The Holocaust

5.04 “The Holocaust”

Personal narrative of a liberated child

My name is Jordan Gorski, I am a 13 year-old polish girl who was in a labour camp in Poland named Gross-Rosen. I was eleven when my family was taken away. My family was persecuted because we didn’t fit into Hitler’s idea of his Aryan race. My dad was the first to go. He was part of the city government. Shortly after that my older sister got taken away too, she was a part of the Jewish support clubs at school. Only my mom and i were left, about a month after my sister left we were ripped out of our house in the middle of the night given ten minutes to pack a knapsack and taken to a train station and shoved into cattle cars that were already packed with other people from our neighborhood. We were told that because my father was a government official we couldn’t be trusted either.

We spent that night in the train station locked in the cattle car with no food and nothing but a hole in the floor to use as a restroom, we were stuck in a car filled with elderly people and babies and it stunk horribly. The next morning before the sun came up the train started to move. We spent the next two days traveling through the polish countryside without food or water. When we finally arrived at the labor camp we were starving and exhausted. They rushed us into a line for food which was basically the equivalent of pig slop, but we were all so hungry that none of us cared. The living conditions were terrible. We were cramped and slept two or three to a bed. We worked in a stone quarry and every few weeks they would bring in a group of people that would be there for a few days then vanish.

Luckily my mom and i didn’t get separated because we were both willing to work in the quarry. Six months went by and we heard nothing of my father and sister. we hoped they were somewhere safe and not at one of the death camps. We worked from sun up to sun down in the quarry with a ten minute break for lunch and dirty water...