Dora Dajbog in Kielce-Planty

In the first row, in the center, is my aunt Dora Dajbog (nee Cymerman) sitting, with her daughter Izia. I don't know in which circumstances this photo was taken. It was taken in Kielce-Planty in 1946. I think there was the administration of the Jewish Community in this building. My aunt probably went there to arrange something. When the war broke out, Aunt Dora and Uncle Srul, decided to go to Luck and stay with Uncle Noach. In 1940, the NKVD came to the place where Uncle Noach worked and took him straight from there to a transport. He managed to notify Aunt Dora and his brother, and they hurried to join the same transport, because they realized they'd all be taken away sooner or later and they wanted to be together. They were sent to Siberia and ended up in a camp. Aunt Dora was pregnant when they took them, and she gave birth in the camp to a girl, Hania, it was 1940. When an agreement was later signed by the Polish and Russian governments, they were released from the camp and settled compulsorily in Jambul, Kazakhstan. Noach worked in a de-lousing unit there and contracted typhus, and subsequently passed it on to his brother. During this time, the Polish army was organizing itself, Noach was sick with typhus, couldn't go with Anders. He recovered, but Uncle Srul died. A couple of months earlier, Hania, the little baby girl, had died, and several months after Srul's death, another daughter, Izia, was born. So that was literally a marathon: a child's death, the uncle's death, the little girl's birth in those conditions. Izia was born in 1943, Hania was born in 1940 in the camp. As soon as the 1st Kosciuszko Infantry Division was organized, Uncle Noach joined it. He went with it the whole way down to Berlin, and from there returned to Warsaw. After the war was over, Izia's mother, Aunt Dora, returned to Poland from Jambul, it was 1945. She accidentally got right into the Kielce pogrom. Soon afterwards they left for Palestine. When Izia was getting married, I received an invitation to attend her wedding in Israel, and of course I didn't get the passport, I couldn't go. In 1969, Izia and her husband left Israel, settled in Montreal, then moved to Calgary. Izia teaches Jewish tradition and culture in Calgary. I never talked to Aunt Dora about the pogrom. With Izia, on the other hand, I did last year, with the help of her daughter. She remembers that some man pulled her out of the crowd during the pogrom, because she looked Polish. She started crying, 'Mommy!' so the man somehow also pulled her mother out, and hid them in the nearest gate. She remembers that, and doesn't even want to think about coming to Poland.

Photos from this interviewee