I Shall Live by Henry Orenstein

the while knowing deep in their hearts that there was no way to deal with Hitler except by going to war.
    On August 28 German troops moved toward the Polish-Slovakian border, effectively surrounding Poland on three sides. On August 30 the German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop presented Nevile Henderson, Britain’s foreign minister, with a sixteen-point memorandum that amounted to an ultimatum demanding Poland’scapitulation to all Hitler’s demands. That same day Poland ordered the mobilization of the Polish army. On August 31, on direct orders from Hitler, the Germans staged a phony “Polish attack” on the Gleiwitz radio station in Upper Silesia. The attack was carried out by German soldiers dressed in Polish army uniforms. This charade provided Hitler with the “proof” of Polish “provocations” he needed to present to his own country, and gave him an excuse for his impending invasion of Poland.
    Western civilization thus saw itself slowly slipping into the abyss of the greatest catastrophe in its history, fully aware of what was happening, yet totally unable to do anything to prevent it.

World War II Begins
    I remember the morning of September 1, 1939, very well. After days filled with tension, the German army attacked Poland. The Polish state radio announced the news with bulletins that spoke of German assault forces, led by tanks and supported by Stuka bombers, penetrating Poland’s frontiers from the north, west, and south. The bulletins emphasized the brave resistance of the Polish army, and even reported a counterattack by the Polish cavalry, which supposedly had advanced into German territory, but we were skeptical about the latter.
    It was a depressing morning. We all knew that we were in for very tough times, but it was Mother especially who, perhaps thanks to her feminine intuition, sensed the enormity of the impending disaster. The minute we heard the news she began weeping and sobbing, which was very uncharacteristic of her. “This is the end,” she kept repeating. “This is the end of everything.” But she soon stopped crying and became our positive, energetic Golda once again. Fromher experience in World War I she knew that food and fuel would soon become scarce, and she set about at once to lay in supplies of these and other necessities.
    The German radio was boasting of deep penetrations by German armor, but most people dismissed this as propaganda. The hope we clung to was that the Polish army, which, although inferior to the Germans, was famous for its patriotic bravery, would be able to hold off the Germans long enough to give the Western powers time to mobilize, come to the rescue, and crush their common enemy.
    We assumed that Hitler, who had begun building up his military machine only in the last few years, would be no match for the combined Western forces; we believed that Churchill’s repeated warnings of the huge increases in German armed strength were exaggerated. England and France we thought of as lazy giants, who at the moment were pacifying Hitler in order to prevent bloodshed, but whose powerful armies, once unleashed, would dispatch the Germans with one swift mortal blow. We were hoping that after the fiasco of Munich and all Hitler’s broken promises, the Allies, faced now with the invasion of Poland, would see at last that the only way to deal with him was through force of arms, and would immediately declare war on Germany.
    But September 1 and then 2 passed, with no declaration of war from either France or England. We were shocked and frightened, unaware of the frantic efforts on the part of both countries during those two days to persuade Hitler to halt his advance into Poland—efforts that were unavailing. Hitler, exhilarated at the success of his Blitzkrieg, would not be denied his victory. Finally, on the afternoon of September 3, England, convinced that she had exhausted all possibilities for a peaceful