Halocaust survivors Joseph Morton and Malka Baran

I watched Joseph Morton survivor story he was born in 1924 in Lodz, Poland. He talks about having a fairly normal early childhood hood, he had 5 brothers and 1 sister. They all lived in a small one bedroom apartment and some of the young children shared a bed with the parents. He grew up in a very traditional, way his family celebrated holidays and the Sabbath. Then he starts to talk about when the war started he said it all started very quickly, the war began on a Wednesday and that Friday the Germans were already marched in and had taken over. They made all the Jews walk down to the market place and see the bodies they had already hung of people who disobeyed them just to show their power. He then goes on describing the Ghetto and how they crammed so many people in this area and all the hunger problems there were that everyone was starving there were only a few lucky enough to not have problems getting food. He mentions that there was also a smaller Ghetto for Gypsy's and at night they would heard shots being fired. At one point he and his family was told that they were going to go do different jobs. Once they arrived at Ashfits that was the end of his family, they separated everyone randomly. He, his father, and his brother were all placed in the same spot his mother and the rest of his siblings were sent away. He was lucky to have been in very good physical condition so he was able to fight off disease in the Ghetto. He did get sick for a period of time but was able to fight it off. They fixed American military jeeps, and electrical work. He was lucky enough to be given the chance to move to Canada. He still does not know what happen to his mother and other siblings. His father latter joined him and his brother in the states.

"they would grab people they took them away we didn't know where some of them they tortured I'm shamed to say it they would take them to places where they had barrels of crap I should say shit and they made them put their faces in those barrels."

Malka Baran was born on January 30^th 1927, in Warsaw, Poland. She was apart of a family of four with extended family. She grew up in Transtahula where she went to private school. As a child she and her friends would play “games” such as walking up to strangers and asking them what time it was, they would do this to several different people. Her family lived in a one room apartment. Baran’s father owned a small printing company, just below their apartment. In September 1939 she remembers the Germans occupying Transtahula, in just one day they over took the city. The schools all closed, teachers were disappearing and German soldiers were walking the streets. They were ordered to wear yellow stars on their arms, shortly after her father’s printing equipment was taken from him. Slowly the Germans began to enforce more and more rules. In 1943 her family was taken from their home and sent to the street where they separated the Jews into five groups. Her mother was taken away from her family and that was the last time she saw her mother. Her father and brother were both shot in the back while they were working. She was taken to a work camp. She and a friend met a Jewish Russian who would bring them food every day. He wanted to help Baran escape but once they began to make a plan he was sent to a different town. But a few weeks later he sent one of his men with a note that said to follow him. Her friends decided she should go but not by herself so a friend went with her.  On their journey away they stopped in an abandoned village to stay the night. The man brought them soup an blankets, and brought them into the stable. The girls were afraid to fall asleep , once they fell asleep they were both woke up by something falling on them, when they woke up in the morning a blanket was covering them. It the first time in five years that they experienced kindness.

 

 

“I had a golden heart that was given to me by my parents on my last birthday on a golden chain. When I came to came I wore a skirt and somehow I made a little tiny entering hole in the waist line and put the heart and chain in it, it was my only thing from home”