lodz Ghetto in 1940. I was sixteen years old at the time. I remember wearing stars on our clothing and that I was no longer allowed to attend school. At first, we had some ability to move around within the ghetto, and some people could even leave, which made life slightly more bearable. But soon, they sealed us in and imposed curfews. Food became scarcer by the day. One day, my father went out and never returned. I never found out what happened to him.

After two years of terrible conditions in the Lodz Ghetto, my mother died of starvation in 1942. I was left all alone. I worked in a factory making shoes out of straw, braiding the straw into small pieces. Later, I worked in a laundromat, washing soldiers’ clothes—mainly underwear—and folding them. At one point, I weighed just 90 pounds and became too weak to fold clothes. I broke down; I just couldn’t do it.

Eventually, I got a new job that came with some privileges. I was in charge of searching people as they left the factories, making sure they weren’t stealing. If I caught someone, I usually let them go or took the item to avoid them being punished.

Once, a man who was the head of the kitchen stole a sack of potatoes. I let him take it in exchange for sharing it with me. We met afterward and shared the potatoes. This job gave me access to more food, which was vital because if you didn’t work, you didn’t get soup. That’s how I lived. Sometimes, we would sneak out at night to steal potatoes from the fields.

Life in the ghetto grew increasingly unbearable. One day, my friend, her mother, and I decided we couldn’t take it anymore. We packed what little we had and walked to the train station, thinking the trains would take us away from the misery. We didn’t know then that the trains were sending people to their deaths. When we arrived, we were turned away because there was no more room on the train. We were devastated and had to walk an hour back to our apartment. At the time, we believed that leaving the ghetto would be better, not realizing the truth. I didn’t find out the truth until after the war.

During a selection in the ghetto, the Germans forced everyone out of their apartments. They pointed guns at us. I saw a woman wearing a trench coat hiding two children within it. When they came for her children, she wouldn’t let go. She got on the wagon with them. She could have saved herself if she had let them go, but she chose to stay with her children. Some people gave up their children and survived.

In 1944, I was sent with 300 other girls to Częstochowa labor camp by cattle car to work in a factory. The conditions were horrible—straw mattresses on wooden beds infested with bedbugs. We worked 12-hour shifts making bullet shells. If something went wrong, we were punished with a leather strap; we had to be perfect.

An older German soldier took it upon himself to protect me. He would pull me out of the selection lines, and he got me a better job delivering soup and bread to the other workers. I called him my Schindler. I never saw him again after the war, though I tried to find him. I still don’t know why he helped me.

Towards the end of the war, there were rumors that we would be sent on a death march. I avoided it by getting a job cleaning the SS barracks. One day, while cleaning, an SS officer warned me about the death march. He told me to hide and stay away from the selection. He said the war was coming to an end and the Germans were losing. He advised me to stay hidden because the Russians were close. I took his advice and hid wherever I could—inside the factory, outside—anything to avoid being sent on that march.

I was liberated on January 17, 1945.