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USF Libraries Exhibits

A Messenger Boy in Warsaw, Part I

George Turlo, Holocaust Survivor

In Warsaw, I was gypped by the dorożka driver. (laughs) They took about four more (inaudible) that this was water for the trip to my grandparents, and landed in their house. So they told me three days ago my mother left. So I figured, what in hell, there is no security. Just to be together doesn’t create security; you survive on your own, if you are intelligent enough and pragmatic and of good heart, trying to help other people, these people who help you back. But I decided to stay in Warsaw.

The rest was not so much of the Holocaust survivor in there. I was watching liquidation of the ghetto in April forty-three [1943]. And after finding that my grandfather and godmother were members of underground, the same like my father was, I asked them if I can participate, and they gave me some indication means. I was in a Szare Szeregi, what is the Boy Scouts in Warsaw during the war. And my assignment was: find the traitors. I was like a counterintelligence. Is to find the people who are preying on the Jewish people, trying to ask them bribes for keeping silence and after giving to Gestapo. And I got a watch, and my task was to follow this particular individual to get their routes, where they often eating, where they this, that; and after a special organization was liquidating these people. But this was nothing heroic on my part.