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I was born in December 1926 in Grodno, Poland (which is now Belarus). Grodno was a city of 49,000 people in the Northwest of the country, near Belorussia, bordering Lithuania to the north and Russia to the west. I remember Grodno as a beautiful city, split east and west by the Neman (pronounced nee-eh-min) River. Grodno was a major Jewish population center: 29,000 of its 49,000 citizens were Jewish. The Jewish population had its own private schools, hospital, old age home and charities. Through the Jewish population's 600-year history in Grodno, anti-Semitism waxed and waned. By the early 1930s, Polish anti-Semitism was again rampant. The national and local governments and the police force were not sympathetic to the Jewish community. We tried as best as we could to live quietly and kept to ourselves, generally avoiding interaction with the Polish community. Still, conflicts inevitably erupted between Jews and Poles and persecutions were inevitable. Even mild disagreements often ended with the Poles saying, "Go to Palestine, you don't belong here." Sometimes things turned violent. I will never forget the riots that broke out against the Jews in Grodno. It will stay with me forever. Windows were broken and Jewish stores were robbed. People were hurt and killed. In 1935, when I was 9 or 10 years old, two drunken Polish men crashed a Jewish dance hall and cut in on an engaged couple's dance. When the woman's fiancé objected, one of the Poles drew a knife and attacked him. The Pole was killed in the ensuing struggle. Some of Grodno's Polish hoodlums rioted after the man's funeral, killing several Jewish men. The authorities did nothing. Ultimately, Jewish neighborhood gates had to be closed to protect the Jews from further attacks. Young Jews talked constantly about emigrating to a safer country, mainly to Palestine. In 1930, my cousin Nachama was in her early 20s and moved to Palestine. Another cousin, Ethel, married a man that was leaving Poland and moving to Canada to become a farmer. They later moved to Westford, Massachusetts, where he had family who owned a chicken farm. My mother, Fradl Nalicka (pronounced Na-Litz-Ka) was born in Briansk (Brinsk), a small town near Bialystok. She was one of five children, two brothers and two sisters. My father, Ephraim Altschuler, was the youngest of seven children, four boys and three girls. His family had lived in Grodno for generations. Along with his brother and four friends, he formed a cooperative that sold firewood for cooking and heating houses. After 1935, Poles increasingly refused to sell firewood to Jews and Jewish businesses struggled. Additionally, Poles would stand in front of Jewish stores telling other Poles not to buy from the Jews. Money was tight and my parents struggled to make ends meet. My parents had four children: a son, Chaim, and three girls: Rivka (me), Yospee and Raisel. From age three to fourteen we attended the private Talmud Torah school where we learned secular and Jewish subjects. We lived relatively quiet but tense lives until I finished the 6th Grade in 1939, when the world suddenly exploded. One morning in September 1939, I woke to the sound of bombs exploding. The Russians had attacked eastern Poland, while the Germans invaded in the west. The Poles mobilized immediately and drafted all young men into the Polish army; but the Poles were no match for the Germans or Russians. Russia swiftly defeated the Polish irregulars defending Grodno, and the Poles surrendered. After the Polish capitulation, the country was divided into two sections. The Germans controlled the western two thirds of Poland, including the cities of Warsaw, Lodz and Posen, as well as many others. The Russians controlled the remaining territory in the east, including Bialystok, Vilna and my home city of Grodno. When the Russians came to Grodno, they immediately closed all the Jewish businesses and schools. But despite our early fears, life under the Russians was tolerable. While ethnic and religious distinctions were officially erased, people were treated equally and families stayed together. Jewish children attended Russian public schools. We learned to read and write Russian and we were taught Soviet ideology. Some children joined the Komsomol (the young pioneers). We lived under Russian control from 1939 to 1941. Food was more or less adequate even though the Russians cleared much of the food from stores for the Russian soldiers. Farmers and peasants came to the town markets with food to sell and we learned how to deal with the difficult situation. We survived. In fact, people living in the German sector escaped to the Russian areas. Those who made it, survived. Those refugees that the Russians caught were treated as spies and sent to Siberia. We lived almost two years under the Russians. Then, in June 1941, the real horror began. I was 13 years old. Germany made a surprise attack on Russia, and full-scale war erupted. Russian tanks went into battle in Grodno. Bombs fell all around us and houses exploded. We were terrified. We ran in to the woods to escape the violence and found many others hiding there. I ran so fast that I lost contact with my family. When I stopped running, I realized that I was alone, except for a girlfriend and a few neighbors. We came to a farm house near a village where the owners let us stay for three days. They brought us a little food from time to time and we waited, not knowing what was going to happen or what we should do next. On the fourth morning, we awoke to the sound of German motorcycles and trucks. "Go home!" shouted the German soldiers. We made our way home slowly. When we got there, we found that much of the area was a smoldering ruin. The homes had been burned to the ground. We went to the Neman river and saw that the pedestrian bridge that went over the river was destroyed, but neighbors with boats took us across. I found my way back to my neighborhood where I found my parents, siblings and grandmother at the Talmud Torah School where I had studied. We were overjoyed to find each other safe. We stayed at the Talmud Torah for four months until October 31, 1941 when the Germans created two Ghettos in Grodno. It was the beginning of the end for Grodno's Jewry. All schools and business were closed. Eighty-six key Jewish leaders were arrested and shot. People were ordered to clean the streets. It was the beginning of slave labor. The Germans opened factories to make German army uniforms and boots. All Jewish men from fourteen, up to the age of sixty-five, and all women age fourteen to fifty-five were used as forced labor. Anyone attempting to escape from the ghetto was beaten, immediately shot or publicly hanged on the main street of the ghetto. The Germans created the Judenrat, an organizing body of two hundred educated Jewish Leaders, which functioned as a surrogate arm of the German Authority in the Ghetto. They took all valuables from the Jews for delivery to the Judenrat. Some who could not produce the desired quantity of valuables were shot. Within four months, Jews were stripped of everything of value or personal import. My family was originally assigned to Ghetto Two. We tried to stay together after being herded into the ghetto, and we found space in an old-age home. There were no beds or bedding, just bare floors. People were crammed into every available space. The Ghetto was enclosed by barbwire gates and guarded by soldiers with guns and vicious dogs. People were subject to searches as they went through the gates. Anyone found with food or contraband was shot. The weather in the Ghetto was freezing. We had no wood or coal for heat. Desperate people tried to cut down trees or fences for fuel, with little success. We received a daily ration of thin soup and a slice of bread from a soup kitchen. Some people tried to grow vegetable gardens. Some managed to smuggle a little food into the ghetto at the risk of their own lives. My father sometimes managed to smuggle a little coal in his pockets. Some villagers somehow managed to give bread, wood and coal to people in the ghetto, at the risk of their own lives and the lives of their entire family. I once saw my mother cutting up her bread and dividing it up between her children so that we could have just a little more. I knew she was starving but she made me promise not to tell that she was giving us her rations. I said "Mom no. You will starve." With tears in her eyes she said, "Please don't say anything. You are so young, maybe one of you will survive to tell the story to the world." My uncle, Jacob Walchik, had a job in a shoe factory located in Ghetto One. After a little time, he found my father a job in the shoe factory. About a month after my father started working in the factory, we awoke one morning to find the Germans starting to liquidate Ghetto Two. They ordered everyone with jobs in the shoe factory, about one thousand people and their families, to move to Ghetto One. The shoe factory had about a thousand employees and we were lucky enough to be moved to Ghetto One. The Germans liquidated Ghetto Two on November 15, 1942. Thousands of others disappeared during the move and we never saw them again. That same morning our family experienced a tragedy. Some weeks earlier, my Aunt Dina lost her son, Nissl, to starvation in the ghetto. When we were ordered to move from Ghetto Two to Ghetto One, Dina tried to pass off her nephew, Nochum Altschuler, as her son Nissl because she believed his chance for survival was better in Ghetto One. Aunt Dina told Nochum to give his name as Nissl if interrogated. Nochum had a stammer and got confused during interrogation. The guard must have expected something,or just didn't like Nochum's stammer. The guard shot Nochum in the mouth. He died in front of us. Typhoid fever broke out and I was infected in late 1942. I was put into a quarantine hospital and somehow survived, while people died all around me. As my health improved, I was released from the hospital to recuperate in Ghetto One. I spent nights in my aunt's warmer, more comfortable living space and stayed with my family during the days. One morning in January 1943, I returned to my family's living space but they were gone. The Germans had taken my parents, sisters and brother to the shoe factory. I ran to the factory but the doors were slammed shut and I couldn't get in. I saw my family through a big window in the factory yard. They saw me and were crying inside the factory. I was crying outside in the yard. I never saw them again. Soon after, the Germans rounded up all the people in the factory yard and took us to the Great Synagogue in the ghetto. They used the synagogue as a staging area for transport to Auschwitz and other camps. Once the Jews were inside the synagogue, the German soldiers started shooting people at random. We were taken to the train station. The soldiers, armed with guns and dogs, screamed "Schnell!," beating us as we ran. In the confusion and panic, my aunt, Rywka, dropped her baby and she wasn't allowed to pick her up. I ran ahead to the waiting train and got into one of the cattle cars. About one hundred people were put in each train car. There was no room to sit or lay down. The Germans relieved us of any remaining valuables. Those who were caught withholding valuables were shot. There was no water and only one loaf of bread for one hundred human beings. One empty pail in the corner on the floor was to serve as a toilet. The pail filled up quickly; people had to urinate and defecate on the floor. The stench was horrific. The train took three days and three nights to reach Auschwitz. As we traveled we could see Poles outside watching the train pass. We called to them to give us food or water, but they only shrugged their shoulders. The train finally stopped in the town of Auschwitz. There was a stench in the air and chimneys were bellowing foul-smelling smoke and fire. Some of us thought the smell from a tannery. I realized later that the crematoria were in the suburb, a few miles from Birkenau, Auschwitz. When we got off the train, we had no idea where we were or what would happen to us. Men in striped uniforms helped us down from the cars. They weren't allowed to speak to us. We asked what was happening, but they stayed totally silent. We got off the train and found ourselves in an open field. Empty trucks waited on the left side nearby. Mengele himself was directing people to the left or the right. Old people and mothers with children were immediately sent to the left and put on trucks, direct transport to the gas chambers. The rest had to walk to Birkenau. We thought the trucks were taking them to living quarters and we envied them. I was chosen to be sent to the right, to the barracks. Those sent to the left went to their deaths. I found out later that they were brought through a tunnel to a big room where men were separated from women and children. There were benches and hooks on the wall where they were made to undress. Then they were taken into another big room with shower heads on the ceiling and pushed in naked, while being told that they were going to shower. The SS threw in cyclone B gas from the top of the roof and within 20 minutes all these people were dead. We were marched through the gates. Armed guards and snarling dogs lined our path and electric barbed wire surrounded the camp. At the gate, a band was playing music as if to welcome us as we marched under the famous sign and into the camp: ARBEIT MACHT FREI. In the barracks, they shaved our heads and tattooed our arms with our ID number, our new, permanent identity from that point on. My number was 30775. Many years later, in America, I had the number removed from my arm, but it remains tattooed on my soul. The wooden barracks buildings held one thousand people jammed in together. We had no heat, water, baths or showers. Five women had to share a tiny bunk made of wooden planks, with no pillows, bedding, blankets or straw. After coming back from work, at night we were fed thin soup and a slice of bread a day. Starvation killed many, while lice and disease tortured the bodies of those who lived. Anyone who showed signs of sickness or weakness was transferred to Barracks 26, the death center. I was a slave laborer. I was ordered to push heavy carts filled with rocks as part of the effort to build railway tracks from Auschwitz to the crematoria in Birkenau. I managed to survive because a friend smuggled extra food to me. Later, a friend bribed the guards to have me assigned to the sewing shed, where I mended prisoners ripped clothes. After three or four months in the sewing room, I became very ill. I tried to hide it but I knew that I looked very weak. Our routine included daily inspections where we checked for "health" assessments. My illness worsened and one day on a routine check I was picked for Barrack 26, certain death. Having nothing to lose, I suddenly lost all fear. I jumped the line and slipped back into the line for my own barrack, in a desperate attempt to save my own life. I fully expected a guard to shoot me in the back of my head. Miraculously, no one noticed. Meanwhile, the Germans knew that they were losing the war. A bomb had already destroyed one crematorium, but the mass murder continued 24/7 in the other gas chambers. Trains still came in everyday from ghettos and cities all over Europe, and the Sonderkommando still slaved away. Mountains of ashes outside the barracks were used for fertilizer or thrown uselessly into the Westula River. In January, 1945, the Germans announced that they were evacuating the camp and they started the people on a twenty-eight day death march. Morris Kesselman, who I would meet and marry after the war, marched for twenty-eight days in the dead of winter, with no idea of his destination or fate. They slept outside in brutal, freezing temperatures, freezing rain and strong winds. Many died during the march. I was in a group that was made to march to Bergen Belson. When we finally entered Bergen-Belsen on the third day, there was no work, food, sanitation or medical attention. The Germans hand't bothered to bury the corpses. We were reduced to skeletons, unable to walk. We were hallucinating. In April 1945, we literally had nothing to do but wait for death. One day we heard voices over the loud speaker, in German and English: "You are free! We are English soldiers. The Germans are gone! You are liberated!" The English brought us food, but it proved too rich for our emaciated bodies and hundreds died. When we were liberated, I was so sick that I could not move. I was brought to a German hospital where I was treated by German nurses. After I recuperated, I was released from the hospital and was placed in a barrack, formerly occupied by German guards. The English army continued to provide food. Jewish organizations also helped a great deal. My cousin Motel came to Bergen-Belsen from Palestine to search for surviving relatives, and it was through that the process family reunifications that I met my husband, Morris. It was April 1945. I was seventeen years old. Postwar, my husband (then boyfriend) Morris got a job working in an American army PX in Marburg, Germany. He wanted me to join him in the American Sector because he felt it was safer. My cousin Motel wanted me to emigrate to Palestine, but I learned about the opportunity too late I later realized Palestine would have been too difficult for me. Another cousin, Ethel, had moved to a farm in Lowell, Massachusetts before the war began. She offered us the chance to join her and her family in America. It took us almost four years to make legal arrangements to emigrate. Meanwhile, I married Morris and we moved to Stuttgart where we lived in quarters formerly inhabited by Germans. They had been stripped of their residences to make room for survivors. There was no work, but the Americans took care of us. We lived in Stuttgart for two and a half years. My first son, Arthur, was born in Stuttgart in 1948. Arthur was a year old when we arrived in the United States. We entered the U.S. through Brooklyn, New York. After we were processed, a friend met us and took us to her home in Brooklyn, where we ate and bathed. We then got on a train for Massachusetts and finally arrived at my cousin Ethel's farm in Lowell. We lived on the farm for eight months. My second son, Allen, was conceived there. Conditions were difficult on the farm. We decided to move to a cold-water flat in the Roxbury district of Boston, Massachusetts. Morris had no formal education or profession: he spent his formative years in the prison camps. His father had been in the textile business, and Morris managed to get a low-level job in a Chelsea, Massachusetts textile factory. He worked in the factory for ten years, rising from position to position, until he was the plant superintendent. During those years, we moved to Winthrop, Massachusetts, bought a house and had our third son, Robert. Soon after, Morris partnered with one of his employers to open a textile factory in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. The partnership flourished and over the next fifteen years, they acquired three more factories and founded a factory in Herzliya, Israel, which employed Russian Jewish immigrants. Morris was a true genius. He built businesses at home and abroad and contributed time, money and management to numerous charitable causes. As his success grew, Morris and I devoted more and more time to Israel. Together, we visited Israel many times. Our goal was to help the Jewish State in any way we could. Morris was a committed activist for Israeli Bond drives and was honored by many Israeli organizations and dignitaries, including Yitzchak Rabin, for his tremendous efforts. We helped establish the emergency ward for Assaf Ha Rofeh Hospital and organized and contributed to many other fundraising efforts for Jewish causes and our synagogue. Morris also served as president of the Holocaust Survivors of Greater Boston for six years. He dug the "first shovel" of dirt at the ground-breaking ceremony for the American Holocaust Museum in Washington DC. He also chose the design for the Boston Holocaust Memorial and was instrumental in its construction, as well as the Brandeis University Holocaust Memorial. Morris died of a stroke in May 2016, just 3 months short of our 70th anniversary. We were blessed with three sons, eight grandchildren and three great grandchildren. After the death of her husband in 2016, Rita moved into Orchard Cove, a Jewish senior care facility in Canton, Massachusetts, where she made a new life and many new friends. She was diagnosed with lung cancer in August 2018. Her appetite began to fail and she became progressively more frail in the weeks that followed. Rita died in her sleep on October 1, 2018. Until the very end Rita retained the detailed memories of her remarkable life. She will be remembered and missed not only by her family, but by so many of the lives that she touched. If you would like to learn more about the lives of Rita and Morris Kesselman, additional film interviews can be found here:
Rita Kesselman, Oral History, United States Holocaust Museum Morris and Rita Kesselman, United States Holocaust Museum Morris Kesselman, Steven Spielberg USC Shoah Foundation Institute |