Paul Calvert heard Ruth Zaks story

Ruth Zaks and her daughter

Oscar Schindler was a German who started by earning millions as a war profiteer. Later on he spent around four million German marks keeping over 1,000 Jews out of the death camps. The Holocaust saw six million Jews murdered; a genocide of two-thirds of the European Jewish population. Ruth Zaks was one of the few survivors, a Schindler Jew. Paul Calvert heard her story.

Ruth: I was born in Krakow, Poland, which is a very beautiful town. Life was very good before the war. I went to a private Hebrew school. At the first grades we learned two languages, which were Polish and Hebrew. At the high grades we learned German and Latin.

There was some Anti-Semitism before the war but I didn't feel it. The Polish President was very good to us Jews; we could really do what we wanted. In the university it was different, Jewish people couldn't study there.

Paul: How did the mood change in Krakow?

Ruth: I was 13 years old when war was started. It was very bad for the Jewish in the small towns; they took all the people and killed them. In Krakow they persecuted the Jews slowly. The Germans closed all the Jewish schools and made the Jews clean the streets. They took over all Jewish business and took their furniture.

Some of the men escaped to Russia where life wasn't easy but at least they weren't killed and there weren't gas chambers.

Later the Germans made all Jews live crowded in the ghetto. Me and my family weren't put in the ghetto, but were put on a train. On the train my parents bribe the guards there so that we could get off the train in a very small town, where my mother had a cousin. Living there with our cousin wasn't so bad. Once, the SS arrived with a list and they shouted, "Rouse rouse". They asked for our names but we were not on their list, I don't know why, perhaps it was because we had stayed with our cousin. My brother Arthur, who was two years older then me, 17 years old, disappeared when two SS men argued if he should stay or leave with them. We didn't know what happened to him. Later we heard that he was taken to a camp for young people and he was shot there.

In that small town, many times we saw the shadows of the German soldiers when they shot or hit people. Life became so bad in the little town, there weren't more Jews there and we decided to go back to Krakow and get into the ghetto. Every one of us took a small suitcase and we wore the Star of David on our arm. In Krakow it was white. We left for Krakow with train.

We arrived at my aunt's house. She was Jewish but her husband wasn't. She tried to hide her Jewish identity. We told her what was happened and her husband was good to us. Her son helps us get into the ghetto and so we ended in the ghetto.

In the ghetto we all had to work. My mother clean German offices and my father worked in a factory. I also worked outside the ghetto in an army airport where we were many girls working together. A truck took us every morning and brought us back in the evening.

We had a small place in the ghetto, two beds and a small table. Once in a while a transporter came and took people away. When I went to work I didn't know if when I'll come back I'll see my family again. The Germans said that the people are going to work in another place, but we never heard anything from the people who were taken. We all believed that they were killed, but we didn't know how, all we knew was that it wasn't good.

Ruth Zaks

Everyone went to his or her place. Once I went back to my place, I met my father, Yoachim, but my mother, Tonia, didn't come back. It was when they sent people to Belzhez to gas chambers. We were sure that these people didn't go to a camp or to work but went to the gas chambers.

In the airport I worked in, the pilots were very nice to us. They were good people, they weren't like the SS soldiers and they treat us well and gave us good food. They decided there to build us sheds, so that we could live there and will be every day on time on work. It was very good for us there. At 1944 the Germans began to liquidize the ghetto. Me and my father were moved from the ghetto to Puashov, a concentration camp. One of the German officer there, Göts, was a sadistic monster, he shoot everybody and sent his two dogs to kill people. After the war he was hanged. In Puashov I worked at a factory and my father at factory where they built pieces for airplanes. After a while Oscar Shindler sent a request for 80 women to work at his metal factory. I was one of them and we moved to live in sheds by the factories we worked in. My father worked at factory near by and we both lived at the same area of sheds.

When the Russian get closer to Poland at August 44, Shindler moved his factory to Czechoslovakia. He asked for the same people to work for him there, but the German agreed to his request in one condition, only after his old worker will move to Puashov and then to Auschwitz; so me and my father went back to Puashov. My father was immediately sent to Mathausen and was killed there. Me and another 300 women stayed in the camp and were busy day and night, burning dead bodies that we dig from the ground. The German wanted to get rid of all the evidence.