When Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, Katowice fell almost immediately. Terrified, the family fled to Sosnowiec, where Helen’s grandmother lived. In 1940, Henry and Shlomo were taken for forced labor. Shlomo died the following year. After her brothers’ arrest, Helen, her mother, and her grandmother were forced into the crowded Jewish ghetto of Sosnowiec. Helen remained in the ghetto until 1942, when she and her mother were ordered to report to a collection center. There, as the prisoners were sorted by Nazi guards, the two were separated. Helen never saw her mother again. Together with other young women, Helen was put on a train bound for a labor camp in Germany. For the next three years, she and the other inmates worked twelve-hour shifts in a textile factory, making cloth for the war effort. They subsisted on starvation rations and endured bed bugs, lice, and bitter cold.
As the Allies approached in December 1944, the prisoners learned that they were to be evacuated. The night before the grueling march began, Helen dreamt that her father, who had died six years earlier, was standing with his talit on, beside an open grave. “I believe in miracles. Maybe he did pray for me,” says Helen, who endured the brutal march until the group paused to take on more prisoners. In the chaos, Helen slipped away. A sympathetic villager took pity on her, advised her to pose as a non-Jewish Pole, and supplied her with written references. For the rest of the war, Helen worked as a maid at a beer hall in Luckau, Poland. She lived in constant fear that her true identity would be discovered. Her only respite came at night, when she was lulled to sleep by the sound of the air raid sirens that signaled the Allied approach.
After the Red Army arrived in Luckau in April 1945, Helen made her way back to Sosnowiec. That August, she was overjoyed to discover that her older brother, Henry, had also survived. Together they departed for the American zone of occupation to live in a displaced persons camp in Landsberg, Germany. In 1946, Helen’s American relatives brought her to New York and gave her a job in their candy store. “Slowly, slowly, I became American,” says Helen of her first few years in New York. She learned English, made friends, and met her future husband, Max Rosenbaum, who had fled Nazi Germany in 1937. In 1947, Helen and Max moved to Houston, where they owned and operated a clothing store and raised two sons, Glen and Steve. “We lived happily ever after,” says Helen with a smile.
Parents:
Aaron Krakowski, d. 1938
Victoria Neufeld Krakowski, d. in Holocaust
Siblings:
Henry (b. Hennac), survived
Shlomo, d. 1941