Dwojra (Dorka) Żorek, Dorota Francuz - a Survivor

In 1937, Dorka finished primary school in Zduńska Wola and was sent to Łódź to stay with her family. Her father’s parents and two of his sisters – Ester Kamlarzowa and Chawa Zylberszpic lived there with their husbands and children. In Łódź, Dorka attended high school, in the afternoons she helped with sewing gloves in a workshop of her uncle Zylberszpic and took care of her uncle and aunt’s children.

After the outbreak of the World War II, Dorka’s father and brother were arrested and put into jail in Sieradz (they were released a few weeks later). Dorka, as well as her father’s family, had to move to the ghetto in Łódź. A few months later, her parents succeeded in bringing her to the ghetto in Zduńska Wola. In face of permanent danger, the family wanted to stick together. Contrary to the Łódź Ghetto, the ghetto in Zduńska Wola was open. Dorka was escorted to work outside the ghetto every day. Together with a whole group of prisoners, Dorka worked in a forest digging up peat. Her father worked in the ghetto as a barber.

In August 1942, the ghetto in Zduńska Wola was liquidated. Jews were gathered in the cemetery where Germans conducted a selection. Dorka was separated from the rest of her family and – together with other people fit for work – was loaded into a train and transported to the Łódź Ghetto. The rest of the people, her family included, were transported – as she learnt later – to Chełmno, and executed there. Among those being killed were her parents, her brother, both of her sisters, her mother’s parents, her aunts and uncles and the rest of a very large family.

In the Łódź Ghetto, Dorka returned to her father’s relatives. She worked in a shed where gloves were produced and where one of the master craftsmen was her uncle Zylberszpic.

Aunt Ester’s husband and her little daughter died in the ghetto of starvation. Dorka recovered from typhoid.

In August 1944, the ghetto in Łódź was liquidated. Aunt Ester was deported to Bergen-Belsen where she died. Dorka went to Auschwitz. From there she was moved to the camp in Stutthof, and then to Königsberg, and again back to Stutthof. In Stutthof, she caught a typhoid fever. During her sickness, she also suffered from a serious purulent infection. A Polish female doctor, also a prisoner, operated Dorka. The operation was carried out without anaesthesia, there were no dressings. The wounds which remained after the operation were bandaged with toilet paper. Dorka survived the typhoid; however, the inflammation of the wounds lasted for many months.

When the front was approaching in April 1945, the prisoners from Stutthof were evacuated on barges via the Baltic Sea to the vicinity of Lübeck. A few days later, the war ended.

The place where the Stutthof prisoners were assembled was at the junction of three occupation zones. For a long time, there was great chaos, and it remained unclear who would administer that area. Finally, the British took the responsibility.

Dorka wanted to return to Poland but nobody was going there. At last, it turned out that a transport of Soviet citizens who – heading east – would pass through Warsaw was being organised. It was decided that they would take Dorka with them and leave her in Warsaw. It did not to happen, however. Dorka could not leave the transport until it reached Brest-Litovsk. It was a Soviet city then, and Dorka had no documents authorising her to cross the Soviet-Polish border. While waiting for a permission to leave the Soviet Union, Dorka was working as a medical aid in Brest-Litovsk. She fell seriously ill there. The exhausted body reacted to miserable diet. Dorka, in a critical state, was transported to a hospital in Kiev. Then, she returned to Brest. It was not before June 1946, that she illegally crossed the Polish border since she did not succeed in obtaining permission for a legal crossing.

Searching for a family proved futile. Nobody had survived. Everybody was killed.

In Łódź, Dorka met a few friends from the Łódź Ghetto and settled with them. Later, she moved to a dormitory for Jewish youth where she was given the opportunity to resume education. She finished a short preliminary course preparing for university studies and in 1947 she began her medical studies in Łódź. She finished the studies at the Warsaw University in 1953 and became paediatrician.

In 1949, she married Henryk Francuz (b. 1925), a friend from the Łódź Ghetto. In 1957, they emigrated to Israel. In Israel, she worked in the outpatient healthcare system. In 1971, her husband (an economist, graduate of the Institute of Social Sciences in Warsaw, employee of the Central Bank of Israel) was delegated to work in Washington. They spent over seven years in America and then in Africa. Dorka was also employed there as doctor.

She lives in Israel now. She has a son and two grandchildren.

Edited by Jadwiga Rytlowa on the basis of an interview conducted in Tel-Aviv with Dorota Francuz on 31 March 2014.