ALLAN FIRESTONE: My name is Allan Firestone.
I'm a Holocaust survivor and Museum volunteer.
I was born in Kolomea, Poland on January 31, 1933.
My parents ran a successful small grocery store and bar,
providing a comfortable life for myself and my four older sisters.
When World War II began in 1939,
Kolomea was first occupied by the Soviet Union.
My parents' store was taken away from them
and my sisters now had to study Russian and Soviet history.
During the Soviet occupation, my older sister, Ruzhia got
married and gave birth to a baby boy named Risio.
Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June of 1941.
For a short time, my town was occupied by Hungary,
an ally of Nazi Germany.
The Hungarians forced the Jews to rebuild railway tracks
to support the effort.
Soon thereafter, the Nazis took control of my town.
The Nazis ordered all adults to wear armbands
showing that they were Jewish,
and implemented other rules that excluded Jews from public life.
The real disaster struck on January 26, 1942.
That day, the Nazis, with the support
of three Ukrainian auxiliary police,
came to our home and arrested my father.
They returned some hours later and arrested
my sister Ruzhia and her husband, Herman.
Before taking them away,
two policemen forced my sister into another room and raped her.
Then they traded places, and the third policeman took his turn.
As she was leaving, my sister turned to my mother
and asked her to take care of her little boy.
That same afternoon, the auxiliary police officers
came back and arrested my mother.
We never found out what happened to them,
but we assumed they were taken to the nearby
Sheparowce forest and murdered.
My sisters Frima, Yula, Ginia, later called Freida, Julia, and Rachel,
and I were left to take care of ourselves and my little nephew, Risio.
I was nine years old.
A few weeks later, we were forced into the ghetto in our town.
The five of us were given a single room to share.
My cousins, Herman, Jack, and Hilda Spiegel moved into a room next to ours.
My sisters were unable to take care of my little nephew
and asked his paternal grandmother to take care of him.
Just a few weeks later, during Passover,
there was another roundup of Jews.
My nephew's grandmother, and many others, were forced to
march to the Sheparowce forest where she was murdered.
My nephew, just two and a half years old at the time,
was used for target practice by the local SS.
Starvation was very pervasive.
Many mornings, I watched a man with a horse and buggy collect
the corpses of people who had died of starvation.
My youngest sister, Ginia, got a job working outside the ghetto,
harvesting beets.
She was able to smuggle beets into the ghetto a few times,
and we ended up living on those for a while.
Eventually, Ginia was caught smuggling food into
the ghetto and was arrested immediately.
We never saw her again.
By the fall of 1942, it became obvious that
the Nazis were determined to murder all of us.
My sister Frima, along with her friend,
tried to save herself by escaping the ghetto.
They took a train to Lvov, a large nearby city,
where they hoped to blend in.
On the train she was recognized by a former neighbor,
who denounced them to the police.
She and her friends were arrested and we never knew their fate.
That left just Yula and me.
Her boyfriend, Pawel Wermuth,
made arrangements with his family's former maid,
Frania Palyga, to hide him and my sister.
Before they were able to move to their new hiding place,
Pawel and his entire work detail were killed in a mass
shooting operation after reporting for work.
However, Yula was able to convince Frania to hide her,
even though Pawel could no longer escape.
Yula escaped from the ghetto and moved in with Frania
while I remained in the ghetto on my own.
After some persuading, Frania agreed to hide me as well.
Yula and I spent all of 1943 hidden by Frania
and her daughter, Stasia.
We spent our time either in the attic of the building
or in a wardrobe in Frania's apartment.
We sat in that wardrobe, not daring to breathe, when occasional guests
came or when Stasia entertained her boyfriend, a German soldier.
In 1944, in February, we were liberated by the Soviet Army.
Immediately, we began to look for survivors.
After living with a group of survivors for
a number of weeks in relative safety,
we were forced to flee because of rumors
of German military counteroffensive.
My sister Yula and I returned to Kolomea in late summer 1944,
but we stayed there only a short time.
We moved west, into Poland, settling in Breslau, formerly East Germany.
We lived an uneventful life until the summer of 1946 when Polish
mobs attacked survivors and killed a large number of them.
The news of the pogrom spread like wildfire,
and we decided there was no longer a life for us in Poland.
After some difficulties, we received visas and arrived in the U.S.
in February, 1947.
Some 50 years after I left Kolomea, I decided to revisit my old town.
I managed to visit the Sheparowce forest, where thousands of Jews,
including my family, were murdered.
There was a small monument in memory of the victims
of the Holocaust in Hebrew, Yiddish, and Ukrainian.
To my distress, I noticed human feces at the base of the monument.
Antisemitism was alive and well in Ukraine.
Antisemitic incidents were also on the rise in
the United States at the time and continue today.
That's why I tell my story to warn people of
the dangers of unchecked hatred and antisemitism.
It is up to all of us, Jews and non-Jews, to stop antisemitism at its
root before it metastasizes into a much more serious situation.