Stephen Shooster Mendel was one of the first Jews to be taken hostage from Grybow. And Simon Unger, who ended up with a tattoo in Auschwitz that was three numbers behind me 161747, I was 161744. The Blauner family; Adela; Hudes; Thema; Romek (Roman); Moshe (Morris); Shia; Hiam; and Max, the eldest. The Blauner’s lived on Węgierska (Hungar- ian) Street near Biała Wyżna. They were a big happy family whose father was also in the horse and carriage business. Because I was only 12 prior to the German occupation, my knowledge of the world was limited. But, up the street at the Blauner home, Max, the eldest, was 20. He was born in 1919 and his impressions as a survivor, years later, add other dimensions to my own understanding of my hometown. Max Blauner: “I used to play with the local kids, too. Once in a while all my friends would get together and play a big soccer game with the non-Jewish kids. In fact, it took most of the town’s kids to get a soccer game going, and when they could get a game, the teams always ended up Catholics vs. Jews. But the thing that stood out was that every single time we played together, there would be a fight along ethnic lines. It did not stop the next game, as they all liked soccer, there was just no way around it. We would play hard and fast, and invariably someone would get bothered leading to a small fight. The older Jewish kids were all part of local Zionist organizations. And in our small town, there were three. I belonged to Honer Hazim, a progressive youth movement. Others belonged to Poalej Syjon, (Youths of Zion) and a third was Ha’shomar Ha’tzair, the Working Organization. There were very few Jewish youths who were not organized into at least one of these groups. My group was politically right-leaning, and I was able to grow and learn with them for 6 or 7 years before the occupation. They were training me to be a scout, as well as to live in Israel. I was learning about a faraway land (Israel), full of deserts, mountains, oceans, and a sea that is so salty nothing can live in it. A few of our Hebrew school teachers were in this same organization with me. All of them had visited Israel when they were young. I always enjoyed listening to their faraway stories. In many ways, I was playing army, but the only talk of war was the looming war with the Arabs and the Jews. No one planned on or expected the Germans to rise up as they did, nor did we portend anything threatening from our fellow Polish citizens.” Kids grew up quickly in Grybow. Being poor does that to you. When Max was 13, he left to become a tailor. The shop was in Nowy-Sacz, so he had to live there, away from his family for an extended period of time. This was the custom of the time. When a child was old enough, if he was also lucky, he would become an apprentice of someone in a profession, learning from the bottom up. All kids that were apprenticed worked
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