• Resources >
• Survivor Stories >
• Holocaust Testimony: Roman Halter

Holocaust Testimony: Roman Halter

I was 12 years old in September 1939 when Hitler’s troops entered Poland. I was the seventh child in our family and the youngest. My family and relations lived in the north-western part of Poland, in a town called Chodecz (Godetz in German). The area where I lived was made an integral part of greater Germany in 1939 and the “clearing-out” – the murder – of the Jewish people began almost immediately. Before September 1939, Poles, Germans and 800 Jews lived in my town. Murder began as soon as the SS police took charge of the town, towards the end of September 1939.

First of all, the SS rounded up all the potential Jewish and Polish leaders in our town and shot them. And they did the same thing in the adjoining towns. Then they took all the able-bodied Jewish men and women to work, either building the Berlin-Pozen road and railway line, or on the construction of the first extermination camp in Chelmno (German Klumthof), built to murder the Jewish communities of north-western Poland.

For those of us who remained in Chodecz, our properties were taken away and we were relocated in hovels on the outskirts of the town. We were made to wear armbands with the Star of David on them and to walk in the gutter. By the following year, autumn 1940, of the 800 Jews who originally lived in our town, 360 were left; and we were all sent to the ghetto in Lodz.

When we arrived there, the Lodz ghetto was overcrowded and could only accept 120 of us. My grandfather, father, mother, half-sister and two of her children, and I were amongst the 120 taken in, but the remainder were taken away and shot. The Lodz ghetto was an unjust and unequal society. Those who ran it under Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, along with their friends, relations and acquaintances, managed to eat adequately; the rest starved. Those of us who were outsiders starved from the first day.

My grandfather, to whom I was very close, died two months later, in October 1940. He told me that when I survived – not if I survived but when – I must tell the world that the German Nazis were murdering all the Jewish people. As early as October 1940, he had understood this, and his words helped me to live because I believed what he said to me.

The Lodz ghetto set up factories to produce things needed by the German forces. I succeeded in getting a job in the metal factory. In addition to the starvation rations, those who worked received soup, a watery soup, but soup nevertheless. Even with the extra soup I looked like a skeleton, and so did my father, mother, half-sister and her two children. My father died of starvation in autumn 1941. My mother’s legs were swollen from hunger and she moved with great difficulty.

In Spring 1942, my mother, my half-sister, her two children and I were all selected to be taken to Chelmno to be murdered there. My sister could have saved herself, but when they took her two children, she chose to go with them. My mother begged me to escape and hide till the selection of our area of the ghetto was over. “Run in a zigzag,” she told me, “and don’t stop when they shoot or shout ‘Halt!’. I did as she asked and escaped that selection, but my mother, half-sister and her children all perished there.

• Roman Halter (pdf)