Recollection of Krystyna Pajes née Sigalin concerning a ring she received in Brandenburg. It is on 2 pages, double sided; the text is in capitals; on the line paper, with a number at the top of each page. Therenclosed is a copy of a document from the camp in Frankfurt (Oder).
The text was donated together with the ring to the museum collection (see object MPOLIN-M759).
Full text of the memoir:
[Top of card motto:]
Hassidic proverb:
"For the ignorant old age is winter, for the wise old age is harvest time".
The story of a ring from Germany
After the Warsaw Uprising, as a child, I was deported with the civilian population, driven out of Warsaw by the Germans. I found myself as a forced labourer in the town of Putlitz, Brandenburg. I got there via the camp in Frankfurt/Oder.
In this concentration camp I was registered as Barbara Szulc, daughter of Feliksa Szulc. Feliksa Szulc stated at the registration that our documents were lost during the uprising and that I was her daughter. I enclose a copy of a part of a document issued in the camp in Frankfurt. From the camp we were sent "to work" in a huge estate, which belonged to a family of German aristocrats, the Barons von Putlitz.
We had to live in a brick barrack, in a separate room, and sleep in a shared bed. The windows of the room overlooked the road.
Through these windows I saw, in the last days of the war (end of April? beginning of May 1945?) a column of prisoners from concentration camps. The prisoners were wearing blue and white striped uniforms, I had never seen this before.
When the column, escorted by armed soldiers (?), sentries in German uniforms, had a short break in its march, I saw the prisoners cutting grass in a roadside ditch and eating it...
A few prisoners managed to escape during the "standstill", it was just opposite our barrack, so those who managed to run across the road ended up in our yard, behind the house.
The "yard" was a threshing floor, fenced off with wire. There was a storeroom for wood, in which there were also cages with rabbits.
I remember exactly how we burnt the prisoners' striped clothes in the kitchen. The inhabitants of our barrack gave some of their civilian clothes to the escapees. The escaped prisoners spoke Polish. They did not know where they were being driven to. Many supposedly died of hunger and exhaustion, or were shot. On the way. Today I know that it was a so-called ["]death march". One of the refugees from the "march" hid in a tree hiding place in the attic. I was supposed to bring him water and food.
That man gave me a ring. The ring, similar to a signet ring, was stamped in white metal and decorated by hand with lines and points. On the front was a monogram [word in bold letters], decorative, the letters I don't remember. Who was it made for? Whose monogram was it? The prisoner made it himself. I knew neither the name nor the surname of the escapee. I kept the ring for many years. It arrived with me, on the long march through Germany, to destroyed Warsaw. It was the end of May 1945.
With time, due to my emigration from Poland in 1969, I gave this ring, historic for me, to Feliksa Szulc's daughter, Malgosia Rybus.
Now, in July 2014, we both decided that, on the eve of the outbreak of the 1944 Uprising, we would give this ring, with this explanation of how it came to be first with me and then with Malgosia Rybus, to some suitable museum.
We decided to give it to the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw.
The decision is justified, I was born in Warsaw, on 10 July 1931, as a Jewish child of the Sigalin family, well known in Warsaw.
I survived the war under many false names, one of them being Szulc.
Västerås, Sweden. July 2014 | Krystyna Pajes
