Kristine Keren - Survivor Testimony

Ashley Speer

Mr. Neuburger

Eng. Comp. 102

26 March 2012

Kristine Keren Testimony

            Kristine Keren is a holocaust survivor from Lwow, Poland.  Around the time that the war, began Kristine remembers the Germans invading her town on motorcycles.  The Germans came to her apartment and told her family that they were taking everything and they had to leave their apartment at once.  After leaving their apartment, Kristine and her family were forced to live inside the ghetto in a small apartment with multiple families.

            Kristine’s father knew that one day the Germans would liquidate the ghetto so he built a tunnel from their basement in the apartment building leading to the sewer for a hiding place.  They were in the sewer for fourteen months.  There was no drinking water available so her father crawled on his hands and knees for two or three miles with a teacup in his teeth to get fresh drinking water.  There were twenty people with them so they divided the water into parts to drink.

After 3 weeks, they were discovered by sewer workers so they had to crawl to a different location inside the sewer.  They finally found a location in the sewer that was decent.  They stayed in that part of the sewer for 14 months.  They divided daily duties between the 11 people there with them. 

While they were in the sewer they had to deal with hardships like flooding.  The flooding reached the ceiling of the sewer so everyone had to hold their heads above the water for air.  Kristine said that when it was flooding she asked a religious man that was with them to pray and he did and suddenly the rain stopped and the water started receding. 

            When Kristine and her family were finally able to leave the sewer, Kristine was blinded by the light for a while and could not see anything but oranges and yellows.  Her brother was terrified and wanted to go back into the sewer because he had forgotten what life was like.  For the next few months they stayed in an apartment building and started to look for normal life again.  It was hard for Kristine and her family because Jews were still looked down upon after the war, but they managed to survive.