Fanny Kandler

My name is Fanny Kandler. I was born Fanny Sager on July 20, 1920 in Stanislwow, Poland. I had two older brothers and a younger sister.

My parents were good parents and I had a really nice childhood. I had a wonderful relationship with my siblings.

My father was a tailor that manufactured clothing for his customers.

My parents believed in educating their children and we all attended high school. My brother was unable to attend medical school in Poland so he had to finish in Italy. I went to a private high school for girls. My younger sister was in a Hebrew high school.

My family was very traditional. My father did not have a beard but we were Jewish and very traditional. Our city had about 35,000 Jews in our town. We had very few Gentile friends. Even so, my two brothers went to public schools with Jews and Gentiles. My school was also a mixed crowd of Jews and non Jews.

My mother had sisters and my father had sisters and brothers. Every Saturday and holidays we spent with our large family. We lived together near our extended families. All of our extended family lived in Stanislwow.

In 1937 and 1938, when the Polish university students from our town came home for the Christmas holidays, they would hold signs that said do not buy from Jewish stores. In 1939, the war broke out and the Germans occupied our town. When the Germans came in, we were not yet in the Ghetto. The Germans and Ukrainian police knocked on the doors of all the Jewish homes and told us to bring all of our belongings and to come with them. Somehow, I got separated from my parents. My whole family got separated. Lucki9ly, we did not go with the soldiers to the gathering place. The Germans gathered over 12, 000 Jews in the Jewish cemetery and prepared three graves that we were unaware of. On September 12, the Germans and Ukrainians were shooting all day and filled three graves with 12,000 Jews from our hometown. I hid during the shooting in a field. My father hid in our attic. My mother and sister hid somewhere as well. Miraculously we all survived this day. When they stopped shooting at 5:00, they told everyone who was still alive, you can have your life back.

In 1941, I married my high school sweetheart. His name is Max Kandler.

After this, the German’s formed the Stanislwow Ghetto. We had to leave our house and just take whatever we could carry to bring to the Ghetto. My father’s brother used to live in this part of the Ghetto so he gave us two rooms for our family to live in the Ghetto. My father had to leave his business behind. In the Ghetto, my father worked for the police as a tailor making them uniforms. He would walk out of the Ghetto to the workshops to make these uniforms. I helped to make dresses when I was in the Ghetto. People exchanged things in the ghetto. We had to try to do the best we could to survive.

Aktions came unexpectedly. Suddenly you saw German soldiers and Ukrainian police and they would run house to house and pull people out. I had one incident on Ukrainian New Years. We thought we were safe that night in the Ghetto because we thought the Ukrainians would be celebrating that night. We had a hiding place in the Ghetto in our attic. Next to our house was once a theater. We made a hole in the adjoining wall to hide in. That night, my mom hid in the attic. That night, the German and Ukrainians came and took the rest of my family and I down and lined us up outside and all the people from the surrounding houses. They put us in an empty building and gathered all of us there. Then they told us we all needed to come out. I didn’t want to come but I looked at the fireplace and I tried to hide in it. I asked a tall man to put me up in there. The man told me I was silly because they would find me. He finally helped me and I hid on the top of the fireplace. I remember three infants were lying dead on the bottom because they died of hunger. Somehow I crawled and hid and they didn’t see me. They took everyone out and they boarded up the doors and windows with iron bars. When I heard them leave and it was quiet. I heard them shooting the Jews and I jumped down from the fireplace and I started to run around and no one was there. I was all by myself. I wanted to get out of the building and somehow I found the basement and it had a small window to go out to the backyard. I don’t know what power I had but I grabbed the bars on the window and broke it and crawled out to the backyard. It was January and no one was there and I ran to the Ghetto. I came into the Ghetto. My husband was working and had a special permit to go out from the ghetto to collect material. He had gone to the cemetery to look for me because he knew which coat I was wearing because he thought I was killed there. He didn’t understand what happen to me. I was the only survivor from that day of killing of 600-800 people. In that Aktion, my father and sister were killed. My mother was hiding in the attic and she was saved.

After this, the Germans were liquidating as many people as possible so my husband decided he wanted us to leave the Ghetto and live as gentiles. My husband went to the flour mill his family used to own and met with one of the workers who had a son that was his friend. He took the son’s gentile documents without the son knowing by asking him what the passport and papers looked like. My husband asked the boy to get him something from the basement- a pickle- and when the boy left, my husband stole the papers and ran away. He came back to Ghetto and got me and we took a train to a different town using the Gentile documents and a birth certificate that we bought for me. We put on clothing as much as we could carry and the documents and we took off the yellow star armband and we traveled to another town on the railroad. The town we went to was Stryj. In Stryj, there was a flour mill and my husband looked for a job there with his Gentile papers. He ended up getting a job and we even got an employee apartment to live in. I stayed in the house and he worked there. In Stryi as I was hiding as a Gentile girl, I saw from a distance, one of my Gentile school friends and I was so happy to see someone from my hometown. But somehow a power from above and stopped me because she would recognize me as a Jew and denounce me and I turned around and did not let her see me.

When my husband was working, he had an incident where a Jewish employee from the Ghetto burned my husband with liquid glass accidentally. This liquid glass burned through his clothing up to his skin. This was very painful. My husband was sitting with the Gentiles. He had to act like a goy and so he screamed. One man came over to my husband and said “One bird does not harm another bird.” So basically this other gentile suspected him of being a Jew. My husband told him come with me to the bathroom and I will prove that I am not a Jew. Each night, my husband would stretch his skin so that it would not look like he had been circumcised.

Anyways, after this we got nervous and we decided that we would run to the woods. We heard that there were a lot of Jews who were hiding in the woods. We decided to join them in the woods. It took us three days from Stryj to get to the woods. During the day we would hide in the fields and we would only walk during the night. We lived through the winter in the woods. In the woods we found close to 300 people hiding in the woods. These people came from all over this vicinity. In a group as big as this, there was always a leader. At night, we would make bonfires and cook our food. The men would go to the village to try to steal food from the fields. There was one gentile who was someone’s friend and he would supply us with bread. People tried to build holes to try to hibernate like a bear to keep them warmer during the winter. My husband said in a group, I don’t think we will be able to survive. We decided to go to go into hiding for the two of us not far from the main road and not too far from the village of Dorline.

My husband found a widowed Ukrainian farmer and told her that he was a Christian boy who has a Jewish girlfriend and told her that he is hiding in the woods and ask her if she would help him. She took a liking to my husband and said ok. We found a spot to hide and he found a small shovel and he dug a hole for the two of us to sit and lie down. He made a bunker for the two of us. He bought us 40 loaves of bread and we stored it in the bunker. No one knew where my husband made the hiding place for us.

At one point, my husband allowed a high school friend and his girlfriend to come to stay in our bunker. However, they went to pick up their belongings and they found out that all of the people were in the group were shot over night. Because this high school friend stayed with us, they survived. In the bunker we could only sit or lie down. We couldn’t go out because we didn’t want to make marks on the ground. We ate one slice of bread a day per person and we melted snow for drinking. We washed with the snow and we didn’t change our clothing or wash it. We talked and we played puzzles and tried humming. We were full of lice. We counted how many lice we could kill a day. We had nothing to do. The bread got so moldy that it was all green but we ate it anyways. But this helped us survive because antibiotics are made from mold. We didn’t get any infections or colds or fevers.

Around March 8, the temperature changed. The ground started to absorb the snow and the water started to drip into our bunker. In the spring, people started to come out of their hiding places. We had about 18 people that survived in the woods similar to us. But the war wasn’t over yet, so we still had to hide in the woods. All of the other people were unfortunately discovered by either making marks on the snow or dealing with a farmer that gave them away.

We were finally liberated by the Russians in July of 1944. My husband and I went back to our hometown of Stanislwow and rented a small apartment. My husband got a job as a miller in a very big flour mill. He was working there. One day as he was working there they heard soldiers coming and singing songs but in a different language from Russian or German. The workers went out and watched the people singing. The Russian soldiers were marching and the prisoners of war were marching. My husband spotted a Hungarian Jewish soldier who wanted to kill us together and he told the officer and said this man is a spy as he was working for the Germans. The officer said come with me to the base and they gave him a room and he said everything to the captain from the Russian army. They didn’t believe him. They called in the Hungarian Jew to the room and the man looked at him and asked if he knew my husband. He answered it would be better if I didn’t’ know him. He recognized my husband. They locked up the man right away.

After living there for a while we left and went to a displaced persons camp in Munich, Germany. Russia and occupied Poland made a pact that Russian citizens could leave Russia and go to Poland. As I was pregnant and we didn’t’ want to stay with the Russians. We lived privately in Germany and my husband worked in a mill. I got in touch with my cousin in the United States. Eventually my cousin sponsored us to come to the United States. We came on the General Holbroke to Boston and then took the railroad to New York. A cousin met us at the railroad station and we stayed with our cousin for two weeks. In 1949, we settled in Brooklyn, New York.

My wife and I had three sons- Edward, Charles and Bernard. My husband opened a leather goods factory. Upon retirement, two of our sons took over the factory. Our third son is a physician. We have 10 grandchildren.

For a long time, I did not want to talk about it. I made some notes and tried to talk to a recorder but it was hard. My middle son told me he would hire a professional for you to share your story. But then the Shoah foundation said they would take the testimony and we opened ourselves to tell this important story.

The legacy for my children is that people think it will never happen again, I think they are wrong. Of course, we have our own country and big support and big faith and to the children just don’t forget who you are and have hope and be a believer that there is someone above us, and have faith.