Yosef was born in Toporów, near Mielec, Poland, in 1926, the youngest of six children. As he relayed his testimony to Ronit Wilder, an interviewer from the Collection and Registration Section in Yad Vashem’s Archives Division, Yosef described the complex relations between Jews and Poles during the Holocaust:
"My parents had a tobacco shop in the front of our house, so lots of Poles from the area would meet up at our place. The village where I grew up was small, with very few Jews; we lived and went to school together with the Poles. Sometimes the Poles would say, 'Jews, go to Israel,' but I didn’t know what that meant at the time."
In 1941, the Kornblits were deported to the Biesiadki camp near Mielec, where they were forced laborers. In the summer of 1942, after more than six months of dire conditions in the camp, the family decided to escape to the nearby forest. Yosef’s parents and the four youngest children hid in the forest in a bunker that the family built. They were forced to steal food from their surroundings and lived in constant fear. “During the war, I was afraid of the Poles more than the Germans,” remembered Yosef. “The Germans didn’t come to distant places like where we were hiding. Most of the time, we were more terrified that Poles would inform on us.”
In the winter of 1943, Yosef’s father Yitzhak and brother Yirmiyahu died of typhus. In June 1944, two months before the area was liberated, the Kornblits’ bunker was exposed by the Poles, and everyone hiding there – Yosef’s mother Sarah, her three children and two other young women, sisters who had joined them in the bunker – were laid on the ground and shot. Yosef and his sister Rosa managed to get away, and from that moment, they never saw their family again.
For the last two months of the war, Yosef and Rosa stayed alone in the forest with nowhere to hide, exposed to the elements. From time to time, a Polish acquaintance named Durek helped them obtain food. The sounds of combat from the front punctuated this period, raising their hopes that the war would soon end.
Recently, Sima Farkash, Rosa’s daughter, contacted Yad Vashem again:
"My heartfelt thanks to you for sending a team to interview my uncle Yosef. I spoke with him yesterday, and he felt a tangible sense of relief. The events of the war have been seared into his soul, and he only mentions them to a restricted group of family members. 'I didn’t think I’d live to see the day when I would give my testimony to Yad Vashem,' he told me. Uncle Yosef wishes he’d thanked the Holy One, blessed be He, as well as you at the end of the film for the privilege of having his personal story documented. He also wanted to say thank you to God for the good life he has now, so I am doing so in his name. Our deepest thanks goes to you and to everyone doing this sacred work."
Yad Vashem records over 1,000 video testimonies annually. To schedule a time to give testimony in Israel, please call 02-644-3888.
This article originally appeared in the "Yad Vashem Jerusalem Magazine," volume 87.
