Aharon Pacirkovsky
Holocaust surviver, Łódź Ghetto
“Out of 70,000 children at Łódź Ghetto, I’m one of the only three children who managed to survive the Ghetto but being a survivor came with a hefty price. From the first day I was born in the ghetto until it was released, for almost five years, my parents hide me in different places. In the beginning, I was hidden at a clothing factory in the ghetto but after a year and a half, my parents had to move me to a different hiding place – The ghetto cemetery. My dad who worked at ‘Chevra Kadisha’ (an organization that sees to it that the bodies of deceased Jews are prepared for burial according to Jewish tradition) hide me in one of the ‘Tahara rooms’ (A room where the corpses were washed (Tahara) before burial), so even if I met people I couldn’t really have a proper conversation with them.
My childhood was stolen from me.
Technically I was alive. I was breathing, I had a pulse and I had some food to eat but I wasn’t really living.
In the most crucial years of being a child, I didn’t experience love, warmth, laughter, or happy moments. I didn’t have any friends to play with or even to talk with. I didn’t have any toys or a single teddy bear I could play with because the Nazis vanished everything they could from the ghetto. My father warned me that under no circumstances should I scream, cry or shout because If I will do that the Nazis will find me and I will be shot dead. It was living under constant fear of daying in an age where I should have got as much warmth and love as any child would.
My wife who knew about my lost childhood bought different teddy bears and spread them around the house. Sometimes after my kids and later on my grandkids would finish playing with them I would approach the teddy bears, pat them, and think about how much the child I was would have wanted a teddy bear-like that while he was hidden at the ghetto. I don’t want that any child in the world will ever experience what I have experienced in Łódź Ghetto so I have a very simple request: fight antisemitism and blind hatred in all its forms. We can not allow that even a single child will lose his childhood.”
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