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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Jane Pearson, a volunteer from Age Concern, Dorchester on behalf of Mr Ludwik Simonsohn, and has been added to the site with his permission. Mr Simonsohn fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

I am from a reasonably middle class family who were living in Berlin from 1837. My grandfather was a doctor, his brother a dentist, and my grandmother’s brother — Dr Dago Rynarshevsky - became a top heart cardiologist in America. He had also been a very accomplished cello player in the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. In the First World War he was an officer in the German Army. My mother was of Spanish/Jewish origin and was a very beautiful woman. She was born in northern Poland in the corridor known as East Prussia and was one of five sisters, only one of whom survived when she managed to get to Palestine before war broke out. My father had a clothing wholesaler’s business. They were all loyal German citizens and not particularly orthodox.

My parents were married in 1935 and I was born on 8 January 1936. Initially they lived in a large house in Katowicz, a town in Upper Silesia not far from Auschwitz. My father ran his business on the ground floor and the second and third floors were occupied by the family and the maids’ quarters. I had a Polish maid so I grew up bilingual which was to be of great help in my future survival. We lived there until 1939. There was a very long corridor with French windows at the end and I used to slide down it on a collapsible chair. One day my leg got stuck and I broke my hip. Another time I became ill with a lung infection and my mother took me to a place called Zakopane in the mountains. I can remember watching the German Army marching through Katowicz. My mother never showed any fear.

My next memories are of travelling north on the train at night sitting on a suitcase. My father was burning some documents in the corridor of the train. We arrived in Warsaw and landed up in my great-grandmother’s flat. This must have been inside the Ghetto as I remember seeing the walls going up with barbed wire on the top. People were herded in and my grandmother’s flat was bulging with people, including my aunts. Eventually the Germans closed the area off, stopped the supply of food and people started to die, lying like so many bundles of rags in the streets. At first they were taken away on carts but soon they were just left there; disease and malnutrition became rife.

In the Warsaw Ghetto the Germans allowed us 154 calories per human being whereas the German soldiers had an allowance of over 2,000 calories. We were on starvation diets. I remember one day when my grandmother was shopping for bread. We were walking away from this queue when a young boy - a street urchin, one of many - snatched the bread from my grandmother and ran off. I ran after him and grabbed it back but he had already eaten half of it. There was a lot of smuggling going on; my father was involved in this so we lived reasonably well. I don’t remember being hungry in the ghetto possibly because my parents gave me their rations. Things got progressively worse though I don’t remember fear. One day the soldiers came in and starting beating people up. One of the Ukrainian soldiers tore a baby out of its mother’s arms, threw it up and caught it on his bayonet. Another one took a baby and smashed its head against the wall. This was in 1941. This sort of thing must have been quite a common occurrence as I don’t remember being affected by it — it’s very strange.

Anyway, mother got a Kencard that gave her the right to go out of the ghetto to work in a factory run by the Germans. People had to walk in a convoy to this factory under armed guard. Somehow or other my mother bribed the factory owner to allow me to work there too, and I remember walking in this convoy down the centre of the road with armed guards and snarling dogs on each side. I carried bundles of cloth and cleaned up the needles from the floor. The reward for working in this factory was a bowl of cabbage soup and a chunk of bread at the end of the day. You had to be at the front of the queue to get any. I have not liked cabbage soup ever since.

My father was involved with this chap on the outside called Mr Fialkowski. He was a Polish Jew married to a Catholic lady, and had two children. They lived in a village called Grodzisk Mazovietsky, about 35 km away from the Ghetto. Mr Fialkowski looked and acted liked a Polish officer gentleman. He was very upright with iron grey hair and a bristling moustache, and walked around in high riding boots giving the impression of being a very upper class Polish nobleman. In fact he was a Jew called Schreidman who had gone into hiding and married this lady. My parents made an arrangement with him that on a particular day I would be brought out of the ghetto as usual in the convoy and when we got to a certain corner I would be told to go and he would be waiting for me. So that is what happened. I left the ghetto dressed in my best bib and tucker and as we got to this corner I dashed round it and met Mr Fialkowski. He took me down some side alleyways and into the old city, then onto a barge on the River Vistula where I was hidden for about three days and nights with black coffee, bread and onions to sustain me. Then he took me on a little local train to his family home in Grodzisk. On the way the Germans came along the train examining people’s papers, looking for Jews. The penalty was death if you were caught. I had never been afraid of the Germans or their dogs so I didn’t panic and thankfully they didn’t ask for my papers and so we arrived safely in Grodzisk. I was introduced into the Fialkowski family as a nephew who had been bombed out. This was in April 1942 just before the ghetto was burned down. I lived in Grodzisk from April 1942 to March 1946 and was a great danger to the family during all that time. The penalty for harbouring a Jew was death.

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