A Knock on the Door.

FACTS FIRST

In terms of lives lost and property damaged, World War II (1939-1945) was the most devastating war in history. During the war, Italy and Japan formed an alliance with Germany, and they became known as the Axis powers. The United States, Great Britain, China, the Soviet Union, and other countries that collectively fought the Axis powers became known as the Allies.

The Holocaust was the state-sponsored killing of Jews and other people by the Nazis in Germany during this war. Nazis killed an estimated 6 million Jews and as many as 4 million non-Jews in concentration camps during that time. Although today it might be difficult to imagine being forced into a labor camp, that's what happened to millions, including Walentina Jarosz. Here is her story.

There was a knock on the door. Rumors had been spreading about people coming and taking young girls away from their families. They came in and grabbed one of the girls in a family. The girl was sent to a concentration camp to work. This was what happened to my grandmother, Walentina Denisovna Jarosz. She was taken from her home and family in Andrushevka, Ukraine, in 1941, when she was 14 years old.

In 1941, the Nazis passed through Ukraine in their invasion of the Soviet Union. They took the oldest girl from every family in Ukraine to work in a concentration camp. My grandmother was one of the girls taken to a concentration camp called Buchenwald [located near Weimar, Germany]. After she left, my grandmother did not see her siblings again for about 55 years. She never saw her father again.

On the way to Buchenwald, my grandmother got very sick from food poisoning, lack of fresh air, and improper hygiene on the train. During the trip, the guards opened the train doors once a day to let the prisoners go to the bathroom in the nearby fields. My grandmother said, "If you had to go again, you had to go in the corner of the cattle car."

When she arrived in Buchenwald, my grandmother, who had been sick throughout the two-week-long trip, was placed in a camp hospital. She said, "I was left to die." My grandmother remained in the hospital for two weeks. When she was released back into the camp, she was still too weak to work, so she stayed in the barracks all day long.

The people in the camp were mostly Jewish, besides a few other Ukrainians. If the prisoners were not sick, they were forced to work all day in the factories, and then they were locked up in their barracks at night. Every morning the special service officers marched the prisoners into town to work. When asked what her relationship was like with the other prisoners, my grandmother said, "We were like brothers and sisters, always laughing and telling stories." It was the only family they had; they were "very close to each other."

One day, a farmer came to the camp. His sons had gone to fight in the war, and he needed someone to help him with his farming. My grandmother was sent to work on his farm. At the time, my grandmother had been in the concentration camp for only one month. My grandmother worked on the farm every day except Sunday, which was her day off.

After working on the farm, Walentina was sent to a displaced persons camp. At this camp, Walentina met her future husband, and they had a child--my Aunt Lucy. For five years, my grandparents and Lucy lived at the camp, waiting for a country to grant them asylum.

In 1947, my grandmother, grandfather, and Aunt Lucy traveled to the United States. They were detained at Ellis Island, New York, for three months, and then took a train to Bozeman, Mont. They had only $2 with them for their journey--money that had to feed three hungry people during the three-day trip.

Once there, my grandmother and grandfather worked on a farm for a sponsor--the person who paid the money to bring them to the United States--until they could pay her back. Today, Walentina and her husband are retired and still live in Bozeman. After more than 50 years, my grandmother returned to Andrushevka to visit her family in 1999. It was an emotional reunion with her brother Misha and sisters Lizavetta, Olga, and Vera, but that is the beginning of another story.