Starting in the winter of 1944, German railway men and SS officers were stationed in the house. Facing extreme heat and cold, they survived on very limited supplies. 9 She described how the door would be opened for fresh air at night, allowing the families to stand upright, or to speak with the Becks, who brought them food, water, and news. Eventually, eighteen people lived in the hiding space, avoiding imprisonment in the Żółkiew ghetto and further deportations to killing centers.įor Clara, the trap door became a link to the outside world as well as an important subject in her diary and memoirs about life in hiding. 8 Other Jews hid them over the next two years. 7 Valentine and Julia slept in the bedroom above the trap door. 6 Valentine and Julia Beck and their daughter Ala-a Volksdeutsche (ethnic German) family-agreed to take over the house and hide them in exchange for money. In November 1942, after German and Ukrainian police rounded up and deported 2,400 more Jews from Żółkiew to Bełżec, the Schwarz, Melman, and Patronasch families began hiding in the space. Two metal handles could be used to open it from the inside. When the trap door was closed, it was nearly invisible. 4 The ceiling was almost four feet tall, and the main living space was around 50 square meters at its largest. Artek Patrontasch created this trap door to fit like a jigsaw puzzle-piece into the flooring above in one of the bedrooms. Small enough to crawl into a narrow opening, Kramer, her sister Mania, along with the Melman and Patrontasch children, dug out the space by hand. They chose the area underneath a house belonging to the Melmans at 35 Lvivska Street. 2 Kramer’s father, Meir Schwarz, along with two of his business partners, Artek Patrontasch and Mechel Melman, decided to build a hiding space. Terrified, Kramer and her family could not get false identity papers needed to escape the town, nor find any non-Jewish neighbors to hide them. Less than a year later, German authorities in Żółkiew deported 700 Jews to the Bełżec killing center. Clara Kramer was fourteen years old when German forces occupied her town of Żółkiew, Poland, 1 in June 1941.
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