HENRY G

Heather Setliff HENRY G.

Henry G. was born in Oleszyce, Poland on June 14, 1921. According to
Henry, he and Eva were "sweethearts" before the war. In 1941 he joined the
Polish Army in the Soviet Union and fought the Germans from Lenino to the
Reichstag in Berlin.

The following interview was conducted by the Institute's Holocaust
Education Specialist, Plater Robinson.

Today is March 27, 1989. It is five thirty PM. I'm on Jackson Ave., an old haunt, and I'm about to interview Henry G. And I look forward to this very much, because I like this gentleman very much.

Well, Mr. G...

You're going to ask me questions, and you want me to answer them.

Exactly.
But the first thing I want to ask is your name and where you were from and in what year you were born?

My name is Henry G., and I am born in June 14th, 1921. The city that I was born is called Oleszyce. OLESZYCE. It is in Poland now, I believe, which I'm not sure because it's on the border between Poland and Russia.

It's in Poland now. I looked it up. You know Mr. G., you probably don't believe this, but I'm going to that town. I'm going to see that town for sure. And so my first question has to do with Oleszyce and I'm particularly interested in the Jewish way of life in Oleszyce before the war. So the question is, if you and I were together in Oleszyce before the war and we left your father's shop, and walked down the streets, what would our eyes see?

You're talking about before the war? Well, before the war it used to be a very religious town. It was a regular Galician Jewish town. It's in Galicia you see, part of Poland. Where the people were mostly religious and Orthodox religious.

Would you describe Oleszyce as a Shtetl?

It is a shtetl. We had about between two and three thousand Jews living in that shtetl. It was divided in three parts. Actually one part Polish people were living there. One part Ukrainians. And one part Jews, and for years we used to get along fine with our neighbors. We had no big trouble. Also the anti-Semitism lately was growing in the last years before the war.

After the death of Pilsudski?

I wouldn't say directly after the death of Pilsudski. It had nothing to do with that. I would blame the Nazi propaganda from Germany. This propaganda infected the Polish people and Ukrainian. And people started to look at us like we're some kind of parasites living on their account. Because as you know the Jewish people in Poland, used to be mostly businesses, not mostly, some of them were business, but I would say the majority of people in my city were not business people. They were workers, hard working people. They were shoemakers, tailors, roofers, making tin roofs and you can see them sitting on the roofs and making roofs. Hand craft people, and they were all kind of other hand work people that were connected with different trades. Then they were also making the religious articles in our city. Our city was one of the biggest manufacturers of religious articles used in the Jewish religion. Torahs, the production

of Torahs was very big in our city. You could see about I would say many, many families who were occupied making the skins, preparing the skins scrapping the skins, drying them out in front of their houses. They lived in small little shacks, and they worked mostly outside, outdoors. In winter time they pulled it inside, dry those skins, and they smelled awful. But they make a living from that. The skins were from the animals, were scrapped to be able to make parchment out of it, and then a bunch of people who were busy with their children and grandchildren. It went from grandfather to father to son. They used to write those Torahs, the holy...what do the call the Torahs in English...not the Bible (laugh)...

The Talmud.

The Torah that is being read every Saturday in the Jewish...in other words this had to be written on parchment, and had to be written by men only, not by woman, and there were woman who made the threads to sew these parchments together. Those were on big rolls and it was a big industry. A lot of people were busy doing that.

Including your father?

No, my father was not. My father was a business man. He was...he had people he paid them and he sold mostly textile in the city. He was a fabric, a fabric salesman. We had a little store where we sold fabrics. But he also had tailors working for him that he sold ready made clothes sometimes for the farmers who used to come into town. Once a week we had a market and the farmers used to come in and bring in their products (pop).

On Wednesday.

On Wednesday, and then they sold their products and they came into my father's store and they were buying fabrics, the ladies, and they used to sew that at home, or they were also buying some of ready made clothes which my father supplied them. Through, he bought that from tailors who used to make it in the city. Boys and girls, and fathers used to be occupied making the clothes.

So he did a great deal of business with the Gentile population.

My father did, yes, we did a lot of business with the Gentile population. Yes. We had a lot of Gentile customers, my father was very well liked in the city, and in my store as far as I remember, outside the store was a big sign, and it didn't say fabrics or something else, it just said, on the sign, a big sign, the name was (omitted). (omitted). And everybody knew the G.'s in the city. I'm sure that the people who live there now remember the G.'s very well because my father was not a rich man, but he was a very nice man and he treated the people very good and so did my grandmother. My grandmother was in the store day and night. She was the brain of the business. She was running the whole business over there.

What was your father's first name?

Leo. The men in my city did the business but the women were the brains behind the business. The reason it was like that. It was because the men were occupied mostly with studying the Torah and the Bible in the synagogue. We had three synagogues. My father used to take me each day, wake me up, four o'clock in the morning to go with him to the synagogue. To study the holy books, and discuss with me the holy books and we discussed the Torah. My father wanted me to be a rabbi, to become a rabbi. So at the age of thirteen, after I became Bar Mitzvah, actually, it was about the same time that Hitler came to power in Germany. I decided to leave my city where I lived, and went to Lvov, to the big city, to Lvov, to a Yesehiva. I sent three years in the Yesehiva. I came home a little later when I was close to seventeen years old already. The reason I returned from there was because my mother's health was very bad. My father couldn't run the business by himself. It was very hard. My mother got sick. We were seven children in the house. Babies kept on being born every year. Some of them I hardly knew because I was away for three years, and so my mother, my father came to Lvov and asked me to come to stop my studies. I was supposed to be a rabbi. Stop my studies. And so I came back and helped my father in the business, and I still studied in the synagogues the Jewish Torah and books and everything like that. Well, I was a religious boy. You can say I was a Hasid. You know what a Hasid means? I was wearing eahs here. A black coat, and a black hat. And I was one of these Hasidim, religious boys, so were all of my brothers too. My family was a religious family, and my grandfather was a Hasid of the Belz rabbi. The rabbi from Belz lived a little bit close to my city, and my grandfather used to take me for big holidays like Rosh Hashana, the New Year's holiday, to stay in Belz for about a couple of weeks. He stayed with me over there. We used to go on horse and buggy. Used to drive sometimes three days and three nights through the woods to reach that city, Belz. Sometimes two, sometimes three nights, depends on the horses. If you could get a good strong horse and a buggy to hire. It's amazing how the Jewish people were not afraid to drive through the woods to see that rabbi. Day and night, driving a horse and buggy.

You as a young man dressed as a Hasid, as a rabbinical student, didn't you stand out a great deal and did that attract attention from the Gentiles that were hostile.

It did attract but it wasn't, for instance, I wouldn't dare going, we had a river in the city.

The San.

It was smaller. It was not the real San. The real San was in Jaroslaw, but this is a little river that falls into the San. I think it's called the ... or something like that. In that river we used to go bathe and swim, cause that's the only little river that was in the city. We wouldn't dare, being Hasdim.

Some of the Polish boys would do something to make fun out of us or cheat or make laugh from us or do something to us, maybe beat us up too.

Did that ever happen to you?

Not directly, but I was one time beaten up by a Polish boy, couple of Polish boys, I was walking in the street at Oleszyce with another friend of mine, and they pushed us off from the sidewalk and told us that we shouldn't walk on the sidewalk and told us that we shouldn't walk on the sidewalk. They came against us, and they pushed us off from the sidewalk, and they said we should walk where the horses walk. We shouldn't walk on the sidewalk. Polish Endeks, you know, Nazis or something. My friend was very upset, and he was stronger than me, and he hit one of the boys, and he fell down, and we start running, and we run away, and so we disappeared very fast.

Oleszyce was a small town, so did you know these boys?

No, we didn't know them because they were all kinds of boys, maybe I know him, but we wouldn't never report on them. Actually, Jewish people would never report something like that. Small things like that. We would never report it.

Because you would not meet with sympathy?

The police were on their side, yes. And the anti-Semitism at that time was getting bigger and bigger. It was the time of the Nazis, you understand, so I just kept my mouth shut, and took it. That's all. We just took it. We just, we were not trained, really, to fight. We were not fighters. We were people of the book. We were studying people. We were learners, and our leaders never taught us how to fight. They never taught us how to fight and that it will be necessary to fight, which was very wrong. Because we were never, later on we realized that we, actually, I remember when I survived and I returned to my city, the first question I asked, after I met my wife, that was a year after the war. I asked my wife, Where were all those young men who marched in May 3, it's a big holiday in Poland, and I remember 1939, on May 3, there was an organization in my city called Betar. Betar is a Zionist organization. They got permit from the government to carry guns, weapons, to dress up like soldiers, and march together with the Polish army. Demonstrate in the street. That was in 1939. A group of Jewish boys from Betar, I would say maybe twenty, twenty-five, I don't remember exactly, those boys were my friends and I remember them because I always looked at them with envy. They were stronger than me. They were trained to fight, and Betar teached them a little how to fight, not to fight in Poland but in Israel. Teaching them when they come to Israel, the Betar, an organization was trained to fight against the Arabs in Israel. So the Polish government permitted them to walk in the streets with their guns. And it was a beautiful scenery to see that, Jewish boys with guns, walking, for the first time in my life I ever saw that, and when I returned after the war, I asked my wife, Where were the boys? Why didn't they up some kind of resistance? Why didn't they fight? So my wife who was over there till the end, and you know the story of my wife, said, Henry, they couldn't. It was impossible to fight the Nazis. It was impossible to fight. We were reduced from people to roaches. Everybody stepped on us, everybody hated us. And everybody tried to fight us. So we couldn't fight them. It was impossible. Don't blame anybody for not fighting, we couldn't do that. She was in the ghetto till the last minute. And I believed her. (more)

To continue reading this interview go to: http://www.tulane.edu/~so-inst/henry.html

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