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My Mother's Memories. 80th Anniversary of Auschwitz

Barbara Frost

My mother only talked about her memories of being in the Warsaw ghetto, escaping and joining the Polish resistance and fighting in the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, only 50 years later when it was the 50th anniversary of Normandy.


My mother only entered the ghetto because her grandmother had come out of hiding because she wanted to ‘be with her people’ and her mother wanted to be with her. (You could initially enter the ghetto fairly freely via the law courts in Warsaw - it was subsequently sealed). From a privileged background they found themselves sharing a room with other people and sharing a toilet and whatever washing facilities were available.


Initially my mother worked making forged work permits - it was believed again initially that these permits might prevent a person being deported.  She described seeing bodies hanging from lamp posts still twitching and to get out of her front door she had to climb over bodies.  My great grandmother was deported from the ghetto and sent to Treblinka. My grandmother had hidden her jewellery in her clothes so they were able to deal on the black market for food. (My mother always maintained that they never got a good exchange rate!). She and my grandmother were in the ghetto for 18 months - a friend off the family took 18 months to collect enough money to bribe the guards to let them out.


My mother and grandmother joined the resistance. My grandmother looked after a safe house, and years later I met a relative of hers who owed her life to her for bringing her and her mother food and money. (Of course, if Granny had been caught, she would have been shot). My mother became a courier in the resistance (the death rate among couriers was very high).


My mother was engaged during the war to a fellow resistance fighter but he was shot while planting a bomb on some railway lines. She believed he was betrayed by a traitor - although there were very few polish traitors which is in itself remarkable considering the horrors that were perpetrated in Poland. 


During the Ghetto Uprising in 1943 they tried to get food into the ghetto but were unable and to her dying day she could smell the smell of burning bodies.


After the Warsaw Uprising the Nazis emptied Warsaw of all the men when it was the women’s turn my grandmother and mother were at the end of the long procession and my grandmother heard a German officer tell a soldier that the women should turn right on such and such a street so my grandmother told my mother that they must turn left which they did they then hid during the terrible winter of 1944.  (My mother never spoke of that time).


I would argue that the Holocaust was unique - part of the dictionary definition of the word holocaust ‘a very large amount of destruction especially by fire or heat.’  The Warsaw Ghetto was burnt and after people were gassed, they were cremated. Also, the Germans retrieved hair, gold teeth and even the bones of the dead were pulverised to make fertiliser.


She never called herself a ’holocaust survivor’ as she hadn’t been in the camps but in my mind, she was a ‘survivor’ as the dictionary meaning of ’survivor’ is ‘a person who continues to live despite nearly dying’. My mother was 18 when war broke out and was traumatised all her life. I suppose now we would say that she suffered from PTSD - I do remember that in the late 50s she was offered electrical shock treatment which she refused.


'WE MUST NEVER FORGET'

Barbara Frost (née Abrahams) was born in 1950, at a time when butter was still rationed. Although very young, she recalls an uncle of hers referring to her mother as a heroine. Her mother was born in 1922 and died in 2003. She spoke 5 languages fluently. She was an avid reader and an exceptional knitter - her knitted baby clothes have already been passed down two generations.

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