Schools in ghettos: 

Dorotka Goldstein

Dora Goldstein Roth was born in Poland in 1932. After the Germans invaded Poland, Dora and her family fled to Vilna, Lithuania. Dora’s father was shot after the Germans occupied Vilna and she and her family had to live in a Vilna ghetto. The ghettos were urban districts, in which the Germans forced the Jewish population to live under miserable conditions. Ghettos isolated the Jews, separating them from the non-Jewish population. After living in the ghetto in Vilna, Dora was transport to a camp in Latvia and then to a concentration camp near Danzig, where her mother and her sister were perished. Immediately before liberation, Dora was shot but she survived.  

Despite the miserable conditions in the ghettos, Jews tried to maintain a normal life. In some ghettos, Jews were allowed to set up schools but in others, they had to maintain it secretly. “Educational programs” were created to prevent children from wandering aimlessly in the ghetto streets. For most of the children, school was refuge where the could play, meet other children and sometimes, get a little food. Most of the rooms where they study were not classrooms but living rooms in which they seated in boxes or suitcases.

Dora talks about her experience during “school” in her ghetto in Vilna. She says that children didn't learn much in school, instead they learned how to sing and that she knew all the Yiddish songs. But Jewish children didn't had the right to live, so a few times in a week germans came to the ghetto a took children to kill them, so less children were in those classrooms. Dora says Germans gave paper and pencils for children to keep quiet. She says she was lucky to stay until the end. There were days when her mother sent her to sell cigarettes so they could get food. They ate horse meat, which was very expensive. So in those days Dora didn't assisted to school.

THEME:

The theme of Dora’s testimony is that, although children did not learned at school, they were killed by the Germans.

She says that basically they didn’t learned anything besides singing and that they didn’t receive a good education. She talks about how every time less and less children went to school because they were taken by Germans and they were killed, because Jews children didn’t had the right to live.

http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/media_oi.php?MediaId=1119