Holocaust Gedenktag

Smadar, Dienstag, 29. April 2003, 09:26 (vor 7673 Tagen)

Ein unerträglicher Tag - und immer noch gibt es
neue, unbekannte Geschichten aus dem Tor zur Hölle
-------------------------
www.haaretzdaily.com

`I thought I was the only Jewish girl left in the
world´

By Ronit Roccas

When Cela Lieberman was 11, her mother daubed
lipstick on her lips and cheeks. `From now on,
you´re 15,´ she said, thereby saving her.

Row after row of Germans and Ukrainians surrounded
the death grounds in the Kielce ghetto in Poland.
Throughout an entire night in 1943, some 2,000
men, women and children - the remains of a large
community that had not long beforehand been sent
to an unknown location in the East - stood there.
In complete silence they stood, and with them Cela
(Celinqa) Lieberman, then 11, one girl out of the
48 children still left in the ghetto. Suddenly a
screech is heard: "Leave the children here!" Roza
Albirt, Celinqa´s mother, removes a kerchief from
her sack, wraps it around her daughter´s head, and
paints her cheeks and lips with lipstick. "Now,"
she tells her, "no more crying. You´re 15."

"Time passes and suddenly I see that they´ve taken
all the children and that only my brother and I
are still there," Lieberman recalls. "He was then
14, and I thought I was the only Jewish girl left
in the whole world. After the aktion, they took
everyone who was still left to a factory building,
and two days later I managed to find two other
children who´d hid out in the ghetto. All the
others were brought to the cemetery in the city
and shot."

In the book "Celinqa - A Girl Who Survived
Auschwitz," which was recently published by Yad
Vashem Publishing House, Lieberman describes the
children´s aktion in terrifying detail. She says
she remembers it all, just as it happened at the
time, even without the journal she wrote
immediately after the war.

Dreaming of loaves of bread

In the book, she writes that she stayed with her
family in Ganryquw, a wagon factory, for an entire
year until July 1944, at which time they were told
to pack up their belongings. They were promised
that they would be sent by train to Germany to
work there, but Celinqa was afraid, terribly
afraid. Ever since all the children were taken
away and she was the only one left, she´d been
afraid all the time. "Everyone was afraid, but if
you were in their crosshairs as I was, you were
much more afraid," she says. "I knew I was a
child, and therefore, had no right to exist, and
I´d been consumed by fear ever since then."

Even in Auschwitz, where the train took her, the
fear was stronger than the hunger. "In Auschwitz,
everyone talked only about food," relates
Lieberman. "There were 12 women in every bunk, and
the whole time they would talk about the foods
they used to cook at home, and would exchange
recipes. It calmed them down
[...]
The women would talk about food, and Lieberman
would lie all scrunched up on the bunk, shaking
all over and talking with God. "The whole time, I
asked him to let me die without feeling it - just
like that, in my sleep. Once, when we were cold,
mama asked me what I was thinking about, and I
said I was thinking about the ones who went to the
wires - to the electrical fence - who were heroes.
One second they are afraid, and then that´s it;
it´s all over. And then mama said, when the first
snow comes down we´ll hug each other and then go
to the wires."