Mala Kacenberg - Malas Cat: A Memoir of Survival in World War II

A Memoir of Survival in World War II

Malas Cat

Mala Kacenberg

MALAS CAT

Pegasus Books, Ltd.

148 West 37th Street, 13th Floor

New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2022 by Mala Kacenberg

First Pegasus Books cloth edition January 2022

Originally published as Alone in the Woods, C.I.S. Publishers, January 1, 1995.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review in a newspaper, magazine, or electronic publication; nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other, without written permission from the publisher.

ISBN: 978-1-64313-903-6

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-64313-904-3

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

www.pegasusbooks.com

my dear parents, Yitzchak and Frimchy Szorer and my grandparents who all instilled in me enough religious knowledge to sustain me throughout the war;

my older sister Balla, whom I adored and always looked to for guidance;

my only brother Yechiel Gershon, so brutally murdered right at my feet;

my younger sister Esther, so bright and mature, who was only thirteen years old when she, too, was ruthlessly murdered;

my sweet little sisters Kresele and Surele, as golden as their hairlocks and far too young to understand what was happening and for whom I begged for food daily;

my younger sisters Freidele and Devoirele, who died so very young even before the ravages of war had commenced;

my dear uncles, aunts and cousins and so many numerous friends, whose loss I shall always feel and whose love I shall always remember;

the six million Jewish martyrs, who were brutally murdered by the Germans.

Dedicated to:

my dear husband for his encouragement and forbearance in sharing my burden of the tragic past, for his patience and understanding whilst I recorded these painful memories and together with whom, with Hashems help, I was able to rebuild a wonderful Jewish family;

our wonderful children and grandchildren may they continue to carry forward the torch of their heritage.

Amen

I was only twelve-and-a-half years old when the shadow of the Third Reich fell across Europe. As the nightmare of the German invasion of my defenceless country began, I was more concerned with my schoolbooks and my family and friends than with the ramifications of war. I could not even begin to imagine the extent of the horrors that were soon to follow.

I was by nature a very contented child and enjoyed my early years of life immensely. In those sunny days of my childhood, I was still sheltered from the dreadful fears by my dear parents and did not know what catastrophe was going to befall the Jewish people and my family.

The passage of time since those dreadful days does not blur the images of the depths to which humanity can sink. They remain indelibly and brutally engraved in my brain. And yet, because of the enormity of the crimes, if they are to be remembered at all, I must record mid-twentieth-century history as I, Mala Szorer, witnessed it.

I know that many people will wonder why I have suddenly decided to write this book. To them I would like to say that I have endured many sleepless nights. While floating between consciousness and semi-consciousness, I cry out, Dear Mother and Father! I am coming home to you at last. I want to see all of you once more in our cosy little house, with the river flowing so peacefully nearby, with white pebbles all along it, the ones that gave me hours of enjoyment when I was just a child. I long to see, once more, the green fields beyond our house where we relaxed and enjoyed long walks together. Please invite all my dear friends and put on a big feast, Mother dear, because I am coming to tell you the most horrendous story that you ever heard about my miraculous circumvention of death on so many occasions and about my loneliness for so many years.

A very familiar voice seems to be calling out as if from Heaven, Do not enter Tarnogrd, my dear child. There is no one there to listen to you any more. With a sudden quiver in my heart, I wake up from that fanciful vision, from that nightmare. When fully awake, I remember and soon determine to write my story not just for my dear, lost, annihilated family and friends but for the whole world, so that they too may remember and not allow the memories of those dreadful happenings to fade away like leaves in autumn.

Tarnogrd. As the immaculate boots of the Nazi soldiers trampled the pastoral tranquillity of that village in the Polish countryside, my life was about to change starkly and irrevocably. I was to be plucked from the warm bosom of my grandparents, parents, brother and sisters and cast out to survive as best as I could, to do battle with the elements in an increasingly hostile world.

Very soon events overtook my family and me, and the systematic annihilation of the Jewish population of Poland began. The appalling conditions that my people endured and the civilised worlds silence in the face of such evil stick in my mind like a yellowed, dog-eared photograph, the photograph of the most awful chapter in the history of mankind the Holocaust. There is an old saying that others may fear what the morrow will bring, but I must tell the world what happened yesterday. My story may seem fantastic or fanciful, but it is all true. It all happened to me in my lifetime, not a hundred years ago but just one short generation ago. We owe it to the dead to keep their memory alive by reminding the world of its responsibility never to forget. For to face the future one has to understand the past.

I was born into an observant Jewish family in Tarnogrd, a small town deep in the heart of Poland in the vicinity of Lublin. My parents had nine children, three of whom died in infancy of dysentery and influenza, illnesses for which there was no cure in those days. In retrospect, I can see that they were the lucky ones, for they were spared the agonies and suffering that lay in store for the rest of my family.

In the early 1930s, my father, Yitzchak Szorer, left for Uruguay on a business venture. Times were very hard in Poland, and he was the only breadwinner in our family. His brothers Jacob and Meilich were already there, and they settled in Uruguay for good. Thus they escaped the events that were to bring about the annihilation of my entire family and of six million of our people.

About two years after his departure to South America, my father returned to Tarnogrd, to my mother and us children, from whom he could not be parted any longer. At first he believed that he could settle in Uruguay, but he soon realised that it would be too difficult to bring up children there in a religious manner, for at that time Uruguay had no Jewish schools or even an established Jewish community.

To sustain our large family, my father engaged in many small businesses, but eventually he gave those up and decided to become a wholesaler of fruit. He began by leasing a few orchards on the outskirts of our town. Later, he leased them from farmers in adjoining villages like ukowa and Chmielek and other places whose names I no longer recall. He would lease the orchards when the trees were still in bloom, so that he could estimate how much fruit they would produce. He was very seldom wrong. Although we were never rich, we somehow managed to exist on the profits of those fruit, and we also had enough fruit for ourselves, which kept us all healthy.