Franka Berk, nee Kenigsztajn, b. 1924, Piotrkow Trybunalski, Poland. Immigrated to Australia 1955.

“…We lived on the outskirts of Piotrovkov Trybunalski, which had a population of 69 000. I was a teenager when we became aware of rising antisemitism. Polish children who used to be my friends began to attack us on our way to school and I fought back to defend my Jewish friends.

When the war broke out, my parents sent me about ten kilometers into the countryside. I saw bombs falling nearby and many of my friends were killed. After a few days I returned to my family and hid with them in an ancient castle, from which we witnessed the Germans' invasion. We returned to our home which was now in the Jewish ghetto; the first such ghetto in Poland.

Since our house was on the edge of the ghetto, my brothers and I could easily get ourselves in and out to smuggle in products to help the Jewish community. There was much looting of Jewish shops and the Polish Army was in disarray. Many Poles were taken prisoners of war and assembled outdoors near where we lived. I was driven by the injustice of the war and felt there was a role for me. I brought the POWs food, I delivered messages for them and kept them in touch with their loved ones. This was my first real act of rebellion, for which I was severely beaten by the Germans.

l) Franka Berk in about 1936 r) Franka Berk today

We all had to work for the benefit of the German war machine, wherever they sent us. I worked variously as a washerwoman and a cleaner and I sorted mountains of shoes and clothes. We didn’t know until later that they had come from Jews who had already been murdered. I also worked with two of my girlfriends, Renia and Luise, at the German Arbeits-Amt (“employment office”), registering Jewish women for work and supplying them with work ID cards.

One day in 1942 our office was suddenly closed down, shortly before the largest Selektion of that year. I had recently married Szymek Nyss. Szymek was a very educated man who worked for the Resistance within the ghetto’s Jewish police force. Szymek and his friend Moniek Grosberg broke into the Arbeits-Amt and stole the remaining work ID cards. I distributed these cards to a lot of the women, thus saving them from the Selektion and certain death. Szymek helped three young boys escape the ghetto to join the partisans, but they were betrayed and all were murdered.

So by the age of 19 I was a widow, with a strong will to help others. I saved many people during Selektions. I would cross from line to line, to a line of people marked for death to make a space for someone in the line for life. Then I would tell a guard I had a work ID card and get moved back. Then I’d do it again. I saved all my sisters-in-law that way, plus countless others, including my neighbours. My mother and my sister were taken in that big Selektion of 1942 and I wanted to go with them, but somehow I was spared. Holding my baby nephew, I went home to our room but I had no food to give him. I tried mouth-to-mouth resucitation, but he died of starvation, only a few weeks old.

After that I got heavily involved in the Resistance. I worked in a place called “The Salon”, which was linked to a workshop where Jewish craftsmen and women made all types of clothing and footwear for high-ranking German and Gestapo officers and their wives and lovers; also some Poles. We took the orders at The Salon and so I came into contact with a lot of people. I was the link, the courier, between the Jews inside the ghetto and those outside. I delivered messages, money and information, helping many to escape, including Dr Grynberg and his wife and son and Dr Wanziger, the head of the Jewish hospital. My friend Renia Zaks and I bribed a Ukranian soldier with a wristwatch to get him out of a synagogue roundup where he awaited certain death. I arranged the rescue of my aunt Perla Yakubowicz from the same synagogue.

My work at The Salon came to an end in 1943, when I was arrested by the Gestapo. I was interrogated and beaten up many times and spent four months in jail, between January and April of 1943. Of 50 people jailed at the same time, only four of us came out: two men and my friend Halina and I. After my release I went to work at the glass factory, Hortensja, where I continued to work in the Resistance including helping Fitek Altman and his friend Fuchs to escape. As ever, I had the opportunity to escape and live as a gentile, but this would have compromised the safety of my father. In addition, the Jewish ghetto commander Mr Gomberg asked me to stay on and look after the other women of the ghetto, so I did.

The Resistance that I belonged to was a chain of people who sustained my own determination to continue. They were Germans and Poles, decent people who showed a spark of humanity at times when I believed that we would all die. I want to remember those few but rare and precious people who are the unsung heros. People who helped others under enormous stress and at the risk of their own lives and those of their families. This is what kept me alive: that there were people who wanted to help, even at such high risk."