From the Mind and in the Voice of Miss Josephina Levi as told to the last reporter she ever spoke to before she died on the eve of her 73rd birthday.
As a child o’ war I was one of the fortunate ones, or so I’ve been told most of my life, in that I never ended up in one of those German concentration camps .
It was in 1945 and I was perhaps weeks, days or even hours from being sent to one of those death camps and ultimately the gas chambers perhaps at nearby Auschwitz. Fortunate, they say, but I think not.
I think perhaps it would have been best for me to have gone to one of those Nazi camps than to have survived my entire life with the agonizing memories of that horrible time in my life… and in history.
Some may not be able to comprehend what I am saying, but you would need to be in the soul of a child and hear with a child’s ears and see with a child’s eyes what I had seen and heard in 1945 and before. And after being there, then be an adult and hear some Iranian dignitary claim it never happened.
Even then, you might not be able to comprehend. But then, I’m not telling this story so that you can comprehend, I’m telling this story because I was asked to tell my story which I have never told anyone until now.
I’m seventy-two years old, tomorrow I will be seventy-three, and lying on my death bed as I speak these words into the reporter’s recording contraption. I was only seven years old then, when I was playing in the courtyard with those other Jewish girls. I was only seven years old at the time when my life was painted with such horrible nightmares.
The Germans, they called us “useless eaters” meaning we children were of no value to them at the labor camps. Nearly 95% of all Jewish children prewar in Europe were unable to survive the Nazis “Children’s Actions” which took place in the ghetto.
I was one of the few who did survive and that leaves a powerful guilt upon your soul. A guilt you simply can not explain. It doesn’t wash away like dirty from the playground.
It was a nightmare I lived my whole entire life and I just as soon not have lived it.
It was a pretty morning and people were busy in the courtyard. I was playing with the other Jewish girls when it began.
My little brother, Adam, was carrying water in a bucket too big for him to carry. He slopped it on the ground as he traveled his little feet moving along as fast as they could. Just then a shot rang out and my little brother of five years old was struck down and bleeding where he fell. He was unable to say anything at all, his injuries were too severe. Moments later little Adam stopped moving and the blood and water stained the courtyard ground.
At first, I thought Adam was killed because he was slopping and wasting the water. But he was killed because he was the first casualty of a mere sport of a man behind a high-powered rifle who killed children for simple entertainment.
I just stood there frozen in my tracks. The most horrible thing I had ever witnessed in my entire life. I remember my eyes slowly traveling toward the direction of where the gunshot came from.
There he was up on a balcony, his German sniper rifle still smoking. He was grinning as if he was a proud hunter who had just dropped a trophy game. Then another shot was fired and, Jesse, another five-year-old Jewish boy fell.
The German officer, still not completely dressed yet, it was so early in the morning, his long-john shirt and suspenders on, but not his German officer’s uniform, as he peeked through his scope and searched for his next target.
He picked off Elijah and Rafal next, and then Debbie and Dina lay lifeless in the courtyard, their blood seeping into the soil like last night’s rain. Not a one o’ those children o’ war was over seven years old, yet. And this shooter was making a game o’ ending their precious young lives.
“Josephina, run! Josephina, hide!” the voices of my female companions screamed just as I was coming to my senses. Just then a bigger girl pushed me and I fell tumbling behind the circular stone well in the center of the courtyard. The older girl who had pushed me had taken the bullet that was intended for me.
She lay there, her eyes open wide but not seeing anything. A gaping hole in her head, blood streaming from it. She was once beautiful. She had saved my life by giving her own.
I found myself weeping and screaming like all of the other little children. There was no one who could come to our rescue. No one could save us. No one. This evil thing would devour us.
Most of the able-body adults had been sent on trains to go to some far off distant place–or so we thought. In reality they only went to nearby Auschwitz–but we wouldn’t find that out until years later. The only ones left behind were mostly children, old men and women and disabled persons who could not work or do anything requiring physical activity.
The Germans were simply detaining us until they could control the populations at Auschwitz.
I hide behind that well, peeking from one side and watching that horrible man up there on the balcony having his sport of shooting people–mostly children–like game animals.
When the German officer made a shot most of the time it was an instant kill. Seldom did he miss and seldom did his victims survive longer than a minute of two after being shot.
It was a horrible way to start the morning and us little children o’ war already knew something was drastically wrong with this world we were born into, growing up in and living…and dying in.
My eyes were so blurry from my tears I remember wiping them with the backs of my hands. I was so angry and so determined to do something to that horrible German man.
But I was powerless.
I watched that man how he pulled back the bolt on his sniper rifle and then pushed it forward again. I watched him as he placed his eye up again the rear-end of that scope and searched for another target. He taught me how to kill as I watched in horror as he killed one Jewish child after another.
All of a sudden there behind me a scuffle broke out between one of the young German soldiers in the courtyard and several of the mentally ill young adults. The mentally ill young adults knocked the young German soldier down and his rifle slid right under my feet.
The ones that were not right in the head were beating the German soldier, clubbing him with big sticks and iron rods and baseball bats. He bled and died right there along side the Jewish children.
One and then two of the five mentally ill boys fell to the ground dead after the sniper shot them.
But the living boys attacked more German soldiers in a last-ditch effort to survive the events of the day.
Other groups of Jewish defenders were attacking and wrestling German soldiers and if it were not for the surprise attack on the soldiers it probably would not have been a successful escape to freedom for us from an oppressive, brutal group of men.
The sniper up on the balcony was trying desperately to help the soldiers under his command. He was screaming down from the balcony at them, “Regain control of those Jews! Regain control!” He would alternate from barking orders and choosing Jewish targets to eliminate them while the commotion was going on in the courtyard.
The more Jews he could shoot the better chance the Nazi soldiers had in regaining control.
I have no idea why or how I did it, I guess I can only credit God for taking control of me and somehow managing something a little seven year old Jewish girl could hardly otherwise do on her own.
But I remember picking up that dead soldier’s rifle from beneath my feet and struggling with it as I lifted it, and aimed it at that evil man on the balcony. I remember it was awfully heavy and smelled strangely. It was also awkward for me to hold. But somehow I managed to position it just right and the whole world closed up around me.
I could no longer hear or see those fighting in the streets. I could no longer hear the other children crying or screaming or those who were dying and calling out for their mommas. I could no longer hear or see the fighting going on between those German soldiers and those men and women with illness in their heads. Or the cripples who were being shot by soldiers or any of those desperate souls who were attacking soldiers.
All I could focus on was him. That evil man up on the balcony.
I just did what he had been doing. I copied him. I did everything he had done. He taught me how to shoot a gun. He taught me how to kill, so I could kill him.
Or…God did.
I moved slowly out from behind the protection of the stone well. The whole world was closed to me. I focused only on him.
I pulled that heavy metallic bolt back and then down, and then pushed it upward and forward. Then I looked into the sight. My rifle did not have a scope like his, only sites, but he was dead center of those sites. I squeezed the trigger, my little finger pulling desperately. Suddenly I was thrown backward, tumbling in the dirt. My ears were ringing. The gun blast was loud–eardrum shattering loud. I could not hear anything outside of my own head. My face hurt, the recoil sent the powerful rifle back and it hit me hard in the head.
I was bleeding.
I thought about it–my injuries–only for a moment. My joy was greater than my pain.
The rifle lay a few feet from where I lay.
I looked up at the balcony and all I could see was that that German officer’s white long-johns were all red with blood. It was a blur, but he was indeed bloody. I had hit him. I had hit him right in the heart.
“I hit him!” I shouted out loud from my position sitting on the ground. “I hit him!”
“Crawl, Josephina!” my girlfriends were screaming. “Get back behind the well! Hurry, Josephina! Hide or he will kill you!”
Then I saw the shocked face and injured German officer expression as he aimed his sniper rifle right at me and leveled it so his eye was on the scope. I’m sure my face was the last thing he ever saw before he tumbled forward over that balcony and died on the courtyard ground below the house he had slept in the night before.
And I was glad he saw my face because I was smiling at him.
His body made a loud thump when he hit and I remember rejoicing when I heard that sound. After all, he was the man who killed my little brother and so many other children o’ war.
At the moment, that made me feel good. I remember sitting there as if time came to a stand still and the world could wait before the next frame of life would roll by.
Some older kid, I don’t remember his name, leaned down and picked up that rifle, “Good shot little girl, you got that bastard all by yourself.”
I had never been so proud in all my life.
The next thing that happen changed the course of history, at least in our lives. Nothing that could ever had happen could have made me believe in God more than what happen during those next few moments–moments that seemed to take a lifetime to complete.
That boy that picked up the rifle I had shot the German sniper with shot two more German soldiers and killed them. And as the soldiers fell dead on the ground other Jews grabbed their guns and kept shooting more and more German soldiers. Before long every German soldier in the tiny little village was dead and we had regained control of the village and our lives.
The change of events could have only been a divine intervention. Nothing else could have explained it. We were simple people, poor crippled Jews, children, the sick and lame, the old and the most weakest from society and being targeted and killed by ruthless armed soldiers who showed no mercy for us and then suddenly we had all of their guns and was taking back power from them.
Teenage boys lifted me up off the ground and sat me on their shoulders, and every one was merry and saying how I was a heroine.
Then I heard a screaming and just as I was looking up at the balcony they were throwing the Jewish girlfriend of the German officer off the balcony and she fell to her death not far from his bloody body. One of the boys said she snapped her neck and called her a bad, bad name.
The older men of our group soon took charge, crippled or not. The women rounded up all of us children and bathed and fed us. The teenagers and those of the age in the middle that could do more physical work than the rest of us dug graves for our dead and watched over us and guarded us from any approaching Germans so to provide our security.
I mourned my little brother Adam’s death and put flowers on his grave in a little cemetery we made just outside the village. And then I prayed for my mommy and daddy and all my aunts and uncles and older siblings because now the truth of the war was known and the German soldiers some of the boys had killed had told them what was happening to those shipped away on trains just before they died.
And I prayed for the souls of all of the rest of men, women and children who fell victim of that nasty war some Iranian parasite claims never occurred. I only wish I could wave a magic wand and let him be a Jew during that era, just for five minutes.
We all had a feast, we had happiness and sorrow all in one emotion. We sang and we cheered and we cried and we prayed. Then we all gathered up supplies and moved out of that town toward the safety of Allied Advancement. We were told that the Americans were coming North in our direction and all of the low flying British and American fighter and bomber planes we saw confirmed that.
There were more planes in the sky than ants in the ground.
The Germans were now on the run and they had no place, no place where they could hide.
I remember looking back over my shoulder as some older boy carried me on his shoulders while fifty or so of us, mostly children, were leaving that tiny village in Poland. We never saw another German again. In time, we ran smack into the American forces and they took care of us. I can assure you I had never felt saver in all of my life than I did when the Allied Forces took us into their custody and protected us from those evil dogs called Nazi Germans.
And the chocolate bars were good, too!
Thank God the war had soon ended. I was told throughout my life how fortunate I was to have survived those Nazi death camps. In a few weeks, days or even hours, had the Allied Forces not had come I certainly would have been sent to one of those Nazi death camps… that is if I had survived that German officer sniper or the brutality of his soldiers.
But I’m not so certain I’m happy I survived. I know it may sound unstable to make such statement, but I’ve had to live with the memory and nightmares of the events of that day everyday of my live hence–night and day.
Although I soon came to America and was adopted by wonderful American parents I can not forget my family that I was torn from in Nazi controlled Europe. I am the only survivor from my family and one of a very few Jewish children to survive that Nazi war.
Soon my body will fade me and all of those evil memories will evade me. My soul will go home to once again be with my family.
Yes, I was a child o’ war… and I am a child o’ God.
