Part I: A journey into horror and the man who survived it

By Jason Fields

Riverdalian Martin Spett, 81, is a survivor of the Holocaust. His story is one of life, and, eventually, hope.

His family lived in Tarnow, Poland, when it fell to the Nazis in 1939, and last week’s Riverdale Press recounted the first part of his story; how he and his family survived life in the city’s Jewish ghetto until the early part of 1943. To avoid the mass executions and deportations to concentration camps, the Spetts hid in walls, under floors or even in plain sight. It was a time of terror and want.

Every week, survival was more tenuous. The ghetto shrank as more people succumbed to starvation or illness, or were transported to places where they could be killed more conveniently.

To live, the Spetts knew they would have to leave Tarnow.

Out of the ghetto

It’s 1943 and the situation has become intolerable in the Jewish ghetto in Tarnow, Poland, where Martin Spett, now 13, and his family have been trapped for nearly four years of Nazi occupation.

There is little food and heat during the bitter months of winter. There is forced labor, random violence, mass executions and transports on trucks, with hundreds, thousands never heard from again.

Into this gray existence comes a call for any Jews still alive that have passports or other documentation from the Allied nations — England, America — to present themselves to the Gestapo for a chance of salvation.

A similar call when the occupation began had been met with the slaughter of those who stepped forward. But for the Jews of Tarnow all that is left are choices between the means and methods of death. Even a false glimmer of hope offers a chance that must be taken.

Martin’s mother had been born in America and stranded in Tarnow on a family visit. Her father had business back in the States, and boarded a ship, with the rest of the family to follow later. He drowned when the ship went down in 1895. The remaining family stayed in Poland, but Martin’s mother never gave up the scrap of paper, the birth certificate, that proved her to be American.