Bluma Szadur (née Babic) was born in 1923, she lived with her family in Warsaw at 105 Leszno Street. After the fall of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in May 1943, she came to Majdanek. She was also a prisoner of KL Auschwitz, KL Ravesbrück, KL Neustad-Gleve. After the war, she married and immigrated to Israel. She died in 2014.

My father, Kalman Babic, 48 years old, was a foreman, a tinsmith. The material condition of the family was good, we lived on Leszno Street 105, in a four-room apartment with a telephone. We lived comfortably. We were seven children: three brothers and four sisters at home, and an eighth boy adopted from the orphans’ home. At home we spoke Yiddish and Polish. […] We had a very large family in Warsaw. In my mother’s family there were seven children and there were eleven children in my father’s family. I was the only one who stayed alive from all this great family who had lived in Poland.

It was July 22, 1942. I remember: it was a beautiful day. I saw announcements on the walls: “Jews! Go East!” They promised that each volunteer would receive 3 kg of bread and 1 kg of marmalade. And they gave the address: Umschlagplatz. Nobody knew what this was about. But, for example, I knew our neighbors from Gęsia Street 79, who voluntarily went for these 3 kg of bread. I remember when they said: “Even if die, at least we will be full once!”

On the first day of the action, my sister Cesia, 12 years old, was caught. Mum ran to the Umschlagplatz and they let her come back from there. They told her: “You cannot take your daughter away, but if you want, you can go with her!” And the child said: “Go home, and I will go with our neighbors and they will watch me. There are children in the house…” In fact at home there were two children younger than her. It was a terrible tragedy. We mourned her like she would be dead, although we still did not know where they were going.

And the first escapees began to appear. It was enough, that in the ghetto people knew that people were sent to Treblinka and that they were murdered there. And not one of them remains. And these wagons with loaves of breads returned and were used a second time for other people.

They took my father from the street. They were looking for some professionals and they asked him who he was and he said he was a tinsmith. (He was taken to Treblinka or to some other camp). My parents loved each other very much. They were married  for thirty years, but they loved each other like a couple of eighteen years old in love. My mother could not exist at all without my father. I remember that when he did not come back – she was speechless, she was spinning like a shadow, she did not care anymore, she spent hours lying down with her face to the wall and crying.

A few days after taking my father away, they took my mother Sara, age 47. My 14-year-old brother Moniek was close to her. They put her on a horse-drawn tramway – the neighbors said that my brother ran after the cart and cried: “I do not want to live without my mother!” And he went with her …. I only found the two youngest children at home: Heniuś and Rózia. It all happened in July or early August 1942.

Children in the ghetto were gone. Every child had the understanding of an old man. [The children] loved each other very much, and they slept in one bed, they held hands. Heniuś was 10 years old, and Rózia 8, and I heard him telling her at night: “Do not cry, we will be fine, we will come back after the war all together and daddy and mummy. And do not cry, because if Bluma hears you crying, it will be hard for her. And that’s very hard for her already.”

[Because Bluma became ill, the two youngest children were given to the Orphans’ Home at Zamenhofa Street.] On January 18 at night [1943], the ghetto was closed and in the morning it was impossible to leave. Action [deportation]! I was now insane. I wanted to go to the children. Whoever lived in the ghetto, knew that first and foremost children would go. I understood that the biggest mistake I made was giving them away. In the morning they loaded them on wagons and they went to Treblinka.

Based on: Yad Vashem Archive, testimony AYV O.3.3677