Finding Your Roots

The gendarmes appear when it is time to light the candles, and report that on Shabbos morning at seven o'clock, everyone must report as families at the entrance of the ghetto. They are told to bring only bread and water. There is terrible crying in the ghetto. -

Interviewer

Wow, what's it like to see that? -

Man

I worry for the world. The unthinkable happened. -

Interviewer

Oh, who could imagine the Holocaust? You know, in your worst nightmares, you know? But yet, the Holocaust happened. Yeah, my job is to imagine. That is my profession. -

Interviewer

Right. I have never been able to get a hold of that. (soft violin music) -

Narrator

On November 2nd, 1942, the Germans and their collaborators, surrounded the Bransk ghetto. Its inhabitants were loaded onto wagons and taken to a nearby town where more than 2000 of them were packed into trains bound for Treblinka, a concentration camp. Their fate was now sealed. -

Man

On the 10th everyone is already in Treblinka. According to the evidence, all the Bransk Jews, men and women separately, breathed their last in the Treblinka gas chambers on the 10th of November, 1942, at four o'clock in the afternoon. Their bodies were burned in the crematorium in Treblinka. Oh, my God. (man crying pitifully) You know I went there and I would say to people I've been interviewed so many times I would, I said, "I don't think any of my relatives died in the Holocaust." I was never given this information. This is more, I don't have words. That's unbelievable. That's unreal, man.