THE LIFE OF BRONISLAVA SCHLACHTER

born in Plontch on November 7, 1914.

(as told to her grandson, Jonathan Gadir) 

EARLY YEARS IN PLONTCH 

I was born in November 1914 in Polaniec, ‘Plontch’ in Yiddish, a tiny shtetl on the west bank of the Vistula river south-east of Kielce. It was on the edge of what was known as Congress Poland. On the other side of the river was Galicia, part of Austria.

My family’s name was Schlachter. Our family had lived in Polaniec for hundreds of years. My parents were devoutly religious yet well-educated people. My father, Meir Schlachter was a torah scholar. His shelves were lined with countless volumes of Torah studies.  

My mother’s name was Tzila Weizman. She was the eldest of nine children. Her mother had died giving birth to her seventh child, Kalman, but her father remarried and there were a further two children from this marriage. Her brothers (my uncles) were Betzalel, Avraham, Moshe and Kalman (Kalmish) - a tall and handsome man who spoke Hebrew and English and was completely self-taught. Her sisters (my aunts) were Tzila, Bila, and Miriam. From the second marriage there was a girl and a boy - Leia and Pinchas.

All of them had large families of their own. Every one of them went to Auschwitz.

I had three brothers. Yosef (Yossel) and Boris (Baruch) were the two eldest - I think I was ten years younger than Boris - then came a boy born about a month premature who did not survive, then me, and lastly Moshe.

I was born premature by two months. My mother cared and tended to me day and night. My mother told me that she wrapped me up in cotton wool and bathed me in milk. And, as fate would have it, my mother’s determination and resourcefulness paid off and I survived.

Ours was a well-known and respected family in the village. When I returned there for a short and painful visit in 1958, all the villagers still remembered our family well. We owned and ran an imported goods store that sold anything not easily available in Poland. Items such as pepper and cinnamon. The selling was often done on credit because people like the village priest or the village school teacher could only pay when they received their wages. It was my mother who was in charge of keeping the books. 

In addition, we ran a business from our house selling whatever commodity would fetch a good price. Boris made leather for shoes and we had three Singer machines to sew the leather into shoes. My mother was an expert at maximizing the number of shoes we could manufacture from one piece of leather. Yosef would travel in Galicia trading in lumber, leather, and fox and rabbit furs, on which large profits could be made.

My mother was an extraordinary person. During the first world war when the battlefront raged back and forth around our village my mother journeyed by horse and cart to barter goods with the German soldiers camped nearby. She also travelled across the river into Galicia to do business with the troops, which was a rather dangerous thing to do, particularly for a pregnant woman on her own.

Our district probably changed hands several times in the course of the war, only it never affected Planch because it was simply too remote and inaccessible. There were no roads to our village, nothing of any importance there, it was a rural backwater with peasant farming, so it saw nothing of the war. Although, my mother told me that on occasions a German Jewish soldier on leave would appear in the village to spend Shabbat with us.

My earliest memory is of the typhus epidemic in 1918-19. The synagogue and other buildings of the village were turned into makeshift hospitals. My father was one of those who fell ill so we had to leave the house and have it boarded up. I remember dimly my father lying in bed with a high fever and hallucinating -- yelling about how he was rising up, up into the sky. The nuns from the monastery usually cared for the sick, but my mother nursed my father personally and, I believe, saved his life.

I also remember running and running through the village on my own. I think I was hungry and so I ran away from the quarantine house all the way across town to my Grandfather Joel’s house. (Joel Weizman, my mother’s father.) I remember arriving there and staring up at the tall, bearded, intimidating figure of my grandfather. I suppose they gave me something to eat. I remember my father’s mother too, but she was always bed-ridden in the years I was around. She was named Sara, and I found out that she had been married at the age of 13.

When my father was fully recovered, we were allowed to return home. The house was completely empty. For fear of the typhus spreading, all our clothes, blankets, food and so forth had been taken out and burnt. I remember very clearly coming back home and being greeted with this gaping emptiness.

Moshe and I went to the common village school together with all the other children of Planch, Jews and Poles.

In the winter when the Czarna, the river that passed through the village, froze over, the young people would come out to ice skate on it. I remember that once on his way to school Moshe couldn’t resist the temptation to slide down the snowy hill and then he fell off his sled into the ice, arriving at school soaking wet and freezing.

In the summers, we used to swim in the Czarna. The Jewish kids had to take turns minding the clothes on the river bank because the Polish kids would play tricks and steal them otherwise. On Sunday mornings, we used to rinse our dishes in the stream, and while we were holding the dishes in the water, fish would come to nibble at the food that remained stuck to the dishes. We would grab them and put them in a hole that we would dig in the golden sand. By the end of the day, we’d have a bag full of fish to take home - and of course the dishes would be washed.

We ran a shoe shop from our house. Boris worked to make the shoes and boots with our three Singer sewing machines. My mother would travel to Stashev to look through the magazines and find out what the latest designs were. We only actually made the top of the shoes - the leather part, not the soles. Yossel travelled through Galicia trading all sorts of things such as eggs, leathers, and fox furs which were very valuable. Yossel, being the oldest, left home when I was quite young, whilst Boris was in Hashomer Hatza’ir which I also joined in 1930. He taught the children Hebrew.

Because I didn’t attend a Jewish school, at age 8 or 10 my parents hired a rabbi to teach me prayers in Hebrew. Not that this rabbi knew Hebrew so well. He was very old - perhaps 75 or older - and he didn’t have glasses. I remember that I used to hide behind the curtains whenever the rabbi arrived because it was so boring.

Around 1930, a generally uncertain and anti-Semitic atmosphere began to be felt. The Great Depression was affecting everyone. I remember our family had to trade a liter of milk just to get a box of matches - and oil was very expensive. Many young people of the village went to Lodz, where there were textile mills, to look for work. There was really nothing for young people to do in a tiny village like Planch.

This web site is authored and maintained by Michael Gottlieb, whose paternal ancestors lived in Plontch since at least the middle of the 18th century.  The site is dedicated to memory of those ancestors, many of whom were  slaughtered during the Nazi Holocaust. 

                             
Last updated on Monday, November 06, 2006
                   

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