Kaymen Cook

1/25/16
Professor Wertz-Orbaugh
Weekly Writing Assignment
The most memorable events from Reva Kiborts testimony were absolutely the times
when she recounted how the people around her became enemies willingly after the Germans
arrived in Warsaw. The assistance and almost happiness with which the Polish people rendered
their aid to the SS in occupied Poland was truly cutting, how she talks about how people fleeing
the bombs happily looted her father and how people jeered the Jewish prisoners as they were
deported from the ghetto and turned them away at every opportunity; the former family friends
who turned them away calling them dirty Jews and chased them away and the public which
would have happily turned them over to the SS after they had escaped Warsaw. Strange was the
stark contrast between the attitude of the Wehrmacht soldiers whom she said brought aid and
food to the conquered peoples of Warsaw and the SS soldiers who gathered up and starved the
Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto and latter implemented the final solution. The way these same
servants of the Third Reich could show compassion and care from some while the rest committed
atrocity and acts of unspeakable cruelty. The gnawing pain of starvation eating from the inside,
the whole of a people trapped like rats, losing all human dignity.
The memories she recounted carried a theme of overwhelming sadness, abandonment by
everyone who was not the closest of family, and an ever closing noose of entrapment and death.
The loss of family and the closing in of death through imprisonment first in the ghetto where
they starved, and the camp where she was worked to inhuman limits as her people were
eliminated one by one, but the way she recounts her experience it seemed like the most painful

part of being systematically eliminated was the loss of what made them human: dignity,
individuality, and the love of those closest. The only thing which seemed to make living worth
continuing once she was in the labor camp seemed to be the last of her family, people who would
endure anything for each other, who kept each other warm at night, and who would declare
themselves each other to keep each other alive. The light for the end of the tunnel was the hope
of reuniting with whoever was left in the town of her parents, the opportunity to recount the
collective suffering they endured; darkness was the loss of all hope, the belief that salvation
would never come that all would be lost and life only then snuffed out after they had been
battered and broken, drained of all they were worth. Her sister Hana was the soul of support, the
sister that would have given her life for her family, the one person who seemed to remember how
a person ought to live and act no matter how desperate.
That salvation would come at the behest of a starving and poor army of the east, much
less be inaugurated by the roaring of bombs and artillery seemed to be remembered by her as
something curious, neither elation nor fear but curiosity permeated the arrival of the army which
brought salvation at the end of 6 years of fear and pain. The ignorance of even the Russian army
of what exactly they were facing standing at the liberation of Czarna, that they first greeted them
with anger as manufacturers of weapons then as friends who had been enslaved to serve and die
at the behest of the Reich. The most miserable part of her account for me was that at the end of
imprisonment, the freedom from the cage that was, was that freedom in their homeland was still
fraught with fear, that hate still permeated society with the war being carried to conclusion. That
hope of family died and final salvation from constant fear had to begin with a flight from Poland
to West Germany.