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In Their Own Words

Here are the stories of six Jewish families as told to writer Georgia East

A 1930 family portrait of Eva, David and young Victor Breitburg

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'Those Children Never Saw
Daylight Again'
Victor Breitburg, 71, of Levittown, is a Holocaust survivor.
Within four weeks after the Germans came to Lodz, Poland, where I lived, there was a proclamation that every Jew had to wear a yellow star. Then ghettos formed in the worst part of town and we had to move.

I remember our janitor opening the gates 24 inches and saying you cannot take more than two suitcases with you. We pleaded with her. We packed what we could and went to the ghetto. We had just enough room for a bed on one side and another bed on the other side and a crib.

After a few months my father was arrested. He opened the door for food smugglers and was caught. That year, 1941, we had a terrible winter. Sometimes we didn't have any coal. Our rations became smaller and smaller. We would wake up and the water would be frozen in a pot on the stove. My mother still nursed my sister, even though she was 3, and she nursed another child, whose mother couldn't nurse her. My father came back to the ghetto. He wasn't the same man. He didn't talk about his time away.

In June of 1941, we heard that the Russians declared war on Germany. We felt now we're going to be liberated. But at the end of 1941 our rations were reduced. People were dying, especially grandmothers and grandfathers.

I started working at a woodworking factory, about 12 hours a day . . . We made everything for the Germans from their hats to their shoes.

In 1942, the Germans told us they were going to send the children to farms and we would see them after the war. We hid our sister. My aunt believed them and gave them her daughter. Those children never saw daylight again. I learned later they were gassed and burned.

In June 18, 1943, my father passed away. He was 41.

That year, the Germans took us to work on farms. I decided they're not going to take me. I ran though the field. The men fired bullets, but none hit me. I went back to the ghetto.

In July, 1944, the Germans came to take us to the country to work. My family hid in the basement for days. By Day 6, we were out of food, the children were getting sick and my sister was turning yellow. So we took our knapsack with our pots and pans and clothes and we boarded the train. Day 1 we were given a loaf of bread and something to drink. Day 2, we saw guys in stripes working in the fields. The train stopped near the fields and there was a lot of noise, and a lot of dogs barking. Women were told to go on one side and men on the other side. I was 17. I didn't want to leave my mother.

She said, `You go.' When I turned around, they were so far I didn't see them. On the third day I noticed somebody from Lodz and I asked him where the women and children were. He took me to the end of a wire and he said behind those buildings there was a crematorium. He said they were all gassed and cremated.

I could not understand cremation. I couldn't understand gas. I stood there for about an hour. I looked at the smoke. I still couldn't believe it. I didn't care if I lived or died. But after some time passed, I had the will of survival. The hate was so strong, that I had to live.

I never forgot looking at skeletons and dead people. We were skeletons, and as we rode by on trains, the people outside would spit on us. I continued to work. I would dig up bombs that did not explode. I figured if I don't do it I won't get food and I'll die anyway.

On May 8, 1945, I was coming out of the bathroom and I saw people running. I said, what's happening. I didn't move. The war was over. Somehow I survived. I was the only survivor out of 54 people in my family. I went back to Lodz to see if I could find some of my family members, but there was no one.

After the war Victor Breitburg found relatives in America who had left Europe before the Holocaust and moved to Brooklyn, where he met his wife, Lucille. In 1959 he moved to Levittown, where he raised his two daughters, Denis and Myra. He recently retired from his woodwork business.

My Mother and the
Jews of Sag Harbor
Ethel Bookstaver Charach, 90, of Patchogue, remembers her mother, Annie Yarfitz.