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Meta Doran:

My childhood was fabulous, adds Doran, an only child who was raised with an English
governess and who spoke English all her life. But by the time she reached adolescence,
life for Jews in Germany had become brutally oppressive.
I mean, the brown uniforms were everywhere, she says. I never went to general
school. It was always Jewish school. And when we got out, when school was over, we all
had an adult waiting for us because, otherwise, we were attacked by teenagers or the
Hitler Youth (who would shout), Those goddamned Jews.
In late 1938 about six months after the German government had confiscated Dorans
fathers business Dorans family was deported to Poland with nothing more than one
suitcase each and the clothes they wore.
Why? Officials didnt tell us a thing, Doran says.
They were taken to the train station, and the train was packed, she says. We were
taken to the Polish border, then the Poles wouldnt let us in.
Luckily, her fathers sister lived in Poland, and they stayed with her for a time. Then,
Doran says, in September of 1939, the war with Poland broke out, and two weeks later
they had everything in Poland overrun. We were under German (rule).
The apartment in which Doran and her family were living became part of a ghetto, a
severely overcrowded, bordered and secured area used by the Nazis to confine and
segregate Jews.
We didnt have to move away, but we had to take other people in with us, Doran says.
It was a very old section of town. They sealed it. And no family had more than one
room, and our groceries were measured out to us. You couldnt go to the store and buy
more.
Did Doran, who was then about 13, try to make sense of what was happening around her?
All we tried to do was survive the day, she says. We had to worry about having
enough so our stomachs wouldnt be growling and that our food should match the time
that was designated.
People died of pneumonia, of being cold or starving to death. That was Poland in the
ghetto.

Doran was made to work in a tailoring factory while in the ghettos What I knew of
tailoring you could put into a small thimble, she says and, at work, we would get
one plate of watery soup a day, which was more than we had at home.
Doran says she and her family lived in two ghettos, and that her father died of starvation
during that time. When the Nazis liquidated the ghettos, Doran who never learned
what happened to her mother was put aboard a rail car and taken to Auschwitz, the
concentration camp in German-occupied Poland where an estimated 1.1 million
prisoners, almost all of them Jewish, were murdered.
Doran knew nothing of Auschwitz. All we hoped for was that they should let us live,
Doran says.
Arriving at Auschwitz, prisoners who survived the brutal and, for many, deadly trip
in the tightly packed, cold rail cars were ordered to walk to either the left or the right.
I was sent to the right, Doran says. I was with the living ones.
We were sent into a huge building, Doran says. The first thing they did to us was
shave our heads. No hair. That was No. 1.
Then, they pushed us into the showers. Now, the other, left side was pushed into rooms
that did not have showers but had gas, and they were gassed to death.
As the surviving prisoners left the showers, they were given shoes and misshapen dresses
that did nothing to protect them from the cold. From then on, there would be no more
showers, little if any food each day and the constant threat of death.

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