During one such raid, an infant was left hidden in the house. As usual, the house was ransacked, obscenities shouted at the hidden Jews and even a shot was fired. After several hours of hiding, Alicia volunteered to go out and feed the child some more tea. When she found the child, she screamed and fainted. A German officer had found the baby and shot it through the head.
One day, Alicia heard some people interrupt a conversation about her when she passed them by. She pried information out of them and learned that Zachary had been hung. She made one of his friends take her to where he was still hanging outside a police station. He had been beaten and tortured. As Alicia wept over his body, a Ukrainian police officer approached her, pointed his rifle at her and threatened to kill her. She told him to go ahead. Instead he settled for kicking her several times. Alicia and her brother’s friends returned in the night and secretly buried his body.
One day during the winter, Alicia returned home from getting water. She had not had time to remove her scarf when there was a knock at the door. When she answered it, a Polish police officer asked her if she was
She was taken to the police station and shipped off to a prison in another city with many more women. As the prisoners were marching through the yard into the prison, she bent to help another woman who had been hit with a rifle butt. This infuriated a guard who began to beat her with his rifle, kicked her, hit her, etc. She fractured several ribs and lost some teeth but was able to stagger inside. The women were put six to a room and were given no food or water for 3 or 4 days. Every once in a while, women were led away and did not return. Alicia could hear the screams of prisoners outside being ripped apart by the German guard dogs.
Finally the women were given buckets of water and told to drink as much as they liked. Soon they became ill. Alicia woke several weeks later in a soft bed. He savior was a Jewish man who was in charge of the work group that came to the prison to bury the dead. He had noticed that she was still alive and had smuggled her from the prison. He and his wife had nursed her back to health. She found out that the water the Germans had given them was tainted with typhus. Those who had not died in prison had been released; sent back home to spread death among their own. If the Nazis could not shoot all of them, they would kill them by disease.
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I had the opportunity to meet Alicia when she came to Grand Junction, Co. The first time when she spoke at our church and a couple years later in the middle schools. We visited one on one for several minutes. As a State Department dependent in my teens, I lived in Munich, Germany for eight years, about 13 km from Dachau Concentration Camp.
That would truely be an experiance worth having. Having lived with adequate everything my whole life, its staggering to think that she even survived.
All i could do was cry at evil horror Alicia endured, but delicate beauty this beautiful child exhibited.
Fascinating story, but it needs further editing – there are several pieces of missing information which make it confusing to read. I assume Zachary was another brother of Alicia’s? I assume the Polish police officer asked Alicia if she was Mrs Jurman?