Dora Mizutz
“I saw it’s not good, my brother wants to get married but my mother wants him to wait until I am married. So I left. I was a Zionist since 14 years old. I was that time 19 or 18 and I went to a Kibbutz near Lodz. I worked there; I was a housekeeper and I was there one year when a boy came in. I liked him very much. It was a Friday he came in and I saw him through the window. And I said, ‘This boy will be mine. Girls, remember.’ So he came in. It was like something hit me. His name was Alexander Kirsch.
I went once to fetch water from the well. He ran out and he helped me. And then he said to me that I am such a type as to be a model for a painter. And then I fell in love with him and he fell in love with me. And it was a very, very big love. He went away then he came back and he brought me a lot of presents. That’s it and then the war broke out. We got married in the ghetto.
While at Auschwitz I had a dream that I open a door, there is nothing. I open another door, there is nothing. I open the third door, there is nothing. A door after a door. Then I saw a window and I jumped out of the window and it was so soft, I didn’t hurt myself. This dream made me think I’m going to survive.
I never heard about my family back in Rovno, absolutely, until after the war. I got a letter from a friend. She wrote that the Germans took the Jews of Rovno, every one of them and they took them to the Sosinkes ?, a little pine forest- sosna means pine. They took them there and they tell them to dig a long grave. And they put them by the grave one by one and they shoot them and they fell in, some dead and some alive, they fell in the grave. And then the Germans put lye and water on the bodies and it start to boil and everybody was dead, everybody. Nobody was alive- not one person, not one Jew from Rovno. Among them were my father, mother, brother, his wife and three children.
Alexander and I were reunited when the Russians liberated Auschwitz. A few years later my daughter was born in Kelce. She grew up like a flower in the sun in a family with a father and mother that loved her. The whole house was love. And I never told her. I didn’t want to tell her what we went through because I didn’t want to spoil her love of life.
It is important, absolutely, not to look backwards, because everybody has a tragedy in his life, somewhere, something. Better to look forward and to enjoy every day. You appreciate life when you think of losing it. I wasn’t afraid in the camp. I was sure that tomorrow I could be dead but then I am alive—I survived. And life is so beautiful.”