No Heroes: A Memoir of Coming Home

Irene Goes to the Ghetto

In ghetto I was seventeen. I know Arthur already ten years. Everybody has to work someplace, slave labor. They give me a job with a family and I’m supposed to be their cook and iron their shirts and all this. I think that’s the end of my life because I don’t know how to do these things. So lucky me, there was a main maid who was Polish, but nice. Very unusual. She showed me how to iron the shirt and what kind of food they liked and how to prepare it.

My mother was in the line to live or die. I had my father’s Iron Cross. It was the highest authority medal that existed in Germany. He received it in World War I. He was a colonel in the Austrian army and he saved many German lives. I showed the Iron Cross to the person picking who would live, so she let my mother go. Three months later they choose lives again. But this time it is SS man. He was mad that I showed the Iron Cross. He took the Iron Cross and shot my mother in front of me. My mother was killed before my eyes. On the street. The SS. By the pistol.

Then they sent me to an apartment that the Germans took over from the Jews. He came with his family, the name of Jore. He was the director of a construction company for the army. When I came in first time, I saw there was a piano, and I played pretty well yet. I remembered the Chopin waltz, and I played and he came and said, oh, you’re playing piano. They started to ask me questions and give me a lot of bread and tea, just because of one piece on the piano. I never played it again. Chopin saved my life.