Charles Feldman

My name is Chil Feldman. I was born January 12, 1919 in Skarzysko Kamiena Poland. My parents names were Samuel Mendel and Chana Feldman.

My parents met in Lodz. I had five siblings: two brothers and three sisters. My oldest sister Basha was born in 1915, Esther was born in 1917, I was born in 1919, my brother Chaim was born in 1921, my sister Sara was born in 1926 and my brother Israel was born in 1929. Out of all of my immediate family, only my sister Esther and I survived.

My father was a house painter. He had his own business. He was very active in the Jewish Community. In fact, he was one of the elected nine leaders that represented the Jewish community. He was a supporter of the Rabbi’s party.

Every Friday night, my mother cooked a special Shabbat dinner for our family. She would make karp and chicken. On Saturday afternoon after Shul she would also serve a delicious meal.

I had several aunts and uncles and cousins that all lived in our town. My aunt Mirel Feldman Cukier lived in our town and she and her husband owned a Department store that I remember sold lingerie and also owned a hat manufacturing store.

Our town bordered the Kamiena river. In the summer I used to swim with my siblings and Jewish friends in the river every day. The non jewish poles used to swim in the river too but at a different place than us.

I attended the public school until third grade. The public school was the only school in our town and it was a one room school. Jews were treated differently from non Jews in school. I also attended religious school- heder. I started attending Heder at the age of four years old and continued until I was eleven years old. At the age of eleven, I ran away to the Yeshiva because then I would no longer have to go to public school. I attended Yeshiva for four years, but I did go home for the Jewish holidays to be with my family.

During the time I was staying at the Yeshiva I became a bar mitzvah. My parents gave me a big party with all of our relatives. The bar mitzvah party was at our house and it was not on Shabbat. We had a delicious meal of chicken and fish and soup.

Around the age of fifteen, I got tired of being at the Yeshiva. I decided to come back home. I first became an apprentice for my neighbor, a cabinet maker. However, my father convinced me to come work for him as a painter. My brother Chaim and I decided to join our father’s painting business. I worked alongside my dad until the war began. In fact, on the day the war began, I had been working on a painting job outside of the city and I heard on the radio that the war started. I just dropped my paint brush and left to go home.

Once I got home, my family was all sitting around listening to my sister Esther’s radio. Esther was married and lived in another house, but she had come to my parents house and brought her radio. I remember we were very worried about the Germans dropping a bomb on our town because our town had an ammunition factory and an important railroad station. My parents and siblings left our town and walked to another town that was ten miles away called Szydlowiec and we stayed there for about two weeks. I decided to walk back to Skarzysko and as I was walking the Nazi’s grabbed me and put me on a truck to Keilce and put me in jail. I was in jail without any of my family. In jail, I became a leader. We were beaten by the Germans a couple times a day. The jail cell was so crowded that we had to stand up and sit down at the same time or we couldn’t move. Even though I was never a leader before, I became one to try to coordinate our movements in the cell. In the jail cell, they refused to give us food and water for three days.

After three days, they brought all of us out of the cell and into the jail yard. In the jail yard, I couldn’t believe my eyes because I saw my father and my uncle Haskiel Herszensfus. I went over to them and joined with them in their cell. The Germans would take us out each day to work to clean up the bombed buildings in the town. After some time in this jail, they sent us to a big synagogue in Kielce that they had turned into a jail. We remained in this synagogue for several days until the German’s came and ordered people into lines divided up by their age and released us according to our age. Once I was released I walked back home and found my father already there and my siblings and mother. However, life had dramatically changed. We could no longer work. Eventually the Ghetto was established in my town.

I married my wife Lola in the Ghetto on January 12, 1941. I had known Lola my entire life because she lived next door to me. Lola was older than me by three years and she was a high school graduate. We spent a lot of time together in the Ghetto. We would sit on the steps and just talk and laugh. One day I told her I wanted to marry her. This was the first time I ever told a girl I loved them. I proposed and she accepted.

We had a big wedding at her house. There was a Rabbi and lots of guests. We had a kuppah and a delicious meal. After the wedding, I had to get up early and go to the train with other painters to work for the Germans on a railroad station. That was my honeymoon. Every day I went by train to paint.

Eventually my wife Lola was taken from the Ghetto with 400 other women to work at the HASAG concentration camp. HASAG was a polish ammunition factory in the town of Skarzysko that the Germans took over and turned into a concentration camp. I was very worried about my wife so I bribed the guards to admit me to the camp. Two days after I bribed my way into the concentration camp, the Skarzysko ghetto was liquidated and everyone was sent to Treblinka. Had I stayed, I would have been sent to Treblinka with my parents and siblings.

In HASAG, I worked as a painter. This job allowed me to get extra food that I shared with my wife. I actually worked with my cousin Mendal Herszensfus and two friends from Skarzysko, Usher Celinski and Mayer Sperling, in HASAG. One night, my cousin Mendel and friend Mayer escaped by crawling over the wall and disappearing. We received word from my friend Usher’s brothers that Mendel and Mayer succeeded in safely arriving at the Szydloweic ghetto. Sadly, a few weeks later on January 8, 1943, the Szydlowiec Ghetto was surrounded by Nazi troops and all the Jews remaining wer marched to cattle trains to take them to Treblinka. Among them was Mendel and Mayer.

In 1944, the Germans shut down the HASAG Skarzysko concentration camp and moved the prisoners to HASAG Czestochowa. HASAG Czestochowa was smaller. I knew that they would not need a painter in this camp so I pretended that I knew how to work the bullet casing machine that my wife worked on.

On January 16, 1945 the guards woke us up and told us to line up and march to the railroad. I kept avoiding going into the line and was thankfully never put in a line for the trains. Eventually, the guards all disappeared and we made our way to the gate. For the first time ever the gate did not have an armed guard. We cautiously walked into the city and came upon a Russian military tank. We worried that we should have stayed in the camp. But the Russians stopped us and asked us who we were and where were we going. We walked back to Skaryzsko.

I walked to my house. The house had been bombed and there was nothing left. I went across the street to a building and found my sister Esther living there in an apartment. I stayed with Esther and my wife Lola and my cousin Sally, who was also in HASAG with us. Eventually, my cousin Jack from Sosnowiec showed up in our town. Jack had survived Auschwitz and when he went to his hometown he couldn’t find any family left so he came to see if any of his relatives survived. We fixed Jack up with Sally.

My wife and cousins and I lived together in Skarzysko for about six months. I left when I heard about a pogram in Kielce, a nearby town. I took my wife to the cemetery to pay my respects to my grandparents and then left. My wife and I tried to get visas to go to Israel but we were not successful. We ended up in Landsberg Germany in a displaced person camp. We gave birth to a daughter, Annie. Eventually, my wife and daughter and I immigrated to the United States and settled in Rochester, New York. In Rochester, I worked as a painter.