Marion Camrass, 81, reveals her childhood experience of escaping from Poland to Kazakhstan after war broke out.
I was born in Krakow, Poland, in January 1932, an only child. My father was a lawyer and the son of a wealthy factory owner and landowner. We only spoke Polish at home but a governess taught me Hebrew.
We were in our holiday house in the country when war broke out, and never went home. We went east to where my aunt had a big estate. We travelled by train, and horse and cart, and were bombed on the way by German planes. We didn’t realise that the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact had already carved Poland up.
After a week, the Russians ordered the landowners out. We went to live in Brody, which is now in Ukraine. We were in a little rented room. Circumstances were very difficult. Eventually, all the Poles who had registered to go back home were transported to Siberia in big cattle trucks. I was just eight at the time. There were 50 or 60 people in the cattle truck. Once a day the Russian soldiers would bring a sort of bucket with some soup and some bread, if you were lucky. It was just dreadful. The sanitary arrangements were horrendous. We ended up at a camp for political prisoners, where we spent the winter.
In June 1941 Germany attacked Russia and, instead of being enemies, the Polish prisoners became friends and allies, so were allowed to leave. But my family decided to stay because we felt, as Jews, they might be safer there. They never believed Hitler would get as far as Siberia.
But as autumn approached we decided we had to go. We didn’t think we would survive another winter. A raft was built and we floated 200 kilometres down the River Chulym. My mother managed to get some oats but they were really oats that you feed to horses. She used water to make little cakes with it, but I couldn’t swallow it. It was very rough.
We kept travelling and ended up in the Asian republics. After a long train journey we got to Kazakhstan, and eventually Bukhara. The family rented a tiny room. My father got work in a communal farm, but he died of typhus. My mother had it, too, but she survived, though she later contracted dysentery and malaria. She wasn’t able to feed me, and I was put into an orphanage.
After many vicissitudes we were repatriated to Poland in May 1946. But the place had changed for the worse – 26 Jews died in the Kielce Pogrom in July, so my mother decided to send me to Britain to my father’s sister.
My aunt was Regina Schoental, a respected academic. She had got her BSc and PhD in chemistry from Krakow University and had come to England in 1938, where she was working on penicillin, and later on cancer research. When I arrived she was working in Glasgow. I went to Laurel Bank School, did very well, and later studied medicine at Glasgow University. I married an older man, Henry, a GP, when I was 20. We had two children, Nina and Peter.
I visited Krakow a few years ago but I did not feel at home. The Jewish quarter used to teem with life but it was now empty. I had the feeling that if my mother hadn’t taken me and run, east and away, we would both be dead and my eight grandchildren would not exist. My grandparents died in the gas chambers, which is just horrendous.
Edited by Russell Leadbetter. The full transcript of this interview can be found on gatheringthevoices.com. Gathering The Voices, which received £45,000 from the Heritage Lottery Fund, is led by Angela Shapiro, an academic at Glasgow Caledonian University.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article