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CHAIM KOZIENICKI IZRAEL
GIVATAIM
DRZEWKO NR 386
TREE NO.

Chaim Kozienicki was born on 16 June 1928 in Łódź to Szalom and Chaja Sara.
He had an elder brother, Ezra. They lived at 75, Kilińskiego Street and then
at 60, Kilińskiego Street. His father was a carpenter and his mother took care
of the household. “At home, my parents spoke Yiddish with each other and
with my brother, but they spoke in Polish with me. I was a Pole in my family.
However, I spoke Yiddish with my grandfather and grandmother, because
every Saturday we would go to their home”, Kozienicki recalls.
At elementary school, Chaim was a very good student, he read a lot, mainly
in Polish. He was interested in history and war. “Tadeusz Kościuszko, Józef
Poniatowski and Józef Piłsudski were my idols”, he recalls. Once, he even
got scared that God would punish him for sneaking out from prayers and
reading Polish books. Just before the war, he became interested in Zionism.
He understood that as a Jew he should also have Jewish heroes. He slowly
became a Zionist.
In March 1940, he was displaced to the ghetto with his family. Initially, they
lived with relatives in Ciesielska Street, then they moved to a house at 30/32,
Drukarska Street. This was the last house next to the barbed wire fence, on
the border of the ghetto and a guard stood outside their window. “On the
one hand, it was dangerous, because he could start shooting at any moment,
but on the other, no one would even think of stealing from the garden, and
this was important, especially when there were vegetables there”, he says.
From the time of the ghetto, he remembers hunger above all. It was the most
overwhelming feeling. “I felt hunger all the time”, he admits.
For two years, Chaim went to school in the ghetto, and when the school was
over, he worked at the leather factory in Łagiewnicka Street where backpacks
were made for the German army. Then he became a messenger and finally,
an official. His father worked in his profession as a carpenter. His mother was
employed in the linen department and his brother in a metal factory.
In the ghetto, Chaim became an active member of the Zionist youth organ-
ization. The meetings gave him joy and hope that someday the war would
end and a new and better life would come. However, when he returned home
and saw how terribly poverty-stricken the household had become, he would
break down. So he tried to act: he co-created a literary and self-education
club, founded a library, wrote articles and poems, took part in discussions
about the future. In the summer of 1944, he fell ill and during his stay in the
hospital, his parents and brother were deported from the ghetto. Chaim was
put on one of the last transports to Auschwitz. He was hopeful. On 29 August
1944, he left Radegast station with metal department staff. He arrived at
the camp on 1 September. “When I was still in the carriage, I noted in my

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