My Life My Way

Book excerpt: Memoirs of a Jew born in 1916 in Łuków, Poland, to the Chajt family. Chs. 6-14 (pp. 47-109) relate her experiences in the Holocaust. Under the German occupation of the town, in 1940 she joined a resistance group. In July she was arrested by the Germans and sent to the Lublin Castle prison, but managed to escape a year later, with the help of the Polish underground, and returned to Łuków. Her mother and four of her siblings were deported in May 1942 and killed, and one sister who was pregnant was killed during the roundup. Wrobel survived as a worker of the Dietz poultry factory; she helped her father and four other siblings hide for a while, but they were also eventually killed. During the final roundup in Łuków in May 1943, she and some members of her resistance group hid; afterward they fled to the forest and, as a partisan group, were patronized by the Armia Ludowa. In winter 1944 their camp was attacked by the Armia Krajowa; many Jews were killed and Wrobel was wounded. In summer 1944 the vicinity was liberated by the Soviets. In 1945 Wrobel, married and with a baby, fled to the U.S. occupation zone in Germany; in 1947 they settled in the USA.