Lili Pohlmann

And I thought- “Whatever happens. If they shoot me, they shoot me. What can I do? What can I do?” I walked. And I come to a soldier standing guard. He doesn't see me. I walk past. The other one on the other side. Now I passed him. Now he’s going to shoot me from the back. I was convinced that he is going- one or the other is going to shoot me from the back. But they didn’t! Nothing! They didn’t see me. Isn’t that amazing?

And there we were [in the flat of a German lady, Irmgard Wieth]. I didn’t understand or speak a word of German at the time. My mother did. Very- she was very fluent in German. And so there we were. And she started- she had to share her… rations. Because we had nothing to eat. She was going to work and come back at six o’clock or so in the evening. And we had to sit and not move… the whole day long. Not- no toilet, nothing. Sit there, because… this was the house which was completely requisitioned for high SS Gestapo. That’s all. Plus… one family which was the- who was the head of the Ukrainian police. And he was immediately underneath us. Immediately. So we mustn’t move because everybody knew that

..the mother superior [Mother Iosefa] took us in. Very lovely. And she said to my mother, “You will stay with me.” She spoke- spoke Polish to her. My mother could not learn one word of Ukrainian. She spoke German, she spoke English- some, she spoke some French. Ukrainian she could not: impossible. She couldn't learn it. It was like a psychological- you know. “And you Lili, you’ll be Lydia, Litka…” and so on. “You will stay…” and there was the orphanage just with the- attached to it. And that’s how it was. And we stayed there until the Russians came again in 1944. And we felt, I mean, I felt quite safe there

I can tell you a lot about Doctor Schonfeld. Not a little bit. He was marvellous. He was wonderful. He was glorious. He was all the things that you can put. All the wonderful adjectives to one man. That’s all he was. Plus being incredibly clever and incredibly brave. ... You want me to smile? Tell me Rabbi Schonfeld, then I smile. Yeah. He was marvellous. He was- to us, he was a god. A god came and took us out. And he really did. He did the most amazing things in order to get those children out. Because it was certainly not easy, to say the least. But apart from anything else- apart from where to get the money for it. Apart from arranging all the- all the things that go with it. All the bureaucracy that goes with it. But, he had to get the children out from convents. He had to get the children out from non-Jewish families who were… hiding them, protecting them. Looking after them. And very often these children became like their own family. When they came and they were very little, they almost forgot who they were.

When we came on the plane and I saw Krakow underneath, you know… I started crying. I started crying uncontrollably. It was- it was something which- not that I wanted to, no, it was something absolutely… I, I can’t explain it. And when I got out of the plane, I could not stop crying. I could not- they were waiting with flowers, with this. I couldn’t stop crying. And the husband thought that they were- or they thought that they were going to do some- something nice for me, so they- to take us to the hotel via the street where I lived before the war. And the house- we were to pass the house. It was awful, because I could not stop crying. And I’m not a crying person. Really not. But I couldn’t stop

my mother… suffered all life long afterwards. All life long. And to her, it was a constant thing. “My little boy, my little Ulrich [Uriel], my little boy-” when she saw a child that age. And he would have been now sixty or fifty or what- “My little boy.” You know. Until her last breath she spoke about her little boy.

A Ukrainian policeman was our caretaker. He rather fancied my father’s watch–always. He said: “I love this watch of yours.' On a number of occasions my mother said: 'Give him that watch. Give it to him.' And [my father] said: 'No. It’s a present from you.' It was a very special watch. A black face & it lit up at night. [The policeman] liked that watch & [my father] wouldn’t give it to him. Then he would come & say: 'Your radio is so good. I like this radio.' Will I give him that? No.' So [the policeman] brought the Gestapo.

When my mother next saw him he wore my father’s watch & the radio was playing loudly in his… thing. She had the courage to go in there. To ask what happened, can you believe it? He was standing dressed in my father’s shirt & my father’s trousers with his back to the door. My mother thought it was my father, from afar, standing with the watch, every- everything. Top to bottom. And that’s how they- That’s how… their lives went.

The train was overflowing. People on the roof. The last train to Lviv. War was in the air. Nobody talked about anything else. But. Nobody expected it to be that close. No suitcase. Nothing. My father said 'I’m coming in a few days'. He got home, call-up papers were waiting for him. Called up to the military. The train stopped in every village, everywhere, people, more people, hanging on, one holding another. Unbelievable, the sight. The soldiers were lying on the platform, next to another, like sardines, sleeping. When we arrived we didn’t know how to get off the train. Because at 5am the Germans had bombed the city & the station: these soldiers; I saw them, it was horrible. That stuck in my mind very much.

Within a few days the Soviet forces occupied. There was a pact. In October suddenly my father appeared, looking like a wild, wild creature. A long black beard & eyes. We didn’t know who it was. Barefoot. They disbanded the army, he walked to Lviv, had to shed uniform. He was in very bad shape. Traumatic, absolutely. At night he was shouting, screaming in his dreams. He was almost paralysed, out of sheer nerves. He had to be hospitalised. They were treating the actual pain he had with bags of hot sand. With hot sand. Imagine that. When he got a bit better he had to work, of course. He couldn't say his profession. Because the Russians did not like what they called ‘the bourgeois’. Not that we were capitalists, but, in their eyes, that’s what it was! He got a job as a cabinetmaker in some institution.

"Lviv was the sort of capital of the refugees. They started saying 'It’s a wonderful thing, we can go back!' It was 1940. Posters all over town that you can register, if they want to go back to their families. My father said, 'Don’t do that. It’s a trick.' But they registered. My father didn't. One nice night they were all taken, to Kazakhstan, to Siberia. Some were shot. We stayed behind. I wish we'd have been taken. Who knows? Because these people, on the whole, they survived & we… Then the Germans came & you know what happened. That’s how it was.