Al Cislowski

Childhood memories

Anczel's father, Dawid Cislowski, was a tailor, who had moved from Krajno to Bodzentyn. In the summer, the family received additional income from picking fruit.

"Three months every year, we moved to a shack at the orchards," Anczel says.

Anczel attended both regular school and cheder, a private day school that emphasised religious studies like other Jewish children.

For the Holiday season, Anczel's father made him a new blue suit. Being a restless child of seven or eight years old, Anczel fetched one of his friends at the Synagogue, Shul, and went to play at the castle ruins in Bodzentyn, close to the Psarka River. Listen to Anczel's account of the events.

Fate during the Holocaust

As a child—only eleven years old—Anczel overheard the adults talk about Hitler and what he intended to do with the Jews. Listen to Anczel's account of the events at the outbreak of WWII.

In October 1939, all Jewish children were excluded from the Polish state school system. Anczel recalls the expulsion from school, the curfew, other restrictions and how he used to sit at home by the kerosene light and listen to the adults discuss recent events. Listen to Anczel's accounts.

In the ghetto, Anczel lived with his father, mother and siblings at Kielce Street No. 13.

"I kept a stamp collection," Anczel recalls. "Before we left the ghetto, I moved it from a drawer in the house to the attic. Most probably, it was lost. No one mentioned that they had found it after the war."

The majority of the members of the Cislowski family fled to work in the munitions factory in Starachowice-Wierzbnik before the liquidation of the ghettos took place. They hoped workers would be spared the selection. Listen to Anczel's account of the family's decision to leave Bodzentyn.

Anczel's father Dawid and mother Chaya were killed during the Holocaust, as were his brothers Avram and Aaron.

Avram had escaped from the ghetto, and the slave labour camp at the ammunition factory in Wierzbnik-Starachowice and gone into hiding with Alter Grosman, Morris (Moniek) Grosman and Dawid Fish (Fisz Dawid). After the war, three journalists from Warsaw wrote about the family that hid Avram.

A Polish woman named Stanisława Dziuba, who lived together with her mother and brother in a modest isolated farmhouse, described to the journalists how the family tried to help the four Jews.

Avram, Alter, Morris and Dawid stayed in something like a bunker (a hole in the ground), and the family gave them food and hid them so that they had a chance to survive. When some Germans spotted Dawid, he was killed. In the winter of 1944, the three Jewish friends left, temporarily leaving the hideout again, ran into German soldiers, and Avram was shot to death.

Anczel managed to survive. On 30 July 1944, he and the other inmates of the slave labour camp in Starachowice-Wierzbnik were deported to Auschwitz. On 28 October 1944, Anczel was taken to Stutthof and in November 1944 to Hailfingen, Dautmergen in mid-February 1945, and finally to Dachau-Allach on 12 April 1945. From there, Anczel and others were brought by trucks to Landsberg am Lech, where at last the inmates were freed when American soldiers liberated the camp.

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