Teresa Yawic Puter

MAIL: mailt: gana123@walla.com , hadar999@gmail.com
Survivor Code: RelatioNet TE YA 34 WA PO
Family Name:Puter
Previous Family Name:Yawic
First Name: Teresa
Father Name: Zusman Zigmunt
Date of birth: 1934

Country of birth: Poland

City of Birth: Warsaw

Teresa's journey

Teresa's Story

I was born in Warsaw and so were my parents. Most of the Warsaw Jewry was intelligent, but the Jewry of the villages belonged to a lower social economic class. My father was a doctor and my mother was a French teacher. However, she never taught French because of the war.

We were a rich family, our house was a 5 room apartment because my father had a waiting room for his patients. My grandfather owned a tanning leather factory. My mother had 7 sisters, 5 of them were killed with their families in the war. My mother and her youngest sister, who wasn’t married, survived.

When the war began in the beginning of 1939, our house was burned, so we ran away to my father's clinic. I had a brother and I was the eldest girl in the family. Every one of us had a German babysitter. Afterwards, the Germans moved us into the Warsaw ghetto. I was a little girl then, about 6 years old. In the ghetto there were poor people and hunger was everywhere. People were desperate. Every day we tried to manage a regular lifestyle if it was possible. My grandfather was rich, so we had money. But, people who had no money were starving to death. I could see the way people sat next to their houses, which used to be big and impressive houses, and asked for donations. I remember one family, one woman with 3 children, who sat on the sidewalk. She was clean and her children were dressed well. I could see that one of the kids was covered with newspapers. He died of starvation. Later on, the woman had remained just with one kid. That was the last time I had seen her. They were starving to death.

Because people were hungry, anything that was brought into the camp was stolen even if it wasn't food. In the ghetto my father got sick, and my young aunt took me to the bakery to buy him a  cake. When we left the bakery someone hit my hand and the cake fell on the sidewalk, but he ran away. When we arrived home, my aunt came in first and I followed her. Then the same guy stole the cake.

The Germans started to kill Jews in the ghetto, so we moved to my grand father's factory, where we could hide. Germans worked there because they changed it into a Laundry. In the factory there were shelves and we hid on them when the Germans came for a search. Once we hid there, we heard someone standing and whistling. We thought it was a local person, but it was a German, he could  have easily found us. Near the factory there was a jail which the Germans wanted to blow. We learned that when they wanted to blow up places they hung light bombs, so they would know what place to bomb. They wanted to blow up jail "Padiak" where political prisoners were held and we saw above us a light bomb. In 1941 the plane shellings were very heavy, and when they flew we heard an annoying noise getting closer to us. They didn’t hit the "padiak", but the house next to us. The building fell on our building but it didn’t hit us.

 

The Germans used to take Jews or German prisoners out of jail and shoot them. No one was able to move them for a few days. Sometimes the Germans found Jews they wanted to kill, so they were shooting them into a bin, and no one was able to move them from there for  a few days too. In the factory there was a double roof and the Germans searched for people who didn’t show up at the ghetto. We rolled around the edge of the attic and at a very small distance from us was the window of the nearby house. We saw 2 young Germans with a dog, the dog barked insanely because it could smell us. But the distance was too small for them and if they wanted to get us they needed to walk around the building so they just left the place.,

In the ghetto I had Typhus. At that time many people died of typhus. The lice transmitted the Typhus so when we found lice my dad threaded them on a needle and burned them. I got really sick and my life almost ended, but somehow I got better.

When the ghetto was shut down, the Germans started burning the buildings and then we needed to run away. My mother made ​​contact with the German nanny we had in the past. I remember once in the afternoon my dad took me to a wall and placed a ladder next to it. I knew someone was waiting for me on the other side of the wall. I had a small suitcase where I kept many of my belongings, including a picture of my father. Then dad told me I couldn't keep it because they would recognize me, and I cried. Since then nothing is valuable for me. I guess something was broken inside me. If someone asks something from me, I don't mind giving it away.

I remember how it was hard for me when I left the suitcase which was so important for me. Then I was moved to an empty house. I guess the people who lived there before were wealthy, because the furniture there was beautiful. Every day I walked around alone until one evening they took me. Later on, my mother and brother got out of the ghetto and the three of us were together. Until then, during the war, I was alone and my mother was with my brother.

One time, when we were together, a Polish woman gave us a place to live. Every time a man dressed up with a black suit and a white scarf came to our place and demanded money from us, otherwise he would tell the Germans where we lived. Then, she changed our living place, but he found us every time. We understood that she sent him to take money from us.

I remember one week I was alone with a bus driver. At first, when he drove the bus, I used to stand next to him. But then people started to whisper :"she is  a Jew". So he started to drive without me. Every morning I stayed in a room where he lived. I slept on a railing bed and when he came back he threw his fur on me so I won't be cold. When I was alone in the room, people were knocking on the door for hours. They knew I was there. I knew I mustn’t open the door but I remember it was scary.

When I was alone and I had nothing to eat, I used to eat frozen potatoes from under the snow.I lived in a village in a small cabin. Once I went to the field and suddenly a bull ran toward me, I ran to the cabin but it almost broke the cabin with its horns.

When the Germans came to Warsaw, they put people on tracks to be taken to extermination camps. One of the Germans asked me :"what are you doing here?" I told him that I was local, so I was saved.

Once I lived in a small room with a German whore. She had a bed with a curtain so I couldn’t see what they were doing. I remember one German who pointed at me, but she told him:"She shouldn't bother you."

Before the war ended, my mother, my brother and I lived with an Ukrainian guy. He dug a hole under a cage with rabbits. Every time that something dangerous was about to happen, we hid there. The Ukrainian guy was really cruel. He used to take off the rabbit's skin and eat it.

One day, my mother went to the village next to us and we agreed to wait for her at the train station. The train arrived and the Russians bombed the other side of the station. It was terribly noisy. Smoke and blood were everywhere. And then all of a sudden, I saw that everybody was lying and only my brother and I were standing. I took my brother and we ran out of there, but luckily my mother wasn’t on that train. When she came on the next train and looked for us, people told her that no one remained there, but dead or casualties. She looked for us among the dead and casualties until she found the place where we hid.

 

During the war, my father was killed in the Ghetto, and when it ended my mother had no conditions to raise us, so my brother and I lived in an orphanage near Warsaw. In the orphanage I fell ill with Meningitis. My mother sent me penicillin and it saved me. We were there a few months, until I heard that a group of kids were running away from there, I didn't know where or why they were escaping, but I wanted to go with them because I couldn't stay alone any more after being alone for such a long time during the war. On the way to Israel we arrived to France and from there we sailed to Haifa. I arrived to "kibbutz Amir" and all my friends there were 18 years old so they went to the army. I was 16 years old but I wanted to go with them, so I insisted to join the army until they agreed to get me.

When I was 19 I left the kibbutz and my mother and brother came to Israel

Today, I have one daughter and one son who has 3 lovely daughters.

Warsaw:

 

Warsaw:

  .The city of Warsaw, capital of Poland, connects both banks of the Vistula River

.Warsaw was the capital of the resurrected Polish state in 1919 

Before World War II, the city was a major center of Jewish communities in Poland. Warsaw's before the war, the Jewish population of more than 350,000 was about 30 percent of the city's total population.

The Warsaw Jewish community was the largest in both Poland and Europe, and was the second largest in the world.

On September 1, 1939, Warsaw suffered heavy air attacks and artillery Bombing. German soldiers entered Warsaw on September 29, right after its surrender.

German civilian officials ordered the Construction of a Jewish council under the leadership of a Jewish engineer named Adam Czerniaków. As chairman of the Jewish council, Czerniaków had to Conduct the soon-to-be established ghetto and to follow German orders. 

On November 23, 1939, German civilian occupation authorities required Warsaw's Jews to identify themselves by wearing white armbands with a blue Star of David. The German authorities closed Jewish schools, Banned Jewish-owned property, and conscripted Jewish men into labor and dissolved prewar Jewish organizations.

On October 12, 1940, the Germans decreed the establishment of a ghetto in Warsaw. The decree required all Jewish civilians of Warsaw to move into a designated area, which German authorities sealed off from the rest of the city. Among the welfare organizations active in the ghetto were the Jewish Mutual Aid Society, the Federation of Associations in Poland for the Care of Orphans, and the Organization for Rehabilitation through Training. these organizations attempted to keep alive a population that suffered severely from starvation, exposure, and infectious disease.

On August 1, 1944, the Polish Home Army rose against the German authorities in an effort to release Warsaw. The reason of the uprising was the appearance of Soviet forces along the east bank of the Vistula River. The Soviets failed to interfere, the Germans eventually crushed the revolt and razed the center of the city to the ground in October 1944. Though they treated captured Home Army soldiers as prisoners of war, the Germans sent thousands of captured Polish civilians to concentration camps in the Reich. 166,000 people passed away in the uprising, including 17,000 Polish Jews who had either fought with the Home Army or had been discovered while hiding.

When Soviet combatants continued their attack on January 17, 1945, they released Warsaw. According to Polish data, only about 174,000 people were left in the city.

Only 11,500 of the survivors were Jews.

Today Warsaw is a major international tourist destination. 

Warsaw's economy, by a wide variety of industries.. The city is a significant centre of Polish media industry, and many publishers are based there. Tourism is one of the main industries in the services sector.

Currently, most of Poland’s Jewish population lives in Warsaw. There is both a Jewish primary school and a kindergarten. Warsaw also houses the offices of the Main Judaic Library and Museum of Jewish Martyrology. It is the home also of the E.R. Kaminska Jewish Theater, the only regularly.functioning Yiddish theater in the world.

Teresa's journey