On October 18, 2019, the family of Rivka Krol, a little girl from Selvino, came from Israel to visit Selvino.
The name of Rivka Krol, born in Lublin (Poland) in 1929, is found among the cards of the assisted from the Unrra (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration) conserved to the Cedec of Milan.
His testimony is in a document filmed for the Yad Vashem museum in Jerusalem.
Rivka recounts his personal stories during the Nazi racial persecution, the experience under the guise of a Polish peasant family, the escape to safety first in Sciesopoli di Selvino after the end of the Second World War and finally the journey to Palestine with the ship “La Rondine – Enzo Sereni”, which left Vado Ligure between 6 and 7 January 1946.
Video of Rivka Krol’s testimony for Yad Vashem:
From the film some frames were extracted taken during the testimony.
The expressions of the witness-protagonist are able to communicate the relived sensations with the exposition of the events really lived during the tragedy of the Shoah and, involving physically and psychologically the interlocutor of the moment and the time to come, they overcome the difficulty and the impossibility to understand Hebrew.
In the transparency or opacity of the variegated re-enactments, in the reflections of the renewed emotions, in the quiet of the resigned knowledge and awareness of what has been, one cannot help but see the flashes that have illuminated, dazzled, burned, lit up a life.
The youth and the family affections, the humiliation of the Lublin ghetto, the deportation from the homeland, the fortunate resumption of the journey of life between faces finally friendly to Selvino, the desperate collective and individual hope for a sure and definitive landing with the boarding on one of the ships sailing from liberated Europe to the Promised Land.
(See the book Come swallow to the nest. On board the ship Rondine. Testimonials and documents, edited by Lorenzo Giacchero, p. 89).
The story of Rivka Krol Kerol (Polk) Child of Selvino
I was born in 1929 in Lublin. My name was Ronnie (Roni), but in Sciesopoli in Selvino it was decided that my name was Rebecca (Rivka).
At the beginning of the war, my father realized the grave danger that was approaching and asked a Polish landowner, with whom he had business relations, to take me and my brother.
My brother was hospitalized, but as a Jew he was sent to the ghetto.
At that point my caretaker realized his life was in danger and asked me to leave and to wander around the villages. And so I did.
Everywhere I said I was an orphan. People felt sorry for me and allowed me to stop for a few days to several months.
When the war ended I was in a place called Horbiiso (Hrubieszow). An elderly couple came to visit their nephew. So I stayed in the house of a midwife, because there was no room for me from my nephew.
On the way I met two Russian soldiers who spoke Yiddish and helped me leave that place and go to a Jewish family.
Then I was greeted by a Jewish woman who had opened an orphanage and moved to Lower Silesia (Western Poland).
I met a guy who suggested I go with him to Israel. We traveled from Poland to the Czech Republic to Austria, where we crossed the Alps on foot. We took the train to Italy and tried to cross the border to Tarvisio, but the Jews were not allowed to move to Italy. Then I hid in the bushes and in the evening I slipped into a carriage. The train left, but I didn’t know where it would go. At one point I heard about it in a language that seemed Spanish outside the train car and I realized I was in Italy. In Udine a soldier took me to Padua.
A group of children was transferred to Magenta. One night we were transported to the port of Vado Ligure to be embarked on the Enzo Sereni ship. So we arrived in Haifa and then in Atlit, in the English detention camp. Finally, we went to the Ayanot agricultural school.
Notes: these words were written in April 2017 by Roznsiin Itzhk, according to Rivka Krol’s story.
