Stephen Shooster made an indelible impression on me. I will never be able to get this scene out of my mind. My boyhood had effectively ended the moment I touched the first body. I had to shut the eyes of some of them. When the wagon was loaded, the horse pulled hard on the heavy load, and we started for the cemetery. Each step of my horse walking pounded on my head. When we arrived at the cemetery, we met Mr. Romanek, the keeper, and his son, Adam. They helped us unload the bodies in silence. No prayers were said, just silence. My wagon was filled with red pools spilling onto the ground. As we left late in the afternoon, the blood continued to drip slowly upon the road. Roman and I were understandably numb. I came home shaking, unable to speak. You might say this was my Bar Mitzvah, how I became a man. My father snapped me out of it by forcing me to answer a few questions bereft of emotion, ”Who did they get?” I told him, “Goldman and his two sons, the fellow that was missing one hand from the First World War, Baldinger, Getz, and…” The rest I could not name. We sat for a while until I calmed down. There was little time for grieving. There was a general sense of malaise about our whole existence. The Judenrat was never re-established. In its place, the Nazis ap- pointed a single secretary from Krynica. Their lives were sacrificed in vain, because, soon after, a hundred hostages were collected anyway. The hostages vanished, in- cluding my friend Mendel Sher, who was among them. Eventually, Mendel ended up in Birkenau with me. They got what they wanted. 1942 was another terrible win- ter, especially for the Jews. It was bone-chilling cold with not even a fur to crawl un- der. No matter how bad it was, none of us thought that the Nazis were planning the extermination of our entire race, from every corner of Europe and then the world. It was a war upon the Jews under the smokescreen of the greater worldwide conflict. Death became a familiar visitor. On another occasion, I was sent to collect the body of another prominent citizen. I found him on the pathway by the Biała River. He was just under the bridge. When I discovered him, he was wearing very fine mahogany leather shoes and beautiful clothing. The disparity between having nice shoes and being shot dead struck me as horribly incongruous. Worse, I knew the man. It was Dr. Ameisen, the judge of the local court. At the time, I didn’t know why, but this was his final judgment, and I was the unwitting bailiff. Later, I learned from my neighbors that Dr. Ameisen was Jewish, but he married a Catholic and renounced his faith. While my family suffered its misery, up the hill, the Blauner family was doing no better. Max Blauner, the eldest child, told me what happened to him.
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