Posted on 04/28/2016 12:30:32 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Imagine finding refuge with your family from the Nazis only to have your life threatened by your own family and other refugees. This is what happened to Frances (Fay) Malkin, now 78 and living in West Orange, when she was a child in Poland in 1942.
Along with her mother, grandmother, two aunts, two uncles, a cousin and seven other Jews, including a medical doctor, she spent two years in a hayloft above a pig sty. The property was owned by a Polish Catholic woman, Francisca Halamajowa. Malkin was 4 years old and took to fits of crying constantly.
Her mother covered her mouth with a pillow to no avail. The owner would even create noise outside to mask the crying, but they all feared that if the Nazis heard her cries, they would murder everyone. It was then decided that Malkin would be poisoned.
Ever feisty, she spit out the pills and medicine. Malkin said that finally, her family thought the poison worked, but she revived. "After this, they left me alone because they thought I was a miracle child," said Malkin, who remembered that later they sprinkled sleeping powder in her food to keep her quiet.
Today, Malkin is anything but quiet about the horrors the Nazis perpetrated on the millions of Jews and others they sought to exterminate. But it was not always that way. Once she arrived with her mother in the U.S. in 1949, they wanted to forget and get on with their lives. It was only in the past 10 years that she has become an activist and embarked on speaking engagements.
(Excerpt) Read more at nj.com ...
His parents were of the merchant class, of Chinese/Viet ethnicity, and knew they'd be cleansed under the new regime.
They fled on an old barge-type vessel that began taking on water immediately. The vessel was very overcrowded. The people began throwing everything overboard.
An old guy died. They tossed him overboard.
There were some soldiers that still had their weapons - overboard the weapons went.
There was a high ranking guy with a moped. When they went to toss the moped he threatened them with a gun. They overpowered him and both moped and gun were tossed.
Finally there was nothing left to toss, and an old lady began kicking his pregnant mom in the stomach to make her miscarry, so they could throw the baby/placenta overboard.
Stories like that and the one above make me feel very blessed. It also reminds me of the desperate measures people will take to survive.
The baby survived, BTW, and he was born an American. So of the 4 boys they are named Giang, Doung, Duc, and...Martin. I think that there is funny as hell!
My wife knows an older gal that came over from Germany. She was a child during the war. Some lady in her village gave some bread to a child in the nearby concentration camp - tossing it over the fence I suppose.
The lady said the Nazis took the woman and her entire family - husband and all the kids. Made everyone in the village come out to watch as the family was paraded to the town square, wrapped them in hay, then soaked in gas, then lit on fire.
Kind of puts to rest the stories that the local Germans didn’t know about the nearby concentration camps. Of course not much they could do about them anyway.
Just watching the Army make the locals bury them was enough evidence for me.
They knew and did not care.
When I was 20 something I took a trip from Hamburg to Bavaria with a Kaiser-esque German businessman.
That evening he drank me under table all the while telling me tales and making reparation for the evil done during WW II.
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