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GRETA CUNNINGHAM: With news from Minnesota Public Radio, I'm Greta Cunningham. Minnesota Republican House Speaker Steve Sviggum says lawmakers have reached a budget deal. Sviggum didn't give any details other than to say he and DFL Senate Majority Leader Roger Moe had reached an agreement.

STEVE SVIGGUM: We do have an agreement both on the parameters of the tax side and on the spending side. It feels good to be done. It was like pulling teeth. But we do have an agreement and that feels good. I think we have great balance for Minnesotans.

GRETA CUNNINGHAM: Sviggum and Moe say they will give more details later today. Conference committees will still have to work out the exact language of the tax and spending bills. Earlier this morning, Governor Ventura announced that he tweaked his budget plan in an attempt to break the stalemate. The governor could call a special session as early as next week.

The Minnesota Court of Appeals has affirmed the murder conviction of a man who left his three-year-old son taped in a plastic bag in the woods. The appeals court upheld Howey Kramer's second-degree murder conviction in the 1999 death of his son, Kenny, even though the appeals court says his confession should not have been admitted at the trial. Saint Paul officials say flood cleanup work on Harriet Island has gone well enough to allow the Riverside Park to reopen for Memorial Day weekend.

Rich Lallier of Saint Paul Parks and Recreation Department says the 101-year-old park held up well under the city's third highest flood waters on record. Lallier says the touch-up work that remains to be done will not limit the activity of park visitors. Crews will resume work on a new band shell and a gateway connecting the park to Saint Paul's west side.

The forecast for Minnesota calls for showers likely in the east, along with a few thunderstorms. It'll be mostly cloudy in the west with a chance of afternoon showers. High temperatures today ranging from 55 to 65 degrees.

Right now in Rochester, light rain and 48 degrees. It's raining in Duluth and 51. In the Twin Cities, some scattered light rain and 55. That's a news update. I'm Greta Cunningham.

SPEAKER 1: Programming on Minnesota Public Radio is supported by Minnesota Corn Growers, dedicated to bringing you a healthy, safe and abundant food supply day after day, year after year. On the web at mncorn.org.

MIKE EDGERLY: This is Midday. Good afternoon. I'm Mike Edgerly in today for Gary Eichten. Memorial Day is most often used as a time to remember those who died fighting for this country. Today on Midday, we hear from two people whose courage and bravery helped them survive war.

Later this hour, we'll hear from Dr. Sabina Zimering, a Polish Jew. She used false documents to hide her true identity and escape the Holocaust. Ironically, her escape from almost certain death led her to Germany.

First, we hear that-- we hear the World War II survival account of bomber pilot Richard Carroll. Shot down over Hungary, the wounded Carroll survived a harrowing episode as a prisoner of war. Both these conversations are a part of our Voices of Minnesota series of interviews. Here's Minnesota Public Radio's Dan Olson.

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DAN OLSON: Eagan resident Richard Carroll, growing up on his parents' farm near Rosemont, working with their horses, had no inkling of the sudden and dramatic turn his life was about to take.

RICHARD CARROLL: Originally, as a little boy, I wanted to be a cowboy and live out in Colorado beyond the mountains and herd cattle. I loved horses and enjoyed riding. Then I saw Air National Guard pilots flying overhead and going through the aerobatics. And I decided that horses were old fashioned and I needed to get up to speed and become more updated and wanted to be a pilot.

DAN OLSON: When the United States entered the war against Germany and Japan, Dick Carroll signed up for aviator training and got his wish to go to Colorado, where he learned to pilot a B-24 bomber at Colorado Springs.

RICHARD CARROLL: And from there we flew our own new airplane over, by way of South America and Africa, to Italy and became part of the 15th Air Force in Cerignola, Italy.

DAN OLSON: After training with more seasoned pilots, Carroll, now 22 years old, and other young crew members flew their first bombing missions. He remembers there was literally a black cloud over every mission created by German anti-aircraft guns firing flak into the sky.

RICHARD CARROLL: It looked very much like 4th of July, except that this was for real and you were flying among it. And it was not colorful. It was very black.

And in the center of the explosion was very dark, dark red. They pretty much had our altitude nailed down so that most of the explosions were within several hundred feet of our altitude one way or the other. And they were all around us, left, right, and front and behind.

DAN OLSON: These are exploding shells?

RICHARD CARROLL: Yes. Of course. I flew two missions to Ploiesti. That's the big oil fields in Romania, where they had the longest flak alleys in the world. We flew 27 minutes through flak in and out of the target.

And it didn't make any difference on the two missions which direction we came in because we did use different approaches and departure lanes. And so they had great coverage us with flak. They really protected that. After all, that was Hitler's main source of oil and fuel for his war machine.

DAN OLSON: Hitler's reach even stretched into the aircraft's cockpit. Carroll remembers crew members being the target of messages from Axis Sally, the voice of Nazi propaganda aimed at Allied military personnel.

RICHARD CARROLL: Axis Sally always came on the radio on our frequency within an hour after we took off, long before we got to the target area. And she always told us the target that we were bombing that day to demoralize us as much as she could. Because she told us that our 4-F friends back home were going out with our girlfriends or our wives, whichever the case may be.

And that when-- your bombing mission today is to Vienna and we want to welcome you to the city. You know that we have 1,200 guns in place waiting for you. And in addition, we are bringing in by flatcar railroad another 400. So there will be 1,600 anti-aircraft guns firing at you today.

DAN OLSON: So their intelligence was apparently good enough so that they knew of the missions, although presumably they could have guessed at some of the missions, too.

RICHARD CARROLL: Well, it's very hard to determine. But nevertheless, she told us the target that we were bombing and it was always correct. It was much more accurate than our weather reports.

DAN OLSON: The mental strain and suffering the duty caused crew members was made clear on Dick Carroll's very first bombing flight. He and the other B-24 pilots were flying in formation when one of the lead bombers took a direct hit.

RICHARD CARROLL: The explosion was so complete with the 6,000 pounds of bombs. Half of the 800 pounds-- or 8000 pounds of 100 octane fuel plus oxygen tanks in the plane, the explosion was so complete that the largest piece of the aircraft or the crew was a piece of the right rudder, which was about a foot square. It was total destruction. And of course, we flew through some of the debris as we passed through.

That was the first mission. We get back home. And when I get to the tent, a navigator that was 3 feet from my tent, I didn't know him at all until I arrived there. He unfortunately, had married just a few weeks before he came overseas.

And he had become convinced that he was never, ever going to get back home to his dearly beloved wife. And he had shot himself in the knee with his .45 caliber revolver. And of course, a .45 caliber makes a terrible mess when it goes through the body.

It expands and it really destroys a lot of flesh. So he was taken to a hospital. Nobody wanted to talk about it because they didn't want to spread morale that would get worse.

And I, at that point, decided that I had better do some thinking about how I'm going to survive in this war if I do. And so I happened to be a Roman Catholic. And I decided that I had to surrender myself and say that I don't want to die, but if it's my turn then I put myself-- I am ready. I'll put myself in your hands, Almighty God.

DAN OLSON: Crew members who survived 50 missions were eligible to go home. Carroll says he learned after the war from military historians that members of his group, the 15th Air Force, had a 70% chance of being killed or captured. Carroll's fateful mission was his 15th. They were after an ammunition plant on an island in the Danube River near Budapest.

The flak hit one of the B-24s four engines. The propeller began spinning out of control. The crew, all except for the nose gunner, bailed out at 20,000.

It was Carroll's first parachute jump. There had been no training in aviator school. Carroll free fell for thousands of feet, hoping to avoid being made a floating target by a passing enemy fighter plane.

RICHARD CARROLL: I landed in a wheat field. So I was a farm boy coming back to my environment. The only problem was that people were coming from-- the farmers in Hungary, as they do in most Europe countries, they live in little farming villages and they come out.

This was on a Sunday morning, incidentally, and they were dressed mostly in their Sunday best. But they carried forks, hoes, shovels, rifles, big pieces of wood. They really didn't like us. They were our enemy.

DAN OLSON: You feared for your life at this point, I assume?

RICHARD CARROLL: To the point where before they got to me, I was shot. So they obviously didn't like me.

DAN OLSON: They had already started firing?

RICHARD CARROLL: Yes, just one. And he hit me through the chest and so I was well aware. And by that time, two young Hungarians came up and held me by the elbows so I didn't fall down.

When you get shot, the initial shock is that if you don't react quickly and brace yourself, it will knock you over. But then there's a greater sensation, and that is the burn. Because you see, the bullet is quite hot even as it leaves the gun. The burn is so significant that you feel that you're on fire and there's nothing you can do about it.

DAN OLSON: What happened next?

RICHARD CARROLL: I said I was shot through the chest. It's actually shot in the chest because the bullet didn't leave. It was still somewhere in the chest.

The farmer with a long-handled shovel came up in front of me with a lot of hate in his eyes. And he walked around behind me to my right, and I knew what was coming. And the two men held me by my elbow and there is nothing that I could do.

And I knew that he was going to hit me and he hit me in the back of the head. And I can still hear that noise. You don't pass out immediately when you're hit.

It sounded like Killebrew hitting a home run in the old Metrodome, that solid smack. And then I started to turn different shades of light gray, medium gray, dark gray. And as I got to blacking out, I felt my knees go to rubber and I was unconscious.

DAN OLSON: They apparently carried you out of the wheat field.

RICHARD CARROLL: Yes. Some time later, I don't know how long, I woke up and I was leaned up against a horse tank out in the middle of the field where they watered the horses. I, by that time, was very short on breath. I was panting.

My heart rate was really racing and I was extremely dry. And I asked for water and of course, nothing happened. And then I thought in German, the word for water is [GERMAN]. So I asked for [GERMAN] and immediately one of the Hungarian men took his cap that he had worn in the field for a long time.

I can still see the inside of that cap. He dipped it into the horse tank and brought me the water. And somebody grabbed the hair in the back of my head so I wouldn't drown.

You understand that horse tanks, if you've lived on the farm, there is a green algae that forms because the horses have pieces of grass or hay in their mouth when they're drinking and it gets into the water. And with the sunshine, it makes a wonderful growth pattern for algae. And so that's a typical horse tank.

DAN OLSON: They tried to kill you and now they're giving you a drink of life-saving water.

RICHARD CARROLL: Not only that, but there is another man that had pulled up my shirt. And he was picking up the dirt from next to the tank and letting it run through the heel of his hand over my wound to try to stop the bleeding. And, of course, being a farmer, you understand that what horses want to do after they take their big drink of water from being hot and pulling whatever farm implements they pull. So I prayed to God that the sun had done its work and killed all the microbes that were in the water, that were in the soil rather.

DAN OLSON: Then in a life-saving turn of events Carroll says he was dragged from the melee. He describes his rescuers as the home guard, a sort of local law enforcement militia. They got him to a house.

But Carroll's own assessment of his condition was grim. He asked for a priest and was given last rites. A doctor who spoke English told Carroll he had a raging fever and couldn't be moved.

RICHARD CARROLL: His way of treatment-- he said, I apologize. The Germans have taken all of the medications that I have had for their war in Russia and that I don't even have an aspirin tablet to give you for your pain. So he was very apologetic and I told him that was quite all right. His treatment for the fever was to have the soldiers pump water into a big old washtub, and bring it into the room, and to soak a mattress and fold it up so that they could wrap it around my chest with this cold well water fresh from the well. Each time they did this, I would pass out.

DAN OLSON: The turnabout in treatment from angry villagers bent on killing Dick Carroll to compassion from Hungarian men in uniform was stunning. Carroll says the soldiers worked in shifts for days to treat his fever.

RICHARD CARROLL: The head of the guard was an officer and he didn't speak English. But yet he was very, very kind with-- just obviously kind with his being with me. And it was real obvious that he understood war and knew the relationship, as did the doctor and the priest.

And it was such a treat to talk to two people that spoke English. You can't really appreciate how valuable that was. So finally, they put me into a buggy and they started out on this cobblestone street. And of course, my heart action started to go fast again and I had to put my head between my knees to keep from passing out.

DAN OLSON: You're listening to a Voices of Minnesota interview with Richard Carroll, a prisoner of war during World War II. They bounced along, Carroll remembers, to the first hospital where doctors refused to help him. They said he had to go to a nearby military hospital where other prisoners of war were being treated.

By this time, another group of angry civilians had gathered and wanted to get their hands on him. Carroll says he understood the Hungarians' rage. They had lost family, friends and homes from Allied bombing. Carroll says a quick-thinking military driver and doctor grabbed him and pushed him into a nearby car. Not long after reaching the military hospital, Carroll says, the mystery of his bullet wound was solved by a doctor and an X-ray machine.

RICHARD CARROLL: This was a Polish doctor who was also a prisoner like we were, of course, with not much status because the Germans didn't give much status to the Polish. So he had no choice. He was directed to go to Budapest.

And so he tried five languages on me. He spoke Polish, of course, Czechoslovakian, Hungarian, German and French. And of course, we stupid Americans that only speak English so he tried real hard.

And after examining me, he was getting pretty excited. And finally, he was a rather big, strong man. He poked me on the sternum right in the middle of the chest several times. He says finally in frustration, bullet, heart. So that was my first knowledge that I carried a bullet lodged in my heart.

DAN OLSON: To reassure those shocked at the revelation that he survived being shot in the heart during World War II, Dick Carroll takes the precaution of bringing along his official military discharge papers.

RICHARD CARROLL: If the officer is permanently incapacitated for active service, state the cause of such incapacity. Foreign body metallic, anterior wall, right ventricle of the heart incurred 2 July 1944 when shot by the enemy after bailing out over enemy territory in Hungary.

DAN OLSON: Surgery to remove the bullet was not an option. His condition deteriorated. Blood filled one of his lungs. The doctors drained it.

RICHARD CARROLL: So then they had a 250 cc syringe with a long needle, and they ran that between the ribs. And of course, understand now that they had a very limited amount of ether that they could use for amputations and serious operations. And anything like a needle between the ribs didn't qualify as major.

But the problem was they would fill up the 250 cc's of the blood and body fluid and then unscrew it to leave the needle in. And as they unscrewed it, the needle would wander around and scratch all over the lung. But of course, as a prisoner of war, you don't complain because they're trying to help you. So this they did six times and each time they took out 1 liter.

DAN OLSON: But the blood loss was life threatening. Lingering on death's doorstep, Carroll says one night he nearly passed over but was saved by the attentiveness of a nurse.

RICHARD CARROLL: Ana was an army nurse with Hungarian army when they were fighting the Bolsheviks, the Russians years before. And she had lost her left eye. And of course a poor country, they never had money to buy a glass eye. So she lived without anything in the left-eye socket, but she was a beautiful woman.

Believe it or not, she was 80 years old at that time. She was 80 years old and she was the most loving, kindest person. She understood war and she would pat the soldiers on the shoulder, on the chest as she'd pull up the sheet at night as they were. She was a night nurse.

But they said that-- the others said that she gave me some sort of a shot in the chest to keep me going that night. And the next morning, she stayed on duty longer than normal to see the doctor. And she actually scolded Dr. [? Sukhavati ?] and must have told him that I had to have a blood transfusion, which they had never done before.

So that morning, Dr. [? Sukhavati ?] had arranged for another prisoner of war, a young man from Portland, Oregon that had some Norwegian blood in him, incidentally. But it matched my Irish blood. And so they arranged this and they had an awful time getting my vein open because I was apparently out of blood. And finally, finally, after much, much prodding, they got into the vein. And so they transfer blood from him to me.

DAN OLSON: Five months after jumping from his damaged B-24 bomber into the Hungarian wheat field, Dick Carroll had recovered enough to be moved by the Nazis to a prison in Germany, where he was held for interrogation. Then he was transferred to a prisoner of war camp north of Berlin. By this time, late in 1944, the Nazi forces were crumbling. Even so, Carroll now faced the terror of life as a German prisoner of war.

RICHARD CARROLL: Each month, there was less food. If we had to exist on the German food, none of us would have come back home. We all would have died of starvation.

It was the Red Cross parcels that kept us alive. Because at the very end, the food that we got, for example, like potatoes, if we got one potato for two men or four men, that was the most that you could expect. And each month, they became more rotten. And of course, you learn to eat the hard rot, which was fine. You could stomach that.

But when it turned soft, then you had to give up and not eat it. So you understand what it means to get along without food. In fact, I got home after back to France, I weighed 120 pounds. But there were a lot of POWs that weighed much less.

DAN OLSON: Torture, maltreatment, execution even, those accounts are vivid in accounts from World War II.

RICHARD CARROLL: Yes, we were again, very fortunate. Stalag Luft I was an officer's camp and it was considered better than most camps. And we survived one way or another, no complaints. However, some of the individuals that were shot by guards that had machine guns in their towers that were on the circumference fence. And so death was always around.

DAN OLSON: Recreational shooting? These were escape attempts? What was the cause for the shooting?

RICHARD CARROLL: It's hard to say what the reason was, but some just were shot right through an open window right into the barracks. You just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. And of course, justice is Nazi justice.

DAN OLSON: It was a reign of terror in the camps. No one was ever sure that--

RICHARD CARROLL: Never sure. No. And of course, if you've stepped over the tripwire, which was a wire a foot above the ground and 12 feet from the fence, if you stepped over that, you were immediately shot. And of course, there were a few that lost their sanity, and stepped over the tripwire, and they were immediately riddled with bullets.

DAN OLSON: In the end, Dick Carroll, how do you think you manage to keep your sanity? which I gather is an extremely important resource to hold on to as you try to survive what you've been through.

RICHARD CARROLL: Yeah, I think it's mostly faith. And of course, I think living on a farm and with the work that we did made us a very healthy life. So that way, when we did enter into a severe case like I did, that I had the advantage of having a very healthy body that stood me in good stead. And then again, if you didn't have hope and faith, you literally could die. So faith and hope was very much an important part of our life.

DAN OLSON: As World War II ended, Russian troops liberated Carroll and the others in the German prisoner-of-war camp. The Americans were flown to France, put on a boat and sent home. 80-year-old Richard Carroll, a B-24 bomber pilot during World War II, lives in Eagan.

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You're listening to Minnesota Public Radio's Voices of Minnesota interview series. I'm Dan Olson.

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Dr. Sabina Zimering, a retired Saint Louis Park physician, was born into a Jewish family in Poland. When the Germans invaded, friends working for the Polish underground gave Zimering and her sister new identities as Catholics. The German military's relentless search for Jews posing as gentiles forced Zimering to live a nightmare existence.

She was in constant fear of being discovered. In a strange twist of fate, Zimering and her sister found refuge as workers in a German hotel occupied by German military officers. Zimering was 16 years old on the bright, clear Friday, September 1, 1939, when sirens sounded as she and her mother returned from the farmers' market in Piotrkow, the city where they lived.

SABINA ZIMERING: So at first I was annoyed. I thought, wow, another one of those boring things. Get off the street, find shelter, and wait until you hear the siren again. Well, instead of that, after the siren, bombs were falling.

Shortly after that, I heard about a boy that was older and I hoped he would notice me. He was the first victim. He was killed on the balcony.

DAN OLSON: They were bombing your city.

SABINA ZIMERING: And this was the first day of the Second World War.

DAN OLSON: Zimering says her grandparents argued it wasn't necessary to flee the invading Germans. However, her father, a coal merchant, had been reading accounts of the persecution of Jews in Germany after Hitler came to power.

SABINA ZIMERING: So the family of five, we got a horse-drawn carriage from our hometown to [? Chechlowo, ?] which was my favorite summer place that we couldn't go that summer. And from there on, on foot we were just walking.

DAN OLSON: Zimering says the roads were clogged with refugees walking at night, hiding in barns or houses with farm families during the day in what turned out to be a futile bid to outpace the invaders.

SABINA ZIMERING: We were spending the night with some farmers and all of a sudden some neighbor was running, shouting, they here, they here, the Germans are here. They just came out of the forest. And a group of people gather to get the latest news.

And I remember everybody was excited and loud, and my father was silent. His face was ghost white. He knew what it meant.

DAN OLSON: Zimering and her family returned to their home in what was now an occupied city.

SABINA ZIMERING: What I remember is just seeing them and hearing them. The thing that was the most frightening was the marching, the boots. What do you call the march? Goose step?

Yeah. They were so loud and so scary. You could hear them for blocks away that there were Germans.

DAN OLSON: Sabina Zimering says her city of 60,000 included about 15,000 Jews. She says the Germans took their homes and belongings and ordered them to move to what would become the Jewish ghetto.

SABINA ZIMERING: So they were confiscating radios, fur coats, any property-- took over Jewish businesses, immediately closed all Jewish schools.

DAN OLSON: Almost immediately, Zimering says, the German military began arresting Jews. The terror included beatings and patrols with attack dogs.

SABINA ZIMERING: Once I was walking not too far from home and I could hear shouts and people running. And I knew right away what it was. It was the Gestapo man with his dog.

And he was a tall, handsome man with black shining shoes, with a leather whip and a dog. And he would let the dog loose and he would bite anyone he could get a hold of, leaving pretty deep wounds.

And when it happened when I was in the street, I started to run. And before long, I could hear the panting and barking of the dog right behind me. And I knew that if I keep running straight, he will get me in a second. So I made a quick right turn to the two apartment building entrance, and the dog kept going straight. And a few minutes later, I heard an outcry of a child.

DAN OLSON: Leaders in the Jewish ghetto plotted rebellion, but they were discovered and arrested. Zimering says as the months passed, the food supply dwindled and disease took a heavy toll. Even so, two girls, family friends who were Catholics, risked arrest to visit Zimering's family in the ghetto. Their mother had been Zimering's elementary school teacher. Her mother asked the friends to help them get documents showing that Zimering and her sister were Catholic.

SABINA ZIMERING: A few days later, they were back again in the ghetto. So luckily, we were at the edge of the ghetto. Right across the street was already the Polish part with a large church. So they came through the front part, which was on the Polish part of the church, came out on, and just went through the street and there they were.

But they came. They said, yes, we talked to mother and here are three IDs. No money, they were extremely expensive. Very wealthy people somehow got a hold of them. We couldn't have never done it.

DAN OLSON: In other words, people were paying a lot of money for false IDs. And these friends, your family friends just gave them to you.

SABINA ZIMERING: That's right. They didn't ask for anything. They said, here they are, all the signatures, all the stamps. All you need to do pick names you wanted, paste the picture, and you have it.

And I remember the look that my parents exchanged. Total disbelief.

DAN OLSON: Disbelief, why do you think?

SABINA ZIMERING: They didn't expect it. It was like a miracle. They didn't dare to ask for it and here it was.

DAN OLSON: Sabina Zimering later learned their friends, the mother and her two daughters, were part of the Polish underground, people risking their lives to resist the German occupation.

SABINA ZIMERING: Already by then, they were very patriotic. The older one was smuggling weapons. In other words, they were on false papers themselves already then and they had access to it.

DAN OLSON: Zimering says fear of discovery caused her to delay using the new false IDs. Then events forced a decision. Rumors circulated that the German extermination squad had arrived.

SABINA ZIMERING: A man, a neighbor from upstairs, came from his night shift at the railroad station shouting, they are here. The Sonderkommando is here. They are at the station. They are still unloading.

DAN OLSON: Zimering says the family waited until nighttime to escape.

SABINA ZIMERING: Father went out, didn't see anyone guarding it so he made a left turn. A few steps later, we were on a forbidden Polish part of town.

DAN OLSON: Subject to being shot on sight.

SABINA ZIMERING: That's right. And as we split up, he said, let's not work together.

DAN OLSON: Two hours later, the Gestapo arrived at the ghetto, rousting residents, separating those who would be spared for work from those who were sent to their deaths. Zimering says her five family members found refuge where they could, sleeping in building stairwells or for a night or two with friends brave enough to shelter them. She says they wandered the city for two weeks. During the day, they tried to find places where patrols wouldn't notice them.

SABINA ZIMERING: One day, we were very happy. It was the All Saints' Day, end of October, a very important holiday in Poland for the Catholics. So we went into a Polish cemetery.

It was the day where everybody would come, and look up the graves, and clean it up, and dress it up and so on. So we found several graves that looked very neglected out of the way. And we spent a whole day in the cemetery feeling very secure, straightening out graves.

DAN OLSON: The family, still separated, continued wandering the city. One day, Sabina Zimering and her sister took a chance and went to the home of old friends. They were given food and a place to sleep for a few nights. But to their horror, they learned their mother and brother had been discovered and arrested.

SABINA ZIMERING: And as he was coming back from the ghetto, talking to father, some Polish boys recognized them and started to run after him and yell, Jew, Jew! And pretty soon there was a big group. And then they brought a policeman.

And mother was-- and they saw mother too. So in the commotion of all these people, mother whispered to him, run. He ran away. And they arrested her and that was it. We never saw her again.

DAN OLSON: The risk of staying in their home town was too great. Zimering's father had returned to the ghetto. He didn't have false documents. He sent a message to his daughters that they must leave, walk to the neighboring town, use their false identification papers and volunteer for work in Germany.

SABINA ZIMERING: And I thought, Germany, what a crazy idea. You're running away from them. How would we go there? But he was still very well informed.

He said it was October or November of '42. The Germans began to retreat. It was after Stalingrad and there was a big turnaround in the war.

So he said, Germany is now depleted of their arm-- their workforce is in bad situation so they need a lot of foreigners. And they were, in fact, rounding up parts of town and just arresting people and shipping them to Germany because they needed-- they couldn't go on with the war. So anyone who volunteered was very welcomed by them.

DAN OLSON: You're listening to a Voices of Minnesota conversation on Minnesota Public Radio with Sabina Zimering, a Polish Jew who survived the Holocaust. The plan to find work in Germany succeeded, but Zimering and her sister lived with the ever present danger of discovery and arrest. Was there any routine or even monotony that set in, or were you constantly feeling on the edge, like discovery could be literally around the corner?

SABINA ZIMERING: Well, I didn't have to wait very long. The things in the factory were going well. Well, when I was transferred to the office, my helper was a young 17-year-old German boy who just admired Hitler. He said yeah, we have already most of Europe. England and America will be next and nobody can stop us anymore.

And so I said, well, there are some-- I mentioned, there are some neutral countries. What about Switzerland? He said, what a joke. They are neutral as long as it's good for us. We can March in any day.

And I realized I better stop talking to him because all I have to do is make him suspicious. And so that was the end of me talking to him. But things in a [GERMAN] where we lived were not going too well.

DAN OLSON: The barracks for the women.

SABINA ZIMERING: Right, the barracks were all one big open hall with bunk beds. I was on top. My sister was on top.

But anyway, the transports kept coming all the time. There was still shortage of workforce. And with every transport that was coming in, I could recognize that some of these girls were not Poles. They were Jews just like us. And I was telling it to my sister. I said, this is not safe.

DAN OLSON: Thinking that now the chance of discovery as a group was growing with each day.

SABINA ZIMERING: Exactly. Nobody else was suspicious. The people that we work with or the women next to us, nobody said anything.

So I figured, well, it's fine until in one of the transports arrived what looked to me like two sisters. And again, there was nothing suspicious about them. The looks we're good. The Polish was accent free, but they were very frightened.

They were just cautious all the time. They were getting out of everybody's way. And I taught my sister-- taught my sister, they are Jewish. And I could hear whispers about them.

DAN OLSON: So these two young women were drawing attention to themselves by the very fact that they were obviously fearful.

SABINA ZIMERING: Right. In fact, I heard some people-- like they were talking how they-- oh, I can recognize a Jew any time. One of the things they could say was they had sad eyes.

DAN OLSON: How would that look? How would sad eyes look for somebody who thought they could tell a Jew?

SABINA ZIMERING: Well, when you run away from something-- like when I looked at those girls, I thought, well, they must have just witnessed something horrible. And they were giving themselves away by the way they looked. And that's what made me suspicious.

And I remember I took quite some convincing of my sister, and I insisted. I said, the way I see it, the whispers, will become loud open speaking. Somebody will let Gestapo know. They will come and find more of us. Well, she agreed.

So now the thing was to plan, where are we going? How are we getting away not to get caught out of open [GERMAN]? So we decided-- we worked in a factory Monday through Friday and half a day on Saturday. So from Saturday noon till Monday, whoever was absent wouldn't be noticed right away.

So I said, we run away Friday night. By the time our foreman, will see we are gone, we'll be far away. And on the map-- looking on the map, I could tell that if we went straight down south, we could reach the Swiss border. And I thought once we're there, we might be able to just get into Switzerland and we have it made.

We packed a little suitcase and left it outdoors so we don't have to walk out with a suitcase. And we went to the railroad station of Neustadt and got the tickets and waiting for them to open the platform. And all of a sudden, three or four German policemen rush in, lock all the doors, stopped everybody.

And he said, [GERMAN] ID. Everybody had to show the [GERMAN] even the Germans. So everybody was pulling out.

And in the meantime, I could see that they pulled out three young men and were dragging them to the police car, which turned out to be three French prisoners of war that planned to escape and someone informed on them. So they came to catch them. And while they were checking us and I showed them our ID, Polish women after curfew on the train. So they took us, put us in jail.

DAN OLSON: Next morning, the police summoned their factory supervisor, a man Zimering considered kind and fair.

SABINA ZIMERING: So Mr. [? Ullman ?] said, these are very good girls. They like him and their job. They don't give me any trouble. They should have talked to me first.

They don't know our laws. They're not familiar. They were not supposed to do that. He said, please let them go. There is a shortage of workforce.

DAN OLSON: The police released Zimering and her sister. They returned to the factory, but their disappearance fueled rumors they were Jews. A friend, also a Jew using a false identity, told them it was too dangerous. They had to leave.

This time, they walked to a distant station, boarded a train, arriving in the German city of Regensburg, north of Munich. They were out of money. Throughout their ordeal, Sabina Zimering relied on her command of the German language and she and her sisters' quick thinking as they fabricated stories for one set of officials or another about why two young Polish Catholic women were on the move in Germany.

Their first encounter with authorities in Regensburg was nearly their undoing. The sisters went to an employment office. An official there sent them across the street to a building with a German flag. When they entered, Zimering says, she realized they had literally delivered themselves to the Gestapo.

SABINA ZIMERING: I still remember how he looked. He had just a very scary way. The eyes, darting eyes. And he was not very tall, but talked fast and so on.

Anyway, I gave him the story again and he said, stop lying. And he hit me, a very strong hit in my face. I remember my head shook and pain was just spreading into my jaw. And tell the truth.

And it looked like he was ready to hit me again. And somebody at the door walked in, two other uniformed Gestapo men raised their hands, Heil Hitler. And they asked him in German, are you ready? And he looked at us. He said, yes. He got up and left.

And he told us to just stand there and wait. And I could tell that there was something major going on because there were phones ringing. The officers were coming and going, and he was put away in the middle of whatever he was doing. And before he left, he called for a woman to take us for a body search.

We came back to the office, the first officer was gone. Someone else took over. And another man was much milder. And again, he was too busy with other things and he sent us back to the employment office.

[LAUGHS]

DAN OLSON: The stunning and inexplicable turn of events found Zimering and her sister assigned to work as cleaners in Regensburg's top hotel, where most of the residents were German military officers.

SABINA ZIMERING: I did the hard cleaning, scrubbing the floors and the front steps, toilets and so on. And in the morning, when I was scrubbing the front steps, that's when all the military people were walking by me to go to work. And they were just practically rubbing shoulders with them. And they greeted me either with Heil Hitler or [GERMAN].

So a couple of things, one was it was very interesting to live and work among Germans for the two, three-- what was it? from spring of '43 to-- yeah, a little over two years. The shortage of men was very obvious among the women there. They were mothers with-- unwed mothers were made to feel like heroes.

Hitler supported any woman that had a child, married or not married. He needed the-- so there was-- a lot of women were unwed mothers. And the grandchildren were with-- I mean, their children with the grandparents and they lived and worked in a hotel.

DAN OLSON: By 1944, Zimering says, it was plain that the war was going badly for Germany.

SABINA ZIMERING: The hotel was filled with wounded soldiers and they couldn't put them up. They were sleeping in the beautiful large ballroom. They were sleeping on the steps of the hotel.

And the German soldiers that I remember seeing full of confidence and arrogance were very humble and frightened looking, bandaged heads or missing arms and so on. And with them came a lot of civilians. First, we saw a lot of Latvians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians that were working with them during the war and were running away with them.

DAN OLSON: Near the end, Zimering remembers the noise, confusion and the frantic efforts of the German military.

SABINA ZIMERING: In front of the Gestapo building, they were outside on a street, on the sidewalks, they were burning stacks of papers, of documents. And then it got to the point where everybody was in a shelter. The streets were empty.

And finally, somebody came running to the basement and said, it's over. They're here, the [GERMAN]. So we ran upstairs and there, just like what I saw in Poland in '39, long caravan of tanks, and buses and all kinds of equipment. And all of a sudden, a truck turned around full of young men in uniforms that I never saw before shouting Hitler [GERMAN], American soldiers, young American boys.

[SPEAKING GERMAN]

Beautiful women or young women and cigarettes and chocolate. And came to mind the German invasion into Poland, Americans coming into Germany. I felt like jumping up and down and yelling at them. You young boys, you risked your lives to liberate us, to liberate the world.

But I didn't. I kept quiet. I held my sister's hand and try to hide my tears.

DAN OLSON: With their own quick thinking and courage, with the help of friends and the compassion of strangers, Sabina Zimering and her sisters survived World War II. So did their brother and seven extended family members. However, their father and mother, and more than 50 relatives were dead.

The mother of the daughters who supplied their false papers had been arrested by the Nazis and tortured. She lived, but her health was broken. After the war, Zimering stayed in touch with her friends. When she became a physician, she helped one of the sisters recover from a life-threatening illness.

When the communists took over Poland, they arrested the other sister for her work with an anti-communist group. Zimering wrote a letter explaining the young woman's wartime work in the Polish underground against the Germans. The communists released her.

Years later, there was a reunion of the childhood friends. One of the sisters has since died. Sabina Zimering is still in touch with the surviving childhood friend who helped save her life half a century ago.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

MIKE EDGERLY: - Our Voices of Minnesota series is produced by Dan Olson. That's it for Midday this week. I'm Mike Edgerly, sitting in for Gary Eichten. Midday is produced by Sarah Meyer with help from Kara Fiegenschuh.

SPEAKER 2: It's an art extravaganza, as usual. On tonight's Word of Mouth, there will be iron crosses, genetically-engineered artists, international children's festivals, all featured on the show, which comes your way tonight at 6:00. Sound exciting? Sound mysterious? You betcha.

MIKE EDGERLY: This is Minnesota Public Radio. We have cloudy skies, 54 degrees at KNOW FM 91.1, Minneapolis, Saint Paul. Twin Cities weather for this afternoon, showers or thunderstorm also possible with a high around 60 degrees.

Mostly cloudy tonight, a 40% chance of evening showers. The low in the upper 40s for tomorrow. Cloudy skies, a 50% chance of rain.