Ida Haberman

June 15, 1923 – May 15, 2015 · Born Ida Tillis in Głębokie, Poland

In February 1997, Ida Haberman sat down in her living room and told the story of her life for the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation: a childhood in a small town between two rivers, the ghetto, two and a half years hidden on a farm, the family she lost, and the family she built. This page keeps her testimony and lets you follow it in her own words.

Watch the testimony Her life, year by year

Her life

Each moment links to the place in the recording where she tells it.

The testimony

Nearly two hours, recorded in one afternoon. Tap any passage of the transcript to hear it spoken.

Chapters

Download the recording (MP4, 766 MB)

Places

From a town on the Polish–Soviet border to Los Angeles. Tap a place to see it on the map.

Historical context

What happened to the Jews of Głębokie, in brief.

A town between two rivers

Głębokie (in Belarusian, Hlybokaye; in Yiddish, Glubok) lay in the Wilno region of interwar Poland, close to the Soviet border. It is in Belarus today. Jews had lived there since the eighteenth century. In the 1921 census they numbered 2,844, about sixty percent of the town, and by 1939 the town had grown to roughly nine thousand people, still with a Jewish majority. There were six synagogues, a Hebrew Tarbut school, and the Zionist youth movements Ida remembers, among them Hashomer Hatzair, whose summer camps in the woods she describes at the start of her testimony.

Two occupations

In September 1939, under the pact between Germany and the Soviet Union, eastern Poland was annexed by the Soviets. Jewish community institutions were closed and private businesses, like the textile shops where Ida worked, were taken over. Her father, a cattle dealer, could no longer trade openly.

Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. After days of bombing, German troops entered Głębokie on July 2, 1941. About five thousand Jews were in the town, many of them refugees from central Poland. In the first days, Jews accused of communism were executed, among them, as Ida recalls, doctors, pharmacists and other prominent families. Forced labor began at once.

The ghetto

A ghetto was ordered on October 22, 1941. Jews from the surrounding towns were driven into it, bringing its population to around six thousand in a few crowded streets, with several families to a room, exactly as Ida describes. On March 25, 1942, about 110 people were taken out and shot. On June 19, 1942, some 2,500 people judged "unfit for work" were murdered in the Borek forest about a kilometer from the town. Ida, working in the German army kitchen, heard the shooting from the ghetto.

In the early autumn of 1942 her father arranged for her to leave. Hiding a Jew in occupied Poland was punishable by death for the whole household. The Iwanowski family, farmers her father had known before the war, kept her for two and a half years.

August 1943

By 1943 Soviet partisan units were active in the forests around Głębokie, and the Germans decided to destroy the ghetto. On August 20, 1943 (some sources give August 17), the Judenrat was ordered to assemble the Jews for "deportation." An armed underground resisted. The Germans set the ghetto on fire street by street; the remaining residents, several thousand people, were shot or burned. Ida's older brother died in a cellar that was gassed. Perhaps a hundred people broke out to the forests, among them her mother, shot in the leg as she ran, and her sister Gita. They lived with the partisans for the next year. In all, only about a hundred Jews of Głębokie survived the war. The community was never re-established.

Liberation and after

The Red Army reached Głębokie on July 3, 1944. The retreating Germans had burned the town. Ida came back from the farm to find the streets gone and, within days, her mother and sister alive. In 1945 and 1946, Polish citizens were allowed to leave the Soviet Union for the new Poland, and Ida, her mother and sister went to Legnica in Lower Silesia, where her future husband Paul had settled.

After the Kielce pogrom of July 1946, most surviving Jews left Poland. The Habermans crossed into the American zone of Germany and lived in the Boelcke Kaserne displaced persons camp in Ulm, where their first daughter was born in 1947. More than 250,000 Jewish displaced persons passed through such camps. Under the Displaced Persons Act of 1948, over 80,000 of them came to the United States by 1952. The Habermans arrived in New York in 1949.

Sources

Memory of the Murdered Jews in Glubokoye, Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe
Glubokoye, Encyclopaedia Judaica, via the Jewish Virtual Library
The Destruction of Glubokie, memorial book (1956), translated at JewishGen
Displaced Persons, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia

Sources differ on a few dates by days or weeks; the dates above follow the survivors' memorial book where they disagree.

Remembrance

Her family in Głębokie

Velvel Tillis: her father, a cattle dealer. Killed in the ghetto, 1942 or 1943.
Rivka Tillis, née Topel: her mother. Survived in the forest with the partisans.
Pinchu Tillis: her older brother, born 1921. Killed when the ghetto was destroyed, August 1943.
Gita Tillis, later Gloria: her younger sister. Survived in the forest; later lived in New York.
Abba Tillis: her younger brother, born about 1929. Killed in the ghetto.

A man and a woman at the open window of a log house, the woman standing outside on the sill — Velvel and Rivka Tillis, Ida's parents, in Głębokie. Probably the 1930s.

The family who hid her

Adam and Cecylia Iwanowski, their daughter Zosia (Zofia), a young son, and a grandmother, on a farm about sixty kilometers from Głębokie, from the autumn of 1942 until the summer of 1944. Ida slept in one bed with Zosia. In 1993 she returned to Poland to stand at Adam and Cecylia's graves in Elbląg with Zofia and her daughter Teresa.

A small girl in a white dress and hair ribbon standing in a garden — Głębokie, about 1926. Ida as a small child.

A large group portrait from 1932, several rows of adults and children in front of a house — Głębokie, 1932. A family reunion when Ida's aunt visited from the United States. Ida stands beside her father; her youngest brother is the small boy in black at the front.

A worn photograph of three young people: a young woman, a boy, and Ida — Poland, 1945. Ida, on the right, with Zosia and her brother, the children of the family that hid her.

Soft portrait of Ida as a young woman, smiling, hair swept up — Ida in the 1940s. Perhaps the portrait taken in Vilna after the war, which Paul saw displayed in a photographer's window in Legnica.

Three women standing beside two graves with a cross and flowers — Elbląg, Poland, 1993. Ida at the graves of Adam and Cecylia Iwanowski, with Zofia Lipska and her daughter Teresa.

A dark memorial stone with a Star of David and inscriptions in Hebrew, Yiddish and Belarusian — Głębokie, 1992. The memorial at the mass grave where Ida's father and family were killed.

Ida in later life, smiling, in a teal patterned dress aboard a cruise ship — Aboard the cruise ship Nordic Prince, about 1990.

Ida and Paul Haberman with their children and grandchildren gathered on a sofa — February 2, 1997. Ida and her husband Paul with their daughters, sons-in-law and grandchildren, who close the recording in their own words.

"I think it's a wonderful legacy that we leave our children and our grandchildren."
Paul Haberman, at the close of the recording