fbpx

Survivor: Masza Rosenroth

Masza Rosenroth (née Czechanowska) stood with her two younger sisters, Gutia, 14, and Surra, 11, in the courtyard of the Lodz ghetto, amid hundreds of other residents who’d been ordered to assemble for yet another selection.
[additional-authors]
June 24, 2015

Masza Rosenroth (née Czechanowska) stood with her two younger sisters, Gutia, 14, and Surra, 11, in the courtyard of the Lodz ghetto, amid hundreds of other residents who’d been ordered to assemble for yet another selection. It was September 1942. As Masza, then just 16, waited, she watched German soldiers tear children from their parents’ arms and throw them onto trucks. She also witnessed the Nazis tossing infants from second- and third-story windows as they searched nearby buildings. “I saw it all,” she said. “I couldn’t do anything.” She also could not save Surra, who was taken away with other young, elderly and ill Jews, while she and Gutia were ordered to return to their room. “I was sitting near the window, and I was turning gray. I couldn’t move for two weeks,” Masza recalled. After liberation, she learned that Surra had been taken to Chelmno, where she was murdered in a mobile gas van.

Masza was born on Aug. 12, 1924, in Konstantynow, Poland, just west of Lodz, to Mordechai and Malka Czechanowski. In addition to her two sisters, she had an older brother, Leon. 

Mordechai manufactured yard goods, renting space in a factory. The family, which was middle class and traditionally Orthodox, lived in an apartment that had a large bedroom, dining room and kitchen. 

“We had a beautiful childhood,” Masza said. But anti-Semitism was ever-present, and every Friday night, as Mordechai read newspapers from around the world to his family, he counseled, “You children, when you grow up, you will leave Poland.”

On Sept. 7, 1939, Masza woke to the sudden roar of airplanes. The family fled to a community bunker, emerging hours later to find the city occupied by Germans. “This will be over in a few weeks,” Mordechai assured them.

But one night in early October, Leon departed hastily with a German friend of Mordechai’s, who, hearing that young Jewish people were slated to be killed, had offered to help Leon and others escape into Russia. Masza, meanwhile, walked through dark alleyways warning other Jewish families.

Then, in late 1939, all 300 of Konstantynow’s Jewish families were ordered to gather in the town square. From there, they were marched for about three days and nights to Glowno, a 22-mile walk. “Many died along the way,” Masza said.

There, Masza’s family roomed with another Jewish family. After several days of living in overcrowded and unhealthy conditions, Masza and Gutia boarded a train for Lodz. 

En route, Masza noticed passengers jumping off the train, soon after she learned that German soldiers were on board, searching out Jews. She and Gutia also jumped. “You don’t even think about it when you have to do things,” Masza recalled. They made their way to Lodz, staying with relatives. 

About a month later, the Jewish community found the girls a room in the Baluty section of Lodz, and their parents and Surra joined them. By February, a ghetto was established in that area. 

Masza was assigned to work in a factory designing and cutting children’s clothes, while Gutia worked nearby making epaulets for soldiers’ uniforms. “We were scared, always scared,” Masza said. 

They were also always hungry, as she and Gutia shared their food with their nonworking parents and Surra. Whenever possible, Masza stole pots of food she found cooling on the windowsills of houses en route to and from work. “You learn how to steal and to fight for survival,” she said. 

In early 1941, Mordechai succumbed to starvation. His body lay in the room for several days before it could be picked up. A year later, Malka, too, died of starvation; again, days passed before her body was removed. 

Sometime after Surra was taken by the Nazis, Gutia became very sick. Masza arranged to have her admitted to a hospital, but Gutia continually cried to go home. After a week, Masza acquiesced. The next day the Germans rounded up all the hospital patients and murdered them. 

During the summer of 1944, as deportations increased, Masza and Gutia hid with about 10 other people in a large dirt storage space under a kitchen floor. Sometimes they heard soldiers’ boots stomping overhead. Once, when a baby wouldn’t stop crying, Masza watched as the mother suffocated the baby with a pillow. “Oh my God, this was so terrible,” she said. Each night, Masza took Gutia outside for air. Gutia was very frail and wanted only to die, but Masza insisted. “If I will live, you will live too,” she told her sister. 

In early August, with no food anywhere, Masza and Gutia answered an announcement to appear at the train station to be resettled. Instead they were crammed into a cattle car and shipped to Birkenau.

At the camp, they were processed and given flimsy dresses, then their group of about 50 girls was confined outdoors, huddling in circles to stay warm at night. After a few days, a visiting merchant selected 200 girls, including Masza and Gutia, to work in a munitions factory. 

The girls were transported to Bad Kudowa (now Kudowa Zdroj, Poland), a subcamp of Gross-Rosen near the Czechoslovakian border. Masza and Gutia, who spoke German, spent five weeks teaching the other girls the language. They were all then assigned to work in the underground factory that manufactured V2 rockets, a mile’s walk from the barracks. Masza remembers working on a machine with multiple buttons. “God forbid I miss a button. I have my fingers cut off,” she said. 

Masza, Gutia and the 10 other girls in their barracks, who remained close throughout their entire lives, spent much of their free time discussing their post-liberation dreams. “I always said it’s going to be a better day one day,” Masza said. Sometime in April, factory work ceased, and the girls were forced to move 100-pound rocks from one spot to another. There was little food. 

Then, one day, they awoke to find the guards had disappeared. Czechoslovakian partisans soon entered the camp gates. “You’re free,” they shouted. But Masza wasn’t celebrating. “Where do we go?” she asked. “We have no place to go.” 

The girls moved into an empty house in Bad Kudowa. But after a week, Masza and Gutia, eager to find their family, left for Lodz. 

There, the Red Cross helped Masza write letters to Leon, despite not knowing where he was in the Soviet Union or whether he was still alive. Masza then returned to Bad Kudowa while Gutia remained in Lodz to wait for Leon. 

Masza moved to the American Zone, into a house near Dachau. She worked for the American Joint Distribution Committee in nearby Schleissheim, traveling to various convents to search for hidden Jewish children. 

On New Year’s Eve, 1945, Masza visited Regensburg, where a group of friends suggested going dancing. Masza had nothing to wear, but then a friend stole a suitcase from the railway station, filled with clothes in her size. At the dance, Masza unexpectedly discovered Leon, who initially didn’t recognize her. Gutia was with him. 

Leon moved to the Feldafing displaced persons camp, and Masza and Gutia returned to the house near Dachau. Soon after, in Frankfurt to meet a cousin, Masza was introduced to Jacob Rosenroth, an Auschwitz survivor from Kalisz, Poland. They married in December 1946 and lived in Frankfurt. 

Leon and Gutia immigrated to Israel in 1948. The following year, Leon moved to New York, where he died in 2012. Gutia remained in Israel, dying in February 2015.

Masza and Jacob immigrated to the United States, arriving on Jan. 1, 1949, and settling in Buffalo, N.Y. Masza found a job as a dressmaker, and Jacob worked in a steel factory. 

Masza and Jacob’s daughter Sharon was born in October 1950, and Michele in October 1956. 

Jacob moved to Los Angeles in 1961, and, with his survivor friend Harold Spiegel, launched J&H Liquors at the corner of Venice Boulevard and Burlington Avenue. Masza and the girls joined Jacob in May 1962, and Masza opened her own dressmaking business.

Soon after arriving in Los Angeles, Masza joined the 1939 Club, later serving on the board of directors. 

Now 90 and widowed since 1991, Masza is a grandmother of four and great-grandmother of one. She continues to work for a few dressmaking clients and remains active with the recently renamed 1939 Society. 

Masza has always lived with hope. “I always think that I will survive and always think I’m going to make a better world for my family and my people,” she said.

Did you enjoy this article?
You'll love our roundtable.

Editor's Picks

Latest Articles

More news and opinions than at a
Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.

More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.

More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.