Fragments of My Life: A Memoir
By Rita Braun
()
About this ebook
Growing up in Poland in the 1930s, Rita Braun had many hopes and dreams for the future. When she was nine years old, however, World War II touched her once-idyllic life, transforming paradise on earth into an indescribable hell. In Fragments of my Life, Braun tells her storyfrom her birth in 1930 to living in Brazil today, where she works to ensure no one forgets the more than six million Jewish people who lost their lives during the Holocaust.
Including many photos, Fragments of my Life provides firsthand insight into the horrors of the war. As a nine-year old on her school vacation, Braun watched as military aircraft streaked across the skies above her parents farm. She never imagined they would leave behind much more than a trail of smoke. This memoir details what she experienced as a Jewish girl trying to stay alive during World War II. Braun describes watching the selection process and deportation of friends and family, living under both Russian and German rule, using a fake identity, surviving in a gated and guarded ghetto, escaping and hiding for her life, and witnessing the many tragedies of war.
Candid and detailed, Fragments of my Life chronicles one survivors experiences from a woman of the final generation who can say, I lived through the Holocaust.
Rita Braun
Rita Braun was born in 1930 in Kraków, Poland, and survived the events of the Holocaust. She and her husband, Mauricio, founded the Bertie Levi store in B’nai B’rith, and she was president of the entity for two terms. Braun and her family live in Brazil.
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Fragments of My Life - Rita Braun
Copyright © 2013 Eduardo Karpat
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
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Cover design by Georgina Duarte -
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Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.
ISBN: 978-1-4759-6696-1 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-4759-6697-8 (hc)
ISBN: 978-1-4759-6698-5 (e)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2012923764
iUniverse rev. date: 5/17/2013
Contents
Foreword
Acknowledgments
If Only I Were …
Introduction
The Girl Within Me
Part One: Before The War
How It All Began
My Father’s Family
My Mother’s Family
Innocent Pursuits
My Parents’ Separation
Improvised Conductor
Other Activities
The Vacation that Changed My Life
Mother’s Second Wedding
I Gained a Sister
A Fantastic World
Childhood Innocence
Exuberant Nature
Request Denied
Vacations with Father, Before the War
When the Sky Began to Fall In
Forced Break
Jewish Life before the War
The Celebrations at Home
A Sharp Sense of Humor
Other Hilarious Stories
Part Two: The War
The Invasion of the Soviet Troops
The Flight
New Confiscations
Setting Up Home in Stanislavov
Surprising Habits
Valuing Talent
Under Russian Rule
The German Army’s Presence in Lvov
The Ghetto in Lvov
A Choice That Broke My Heart
Good-bye to My Father
Just an Illusion
Test of Faith
A Strategic Choice
The Arrival of Hitler’s Army in Stanislavov
The Sorting of the Jews
Our Miserable Life in the Ghetto
Never-Ending Horrors
The Jewish Police
Another Heroic Act by Uncle Edward
Life Hanging by a Thread
The Fatherless Ones
The Final Wave
The Loss of Loved Ones
Our Flight from the Ghetto
The Fate of My Uncles
A Vocation Challenged
Our Clandestine Life
Confiscated Document
Trip to the Gestapo
Accused of Espionage
A New Residence
Gestapo Once Again
Elegance in Check
Face-to-Face with Death
Assumed Identity
Life in Boryslav
Our Bunker Tenants
A Whistleblower’s Reward
Conversion to Catholicism
Uncontrollable Panic
Living with the Enemy
New Tenants
Kranz, Heraus (Out)
A Friendship Miraculously Recovered
The Second Russian Arrival
A Short Time-Out
Back to Katowice
Part Three: After The War
The New Beginning
Our Exit from Poland
Portuguese, Ora, Pois
Arrival in Our Promised Land
My dear sister
Shared Destinies
A New Life
New and Old Friendships
A Warning to Future Generations
Voyage of No Return …
Yizkor for Six Million
Rita Braun
Fragments of a Life, A Memoir
1st Edition—April 2008 (São Paulo, Brazil)
2nd Edition—September 2010 (São Paulo, Brazil)
Rita Braun
Reproduction of this publication, via any medium, in whole or in part, is strictly prohibited without the express permission of the author, who retains full intellectual rights to this work.
Translated into English from the original Portuguese by Giles Beard and Mark Philipps, Talking Business, São Paulo.
www.talkingbusiness.com.br
76_a_bati.jpgThis photo was torn from a wall and damaged by a soldier’s boot, deforming the nose. Our maid saw it and kept the photo until the end of the war so she could return it to us. Thanks to the work of a painter, it has been restored.
This book is dedicated to the memory of my mother,
Mina Maria Ringel, who was a role model for me
and for all who knew her.
I have learned that a life is worth nothing, but also that nothing is worth a life.
—André Malraux
We are made of flesh, but must live as if we were steel.
—Sigmund Freud
Foreword
I n these Fragments of a Life , Rita Braun records various aspects of the life of a woman of valor
(from the Hebrew eshet chayil ).
It falls to us to understand how to take positives from the suffering of the past, while always maintaining a critical detachment and not getting lost in sentiments of hate and revenge. On the contrary, let us learn to live with the past and the uncountable moments of deep suffering.
Since I first had the immense pleasure of meeting Rita in 1996, through a project to interview survivors of the Holocaust here in Brazil, for the USC Shoah Foundation Institute of Los Angeles—an organization created by Steven Spielberg—I can say that we have become increasingly close. I have been able to sense in her an educational mission to create a better future for this world.
She showed, and shows, courage and a great sense of self-esteem in not expressing any feelings of guilt for having survived, which can sometimes happen with survivors. Despite her own suffering, she, together with her mother, helped to hide others at a time when they lived a clandestine life under a false identity.
Rita has become a true working companion of mine, always willing to talk to youngsters in schools, to guide university students in their work on the subject, or to answer the call whenever people have requested the presence or words of a Holocaust survivor who expresses herself calmly and lucidly.
In coordinating a work that has resulted in the production of an educational documentary, we have had the pleasure to include Rita as one of the contributors. The strength and clarity with which she expresses herself give veracity to her accounts.
These fragments
record happy and sad moments of her life. The words and pages flow, inviting us to reflect on our own lives and, at times, even to rethink certain concepts.
Anita Pinkuss
Coordinator of the Remembrance Project
at the Jewish Cultural Centre Representative
of the Shoah Foundation SP
Acknowledgments
A ll my love to my husband, Mauricio; my children, Eliana and Edmundo; my daughter-in-law, Lilian; and my grandchildren, Claudia, Eduardo, and Allan.
Without their encouragement and support, I would not have faced this challenge.
If Only I Were …
There were wires in the ghetto
On the wall so high,
And there through a crack
Suddenly appeared a cat.
The feline stretched
And with a deep yawn,
Crossed the wall of the ghetto
To the other side of the world.
The sentry saw the cat,
For the gate looked on nearby,
But didn’t hear the scream
Or the gunfire or grenade.
The pussycat reached the alley
In search of the mouse.
O merciful God,
Why didn’t you make me a cat?
Rita Braun, 1992
9781475966978_TXT.pdfMap of Poland
Katowice
Kraków
The cities Stanislavov, Stryi, and Boryslav were ceded to Ukraine, and they were returned to Poland long after the war.
Introduction
Fragments of a Life
A Memoir
Today is the first of May 1991, the day on which my granddaughter Claudia (or Claudinha
as we call her) completes fourteen years. How quickly the time flies! It seems like yesterday.
I remember Mother preparing the bag for the extended holiday in Guarujá when suddenly there was a phone call. It was my daughter, Eliana, announcing that she was on the road to motherhood.
When Mother heard the news, she immediately unpacked the bags and came with us to await the arrival of the first granddaughter and great-granddaughter. Granddaughter and great-granddaughter … yes, since we were both sure that it would be a girl.
O n opening an old notebook, I found these notes that I wrote following this extra-special event I was able to share with my mother, two years before her death. When I think about this, I still feel moved, knowing that this period was, without any doubt at all, the happiest of her life.
If the birth of a child is a moment of extreme happiness for a mother, the birth of a grandchild or great-grandchild is sublime, magical.
Three years later, when I received the news that my grandson Eduardo had been born, I felt so anxious and emotional on the way to the maternity ward that I drove into a supermarket cart that a gentleman was pushing. When I apologized and asked if he was hurt, he shouted, Hurt? You almost killed me, lady!
With the arrival of my youngest grandson, Allan, I was an old hand. Even so, the emotion of seeing the tiny defenseless being exiting his mother’s womb was extraordinary! It was the first time that I had watched a childbirth through the window of an operating theater.
Many images flashed through my mind like scenes from a movie, now flashing up randomly, now in sequence. It was the beginning of a new life, of a new hope that would certainly bring a lot of happiness.
I mention all this to explain why I have finally resolved to answer the insistent requests from my children and grandchildren, made over many years, to write my life story.
The most recent and forceful of these requests came from my grandson Eduardo, who had been hounding me over this for many months. I also received an e-mail from my granddaughter Claudia, who is studying in Paris, following up her request that I write, and saying that my story would be the biggest gift that I could give my children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and—using her words—everyone who had the opportunity to read it. Given this, I committed myself to writing at least a page per day, in order to complete this mission on time.
Before that, I had actually never had any intention of publishing a book. I wish only to leave a record for my descendants, the most vivid memories from my childhood and adolescence, and to tell them about their ancestors. Unfortunately, they have (except the younger ones) met only two of them: my mother and her brother, my uncle Filip.
003_a_bati.jpg