After the Night

My name is Lusia Milch, and I am a survivor of the Holocaust. 

I was born December 25, 1930, to David and Necha Rosenzweig in the small Polish town of Skalat. In 1941, there were about 5,000 Jewish people in my hometown. 

Skalat was an idyllic town. There was a square adorned with four seventeenth-century stone towers, a moat, and a lot of greenery. The Jewish community, the shtetl of Skalat, was vibrant and various businesses and trades flourished, which sustained the life of a thriving Jewish community. 

My childhood was wonderful in every way. I was surrounded by family, including grandparents and many uncles, aunts, and cousins who were my playmates. I grew up in a lovely home with a living room that was beautifully decorated. I remember my mother’s cooking as being the best in the world. Every day we had soup made with ingredients fresh from the local market.

After Hitler came to power, everything changed for the Jews. Jewish people became easy targets for hate as anti-Semitism grew. Jewish stores were boycotted and negative stereotypes of Jews were promoted through propaganda. Children were taught the Jews cannot be trusted because they were only interested in money and taking advantage of people. 

The vicious anti-Semitism grew so severely, I feared what would happen to us. I vividly remember the first day of the German occupation of my town. On July 4, 1941, the Nazis entered Skalat with their swastika flags. The non-Jewish Ukrainian population of Skalat lined the streets, beautifully dressed in their national colors of yellow and blue to warmly welcome the Germans. Immediately, those townspeople who had been our neighbors and our friends turned on us and carried out a day of terror against the Jews in Skalat. 

Like wild beasts, they grabbed innocent Jewish men from their homes and on the streets and viciously beat them in the town square while the Germans looked on, took pictures. Gone was my carefree childhood and the freedom as a Jew. Soon came the decrees. First, we were ordered to wear a white armband with a Star of David on our right arm. Second was forced labor. Every day, hundreds of Jewish men were ordered to work in the quarries, chopping boulders into stones for gravel, which the Germans used to pave roads for the tanks and trucks. 

Third, a decree forming the ghetto. The once thriving shtetl of Skalat became a ghetto filled with thousands of Jews from surrounding towns. The population more than doubled, and the people had to live on the streets in cramped conditions without sanitary facilities. Diseases spread quickly. Life was reduced to surviving one day at a time. The Germans came into Skalat with the goal of destroying us. Over a period of two days, more than 3,000 Jews were transported by truck and by train to the extermination camp, Bełżec, where they were immediately murdered by gas. 

Seven hundred of us survived the roundups. My once beautiful world was reduced to a cramped homemade bunker in the basement of our neighbor’s house. We slept there, three or four people in one bed. Whatever possessions we had were on the bed. We ate on the bed. We planned escapes on the bed. My life was reduced to whatever I could do on the bed. 

At the end of the second year of the German occupation, the time came to leave our hiding place. My mother explained we were going to a non-Jewish family who had promised to hide us in exchange for our possessions. As we approached the house, we heard terrifying shootings coming from the ghetto. An action had started. It was fast, loud, full of terrible screams. 

People everywhere were running, and we too started to run as fast as we could. We reached the house where we hoped to be safe. We pushed our way inside and found ourselves standing in front of a man, his wife, and two small children. In a loud, angry voice, the man yelled: “What are you doing here? You must get out of here immediately.”

“We cannot leave. An action has started, and you promised to hide us,” pleaded my mother. “I have no hiding place. I want you out of here right now.” He started to push us out of the room as my mother continued to plead. “Have mercy on my children. The streets are full of Germans,” she sobbed, “and if we go out, we will be killed.”

The man’s wife demanded that we be thrown out immediately. In the ensuing commotion, my mother turned her head quickly and stared at me. Afraid to talk to me while she’s negotiating with him, my mother gives me a look with her eyes, a desperate look. Afraid to say one word, I look at my mother. Our eyes met. I read in her desperate look what she was telling me. “Now is the time. What I told you all the time, leave us. Run. Save yourself.”

I had the strength of running from death. I jumped, and I find myself on the roof. And when I fell down in that panic, I took a look, and I saw a hole. I knew, one way or the other, that’s where I have to go. And I pulled down the rest of the straw and some of the dirt, leaving only one little place. For what? To breathe. It doesn’t take more than maybe 20 minutes or a half hour, a German comes in, and he comes up to the attic. My nose was away from him maybe that much. I felt if I don’t breathe, he cannot know that there was somebody there, and he didn’t. He was there minutes only, and he leaves. 

I spent there the rest of the day. It’s dark, and I am exhausted, and I fall asleep. After the night, the morning comes. I hear somebody coming up to the attic. He comes up, and he says, “Who is here?” I came out, and he says, “You were here when the Germans were inspecting?” He had a heavy stick, and he had an axe, and I knew that I was in, in a very dangerous situation. I said, “Listen to me. I will go out, and they will spot me right away, and they will say, ‘Where were you hiding?’ I will say, ‘There was a nice man. He let me hide in his attic.’” He said, “But that’s a lie.” I said, “But they will not believe that it wasn’t like that.” I said, “Do me a favor. Let me stay here the day. I promise you, as soon as it gets dark, you can come up.” He said, “I will kill you if you stay another minute after it gets dark.”

After the night, I went down. The door was opened, and I came out. From that day on, I was on my own. By 1943, my mother, stepfather, and four-year-old sister had been murdered, along with nearly all the members of my extended family and the Jewish community of Skalat. At the age of 12, I was on my own in a totally hostile environment for the next two years. I survived by pretending to be a Ukrainian peasant girl, living a false life in a tiny village until liberation by the Soviet Army. In an orphanage, in a displaced persons camp, and often sleeping under the open sky, I made my way across Europe and sailed to New York, where I began my new life again as a Jew.

My message to you today is the following: I, Lusia Rosenzweig Milch, am 95-years-old and a Holocaust survivor. It is difficult to fully describe the suffering to which the Jews of my town, Skalat, were subjected. There, we were isolated, incarcerated, extorted, starved, and finally murdered. 

Out of almost 10,000, only 160 Jews survived. An ancient hatred, anti-Semitism, led to the murder of over 6 million Jews, including one and a half million children, the future of our people, gone forever. I ask you today to listen to eyewitnesses such as myself. Read, educate yourself, write to your representatives, and pledge never again. Never permit such a Holocaust to happen again. Do something before it is too late, or such events can happen again. 

The one thing I will not accept is to do nothing. With your help, we shall prevail.