“My brother’s name was Yoski and my father’s name was Chaim and as soon as we stepped down, they went to the left and I and my mother went to the right. That was the last time we saw them. Everything was going very, very quickly and orderly. It was everything just perfect. They didn’t give you time to think that they are going away from you and that you are never going to see them again.”
Linda Penn was born in Grodno, Poland in August 1931. Just after her eighth birthday, the Soviets overran eastern Poland, and life grew difficult for Linda, her younger brother Josef, and her parents, Chaim and Riva Kremer. They had to stand in lines “for bread, for sugar, for everything when the Russians came over,” but worse was to come. Less than two years later, Germany advanced eastward, taking Poland under its control. Jews were singled out for terror, abuse, and destruction.
In February 1943, Linda and her family were sent to Treblinka, a killing center that operated with clocklike precision. The vast majority of the Jews sent there—including Linda’s father and brother—were murdered immediately. For reasons she never understood, Linda and her mother were spared. Sent to Majdanek, they worked as slave laborers, sorting the clothing and other belongings of the Jews who were murdered there.
After nine months in Majdanek, Linda and Riva learned that they were to be sent on a transport. At first, Riva, who had grown accustomed to her dreary existence in Majdanek, wanted to stay behind. But Linda insisted that they go. Her intuition saved their lives. Only days after they left Majdanek, SS units shot 18,000 inmates just outside the camp. After working briefly in a marmalade factory as slave laborers, Linda and Riva were sent to the camp of Trawniki, where, just days before, all the inmates
had been killed by machine gun fire in a massacre that came to be known as the “Harvest Festival.” Linda, Riva, and the other new arrivals were given the ghoulish task of cleaning up after the dead.
In the summer of 1944, Linda and her mother were sent from Trawniki to Auschwitz. In spite of all they had already endured, they were completely unprepared for the horrors that awaited them there. In the fields near Auschwitz where they were forced to labor, smoke from the crematoria was a constant backdrop. Subsequently sent to Bergen Belsen and Theresienstadt, Linda and Riva were liberated by the Soviets in May 1945.
After liberation, mother and daughter tried unsuccessfully to reach Palestine. They ended up in a camp for displaced persons in Austria, where they spent the next several years. In 1951, they came to America. Later that year Linda married Morris Penn, a fellow survivor whom she had met in Europe. They moved to Texas in 1952, and worked hard together to establish a series of dry goods stores in Newgulf, League City, and La Marque. In 1965, they and their three children moved to Houston to be part of a Jewish community, and Riva came from the East Coast to live with them. Linda and Morris retired in 1985, and Linda died on February 2, 2001.
Parents:
Chaim Kremer, d. Treblinka, 1943
Riva Karp Kremer, survived
Siblings:
Josef, d. Treblinka, 1943