Interview with Rachel Karpf Bochner

I was born May 6, 1914 in Ulanow, Poland.  It was a very small town but very lovely people.  We had about 300 Jewish families, very orthodox.  We had two shuls, a Hebrew school, a Zionist organization for the girls, and the boys belonged to Batar.  Our life was quiet, we had a shoe store and galanterie.  After school we always helped in the store.  My father was  very bright, he was the head of the Jewish community.  We had a one family house.  We were four children: the oldest was Gloria, then me, then my sister Esther, and the baby brother Joel Mayer.  We got along beautiful, we respected our parents. We always wondered, how would our parents react.  And we did everything to please our parents, Moses and Amalia Tannenbaum Karpf.   My mother was born in Ulanow.

We were strictly observant, we didn’t work on the holiday, our parents went to the synagogue, we had a nice meal, it was a holiday with a capital H.  Passover was my favorite holiday because it was spring coming;  Rosh Hashanah was a lovely holiday but more on the scary side, and Yom Kippur was a sad holiday for us.  We made ourselves think of the whole year, what we did, and we made plans for the next year; if we did something wrong we promised to improve.  We hoped for next year and the year after next; we were very serious about life, we didn’t take anything easy.  Usually YK was very very sad.  My mother would light the candles a day before, and she was praying and begging for a good year, for health, for the children to succeed.  Everything was taken so serious with all your heart and all your brains.  Every holiday had a meaning for us.

My school was very close to our house.  We liked school, we did good in school.  We had a problem with books, books were very expensive.  When we finished one year, the books were like new, we sold them and bought books for next year.  I remember in the 5th grade a physics book was very very expensive, we couldn’t get it right away.  So we borrowed the book, and me and my sister wrote everything in the book on paper, nights we copied the book, because we didn’t know when we would get our book.   How careful we were and respectful for the book.

It was a public school, run by the city, didn’t cost anything.  We went to school with Polish children.  School started 8am, we had half an hour at noon, then back till 2pm. Then we went home and started to tackle the Hebrew school.  Hebrew would be 6am to 7:30 in the morning, then two afternoons till 4pm we had Hebrew lessons.  From  5 until 9 or 10 pm we had lectures in the Hanaor Hatzion.  Our close friends were those children who went to the Hebrew school.

My sister was a very smart girl, she was two years older than me but we went to school together because she had a speech defect.  She’d speak only to me.  I started at 5 instead of 6 but they took me because of my sister.  But somehow I made it.  She was smart, the best student in the class, knitting and sewing was easy for her.  A very capable woman.

My favorite subject was Hebrew.  We belonged to a group Marginate Hasofar Hebraic, to take care of the Hebrew language.  I still read and write Hebrew.

Our organization was Hanaor Hatzion, a youth group, a beautiful group of people. We did Israeli dancing,  lectures about books, we helped each other a lot.  We had a lot of poor girls.  You had to pay 2 zlotys a month, and some girls couldn’t afford 25 cents, but we took them in.  We taught the younger children.  For the 2 zlotys we used to buy Hebrew books.  We didn’t wear fancy dresses.  We belonged to the scout organization, and we had a gray dress and a blue scarf, even for the holidays.  We played ball, we swam, and classes and studying.  We had visitors from Krakow, the main organization, who came to teach us.  We were prepared to go to Israel, and some of our group did go to Israel.  My parents didn’t want us to go to Palestine, because to make a living in Israel was hard.    I was in a special school to prepare to go to Palestine, we got up at 6am, we studied Hebrew, 7:30 breakfast and went to work.  I worked in a printing place which was not bad,  we came home, had supper, and again start Hebrew.   You had to apply and be sent.  Then they sent me to a summer camp in the mtns for seven weeks.  I got sent to another town to teach Hebrew, but I didn’t accept this--there wasn’t a salary to live on.  You had to eat with the people who would feed you.  I had too good a home to accept this, although this was a honorable thing to do.  I was probably not mature enough.

Anti-Semitism did not hit me before the war, I spoke very good Polish, it was friendly.  They called you ‘Jew” but I was not insulted.    They complimented me that I looked like a Polish girl.

My father’s store was in our house, a one-family house.  Mainly shoes, but also ladies underwear, ties, socks, stockings, cosmetics, books for school.  My mother got a license to sell school supplies, ink, pens, pencils.  The court bought paper goods from us.  We were surrounded by villages.  We exported wood to Danzig.  We were not rich people but we made a living.   The town had a lot of people who were not educated, just the Hebrew education, but if they had trouble they would come to my father and he helped them.  I have here friends from my hometown who told me stories about my father.

What were the first signs of danger for you when the war started?  We knew what was going on in Germany, that some were expelled in 1939 in a very cruel way, they took them without luggage and left them in a place without food.  When the Germans walked into our town, there were some German Jews and they ran to welcome the Germans, and the Germans killed them on the spot.      In 1939 we had the Germans, then the Russians.  The Germans made NO MAN’s LAND, you could do to the Jews whatever you wanted.  The Polish people during the night they broke the windows, the lights, neighboring towns were expelled from their city and they came to our city.  They had  a miserable life.  When the Russians came it was quiet.  Then the Germans came back so life was miserable.  Most of our people ran with the Russians to Lvov.  My father, too, with the understanding that he would send a carriage and horse for us.  But my mother said I have a store and merchandise, I’m not going.  My grandmother was there, too.  Then my father came back to us, 1940.

When the Germans came whoever was a Jew they wanted to hurt the Jews.  The Jews were made to sweep the streets, they cut their beards, the girls had to go into the courthouse where the soldiers were stationed, to wash the floors.  Insulting jobs.  Till 1941 the war with Russia broke out.  The situation for us got more serious.  Some more Jews came to our town from other towns with what they could carry.  We took in some people.  The Polish people hid them and robbed them at night, and they had no place to complain.  In the summer of 1941 came 2 or 3 Germans, dressed in black, and they took some people out of the town, with tools to dig a hole, they were killed, but they were not all killed, but the Polish people told us the earth was still moving, they were still alive.  Some of us went and dug them out and buried them in the cemetery.  One day  the Germans went to another town and surrounded the Jews and killed them in a fire.  We heard of it.  Then the survivors picked up the pieces of the dead and buried them in one group grave.   I couldn’t believe this!  German people don't know what happened, six million Jews perished, they didn’t know.  As a Jew I didn’t have the right to go to school, my brother was expelled after the fifth grade.  If a Pole hit me, they could hit a Jew, and police wouldn't do anything.  We didn't have rights.  One of us would watch, and we would hide in the woods. They could come in the store and take whatever they wanted.

What happened to your parents?
I really don’t know too much.  The last day of Succos we were ordered out.  My father prepared for all 3 girls gentile papers.    Children, he said, you have to go on your own.  He gave us some money.  Keep yourselves together, he left himself without money. “ I have my talis and tefilin,”  he said.   I didn’t say goodbye, we went.  We went to a Pole who had a small boat, he took two friends, and us at night,  I didn’t say goodbye, we just left.  I had a big pocketbook and in it were nightgown, a sweater, a pair of shoes, and on me I had 3 underwear, 4 sweaters, whatever I could put on.  It was autumn.  We were afraid to carry a valise.  We walked at night six kilometers to a station.  The two friends who were with us were talking, but we were quiet.    We came to Dembitza, we planned to go further.  But the train stopped for hours, with no connection, we had to leave the station.   We walked around the city to the Dembitza ghetto.  I saw a Jew and I told him I am looking for the  Bochner family from Pilzno,  and he told us there is a Bochner working over there as a furrier.  That was my husband.  So we snuck into the ghetto.  We were already calmer because we were amongst Jews.  There was my cousin Resha who married a Bochner.  So we were 18 people in one room.

Where did you meet your husband?
I knew my husband when he was about 14 years of age.  When I was a child my sisters and I went to visit my Aunt Shpritza in Pilzno.  She was my Grandma Tannebaum's sister.  Shriptza married Aaron Grafshrift.  Their daughter Resha Grafshrift married Leizer Bochner.  So I met Michael Bochner, my future husband, on that visit.    When I came to the Dembitza ghetto in 1942  I arrived at his house.  We got in with his family and we stayed with them.  Then we heard there would be an AKTION.  So I said to my sister let’s go to Lvov.   We went to a friend of my father’s for help, he gave us potato latkes, he gave us an address  where the Jews had been killed.   So we got that room. And we did some mending.    But the landlady figured out we were Jews, we had to leave.  We packed and left.  We walked 12 hours to catch a train and we went back to Dembitza.

We bribed someone and got my oldest sister out to Germany.  She worked in a factory making Rosental china/porcelain.

We were taken to the Gestapo, me and my sister Esther.  We came back to the ghetto, to the Bochners. 11 Dec 1942 we left Dembitza.   The next night half of the group left, and the next night the other half left.  In the first bunker were  me and my husband , my mother in law, my sister Esther and her husband Harry, which is my husband’s brother.  My sister in law Minnie and her husband Abe and her 3-year-old girl Helen (see interview with Helen Cohen).  Pescla Bochner and Leizer Bochner for a short while they lived with us.  It was too crowded, they arranged for another place in another village.  Unfortunately they didn’t make it.

 We stayed there seven months, in Kolomeyea, it was a small farm with one  cow.  We slept double-decker.    We had an encyclopedia!  We had a tiny lamp.  We didn’t wash, maybe once in four months we changed.   There was not room to stand up.     The farmer woman, she was very poor, an old lady, two of her grandchildren were taken to work in Germany.   Yashe Krembach brought us there.  My husband and brother in law made a bunker in the barn where the cow was.  They got a shovel and made a hole big enough for us to go in.    They lined it with trees so it would not fall on us.  The hole into the bunker was a big as this chair.   The cow would lay down on the cover of the hole.   The farm woman suddenly had a coat, a sweater, beer.  Someone informed on her.  The Police came, but the cow sat down on the hole, so we were saved.  But life always has something prepared for us.  This Krembach made another bunker for another group, a family Tau, husband and wife and a seven-year-old son and an educated girl to tutor the boy.  But they didn’t have a bunker like ours, they were sitting in the barn and a fellow saw them.   So Krembach said he would take them to Tarnow ghetto at night in the horse and buggy.   But he took their goods, and killed them in the woods.   A retarded girl showed them where they killed  the Jews.  The police asked Krembach and the retarded girl where are the rest of the Jews, and she showed them.  The police threw a bomb in there and killed all the Jews.  Krembach never came back to this village, he was afraid.    So our farmer told us what happened, and  suggested we leave.   We left at night and lived two weeks in the woods, stealing from the fields.  The police killed the woman who had hidden us.  We had paid the farm woman 4000 zlotys a month.

We married in the ghetto, we didn’t have a real wedding but we didn’t think we would live, so what would it matter.

So two weeks living in the woods, my husband and my brother in law would trade with farmers for bread.  Then we met three brothers, and they knew the villages, and they joined us. The Reich brothers.  We paid a farmer shoes to take us for a few days.   So we built the second bunker.  It was in a barn, too,  and we built a tunnel you had to creep in. My brother in law and my husband and the Reich brothers built it.  And we took in 3 other Jews, my husband knew them,   We paid the second farmer 6000 zlotys a week and after the 3 others joined us, 6,300.   The farmer gave us potatoes, potato soup, some bread, some days we each had a slice of bread.  It was a miracle how we lived through, how we managed, in such unsanitary conditions.  We still had the encyclopedia in the second bunker.   Once it was pouring, and we stood deep in the water, and we asked for pails and we stood in a line and emptied the water outside the barn.

There was a fire in the bunker, a lamp caught fire, some people got burnt on their legs, my brother in law was sleeping and all of a sudden he woke up and he smothered the fire.   The burns got infected, we didn’t have medication, they got marks but it healed up.

When we were living in the woods, my brother in law cut hedges from the tree and covered us to hide from the people from the city.  So a man was walking through with a cow and the cow ate some branches, and they saw all the Jews.  So we gave him money and he promised to make us a bunker in the woods.  So  that evening my brother in law and my brother asked him to take us, and he said I’m a poor guy, I have only one room and no barn, but I can tell you run away because he will turn you in because he has denounced already a lot of Jews.   My mother in law said children, you go, let me die here, but my brother in law said no ma, you will stay with us.  He took his belt and my husband’s belt and tied the mother  around himself .  So when he walked he pulled her.

The second bunker was in the town of Lubcza, near Pilzno.
In the second bunker were me and my husband Mike Bochner,
My sister Esther and her husband Harry Bochner,
My mother in law Rachel Bochner,
My sister in law Minnie and her daughter Helen Bochner.
3  Reich brothers.
Israel  Hamel from Dubezeko;  Benjamin Deresciewitz from Pilzno who  married Minnie Bochner after the war; and Avrum Einspruch from Pilzno.  The Reichs knew which farmers to go to.  Helen lost her father this way, he went for bread for the baby, and they turned him into the police.  So you had to know who to go to.

The three other men, we met when they came to our farmer to ask for bread, and he mentioned them to us.  So for 300 zlotys more we could take them in, but for the same amount of food.

During the day it was pitch dark, we didn’t see light at all, we had to get along.  If we got bread my husband had a scale so we got the same amount.    I would dream and pray, like my father’s dream, that the name of his family would not be killed, destroyed altogether.   And all three of us sisters did live.  My brother went to a village, Jarocin (near Ulanov) and I don’t know how, he was shot by polish police in 1942; he was 13 years old.

The second family that hid us was: Stephan Bradlaw, Clara Bradlaw the wife, oldest son Taddeus, sister Francisca, and Antony the youngest he became a priest.

We got news of the war if the farmer went to the city, he bought a paper, but he had to hide the paper because normally no peasant would buy a paper.   The last 3 months my sister and I lived with another farmer in his house.  Because we were not from Pilzno no one there knew us.   But after so long in the bunker we lost our voice.  So in the house we were reading together, me and my sister, and we worked in the garden to get some color in our cheeks.  So we regained a normal voice.  We were in the second bunker 13 or 14 months.  We were all together 26 months in both bunkers.

The Russians liberated us, my sister saw them and she ran to the bunker and yelled  ’the Russians are here’.  We didn’t trust them and they didn’t trust us.  The next day all the Jews came out of the bunker and went to Pilzno.  Their house was demolished, so they took another Jewish house, nothing from the house was left.

I went back to Ulanow but I found it empty.   Even the stove had been taken.

First we lived in Pilzno, then to Katowice where there were some Jews, and we left our address on the walls because I thought my older sister would come.    My sister from Germany found us in Katowice.   Now she lives here in Jersey City in a small apartment.

So we lived in Katowice, and made contact with the U.S., and we got passports to leave Poland.  My brother-in-law Max Bochner in New Jersey sent $7- or 8000 to Sweden, and a guarantee, but we couldn’t get a visa to Sweden.   This was Feb. ’46.  So we sold the house and saved for a visa to France.  Our train stopped in  Munich, we went to the community center there, we got an apartment and food from UNRA, and furniture.  My husband went to work selling fur coats, and we got ration cards.  We were in Germany from 1946 and we left in 1949, 3 years.  Then we came to Jersey City because my husband had two sisters and a brother already here, and my mother-in-law had already come.

In America I worked in a brassier factory, Maidenform, and my sister sewed.    My husband couldn't get a union card as a furrier.    So we bought a small grocery store on a mortgage.

Was it difficult for you to reintegrate into society after the war?
When I was in Germany, we got an English teacher.  When I gave birth to Paul, in Jersey City, the doctor said “push”and I didn’t understand!  So he got someone to say it in Polish.    When we got here we went to high school at night.    After five years I became a citizen.    All of us after five years became a citizen.  Most of my friends, in the beginning, were all survivors.   We were in contact with each other and helped each other.

When we came here there was a big Pilzno Society.  Max Fogel was the President when we came, later William Seiden was the president.  We did attend meetings.  Slowly the group became smaller and smaller.

We opened a grocery store.  We didn’t know the names of the items, we couldn’t afford to pay anyone, so I worked with him and my sister was with the children.  Until my sister took sick, they discovered it Mother’s Day and before Yom Kippur she passed away.  I was left with a grocery store and 3 children.  I raised the 3 boys.

I think about the Holocaust, I read everything, I watch on television.  I still live with the past.

I just hope that we’ll live in a nice surrounding from now on, we’ll have sunshine and no discrimination.  The Second World War taught us a proper lesson.  There’s plenty of room for everyone, and it doesn’t have to disturb anyone that I’m a Jew, or yellow, or a black person.   –Oral interview conducted in 1996,  transcribed by Sharlene Kranz.