Everything that happened was as if it was meant to be.
Her story quite literally begins with a single event – the destruction of her father’s barbershop during World War II in Warsaw, Poland – and along with it, his livelihood. This occurrence, though devastating, was to shape Gail’s* life from that point forward.
Gail doesn’t remember a lot of the events during that time, because she was so young. But her parents, Sam and Sally Lauer, often told the story of their survival to people they met while she was growing up, and she thinks that this is mainly where her early recollections come from. She never had a ‘normal’ childhood, and cannot even remember playing with dolls or toys in her early years.
The Germans invaded Poland in September of 1939, when Gail was almost three years old, and her family didn’t leave Poland until the end of that year. Uncertain of the family’s safety after the loss of his barbershop, Gail’s father decided to go to his aunt’s house in Berezne in the Ukraine to determine if it was safer there.
After several weeks, her father sent for them. According to Gail, her mother tried to get members of her family to go with them: her parents, two sisters, a brother, their families, her father’s siblings. No one was willing.
“They said that nothing’s going to happen – nothing happened in WWI, nothing will happen now,” said Gail. “I don’t think we would have gone either if my father’s barbershop hadn’t been destroyed. So we were lucky.”
Her father sent a young man to help Gail and her mother sneak across the border. When they got to Berezne, the family lived with her father’s aunt in a rooming house she owned. Her father worked in a barbershop, and her mother worked as a seamstress and manicurist.
They were there quite a while before the regular German army (not the Nazis, but the soldiers at war) occupied the town. Gail’s mother did the German General’s nails, and her father cut his hair. Historical accounts of the war indicate that for most Jews in Berezne, conditions were terribly difficult. But some Jewish families, including Gail’s, were able to evade the worst of the problems through luck -- at least for a time.
The regular army was in Berezne for about a year; toward the end of their stay, the General told Gail’s parents that they should tell their relatives and other people they knew that “things are going to happen.”
“He told us to hide – to get away,” said Gail. “He warned us so that we could start planning.”
And plan they did. In the rooming house where they lived, Gail’s parents found that in the cellar, right beneath their room, there was a little space set apart from the main room – so they dug through the floor to that small, closed-off area. They brought down food and water to that area. In the middle of one night in 1942, the Nazis who had come to Berezne began rounding up all the Jews. Gail and her family went down into their hiding space, and they took along an orphaned 14-year-old girl, Esther, who was living with them.
They heard the Nazis going through the house, up above. Few people escaped as the Nazis went room to room rounding up everyone. When they got to her family’s room, they heard the Nazis talking about them.
“They said, ‘We didn’t get the Polish barber yet,’” Gail recalled. “I started to cry and my father put his hand over my mouth.”
Gail and her family stayed in the cellar through the next day – but then they had to get out. They crawled out in the middle of the night and immediately went to the only person that they thought could help them – the German General. He occupied a house in town that served as his headquarters and had many Ukrainian and Jewish people working for him. When Gail’s parents knocked at his door, the General listened to their pleas for help and then sent a young Ukrainian man to help them.
“He told the man to get a horse and wagon and to take us out of town,” said Gail. “And he did.”
The man dropped them at the edge of a forest and, pointing in one direction, told them to go that way. After he left, however, Gail’s mother said that they should go the opposite way.
“She just had a feeling that we should go the other way,” Gail said. “This was another important decision that turned out to be very fortunate for us.”
After a short time, the Ukrainian man came back to the forest with the Nazis and they went looking for Gail and her family in the area where he had told them to go. But her family was safely hidden in the bushes in the other direction.
“After a while, they gave up and left. That’s when our time in the forest began.”
Gail was five years old.
