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GILES SYNDER: From NPR News in Washington, I'm Giles Snyder. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said today that results of government intervention into the financial system aren't clear yet. He assured lawmakers that a hearing on the effectiveness of the financial and industry bailout program that tough standards will accompany any new federal funds for companies seeking government help. NPR's Paul Brown reports.

PAUL BROWN: Geithner told members of Congress he can't say for sure the $700 billion program is helping to make credit more readily available.

TIMOTHY GEITHNER: To date, frankly, the evidence is mixed.

PAUL BROWN: Geithner confirmed that banks are actually lending less now than when the program began, but he said it's hard to know how things would have gone had the government not intervened. And he said further bailout funds will come with conditions.

TIMOTHY GEITHNER: Not just to help protect the taxpayer, but try to help ensure that the system emerges stronger, not weaker.

PAUL BROWN: Geithner said history shows that early, forceful, and sustained government action to promote the flow of credit is essential for recovery from recessions at the lowest taxpayer cost. Meanwhile, a new inspector general's report recommends tougher rules and monitoring for the bailout program. Paul Brown, NPR News, Washington.

GILES SYNDER: The Treasury Department says there's about $110 billion left in the government's financial rescue fund, but officials say that should grow by about $25 billion over the next year, as some of the money that's been handed out gets paid back. Meanwhile, the International Monetary Fund is predicting American financial institutions could lose $2.7 trillion as a result of the global credit crisis.

The Obama administration will make about $500 million available to Chrysler through the end of this month, while the company tries to secure a deal with an Italian automaker. General Motors will have access to as much as $5 billion in government funds through May. NPR's Ari Shapiro reports.

ARI SHAPIRO: Chrysler wants an alliance with the Italian car company Fiat. Fiat's chief executive is in the US early this week for talks. If the companies secure the deal, the federal government could provide another $6 billion in aid. General Motors is relying on $5 billion in government money to restructure outside of bankruptcy. That's according to an independent oversight report on the Treasury Department's corporate rescue fund.

At the same time, the United Auto Workers Union wants its members to lobby the White House. GM and Chrysler are negotiating with the union about concessions. Those concessions are considered vital for the companies to survive. The union wants members to urge the White House to make sure that workers and retirees are treated fairly in the negotiations. Ari Shapiro, NPR News, Washington.

GILES SYNDER: President Obama is taking Iran's president to task. He says Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's comments yesterday at the UN Racism Conference in Geneva undermines Iran's standing. But he said he will continue to pursue improved relations. Dozens of Western diplomats walked out during Ahmadinejad's speech when he called Israel's government a racist regime.

Stocks have erased early losses and are trading higher this hour. The Dow is up 82 points. And NASDAQ has gained 26. This is NPR News.

SPEAKER 1: Support for news comes from the Alfred P. Sloan foundation, working to enhance public understanding of science and technology in the modern world.

STEVEN JOHN: From Minnesota Public Radio News, I'm Steven John. Lawyers for Democrat Al Franken are asking the Minnesota Supreme Court to move quickly on Republican Norm Coleman's appeal of his election lawsuit loss. Franken's lawyers ask in a motion filed this morning that the high court order all briefs to be filed by May 4 and hold oral arguments very shortly after that. Coleman filed a notice of appeal yesterday. Franken's attorneys say the appeal should be expedited because Minnesota is entitled to two US senators.

Democrats in the Minnesota Senate are proposing across-the-board income tax increases to help balance the state's budget. NPR's Tom Scheck reports.

TOM SCHECK: All Minnesotans would pay higher taxes if the Senate bill becomes law. In particular, joint filers who earn more than $250,000 a year would pay a new top rate of 9.2%. But the bill makes the increases temporary. They'd expire in 2014. The plan raises $2.2 billion over the next two years and would erase nearly half of the state's $4.6 billion budget deficit.

The chair of the Senate tax committee says his bill would also create incentives for businesses to hire more workers. The plan is dramatically different than the tax bill released by House Democrats. Both plans create a new top income tax bracket, but the House plan relies more heavily on cigarette and alcohol tax increases. Republican Governor Tim Pawlenty says he'll veto any bill that raises taxes. Tom Scheck, Minnesota Public Radio News, at the Capitol.

STEVEN JOHN: Officials have given the all clear after a gas leak forced an evacuation of a neighborhood on St Paul's East Side. Gas escaping from a main line had prompted authorities to evacuate the city's Mounds Park and send away some residents of a nearby nursing home.

Partly to mostly sunny for Minnesota today. Breezy this afternoon with wind advisories up for the southeast. This is Minnesota Public Radio news.

GARY EICHTEN: All right, thanks, Steven. 6 minutes past 12:00.

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GARY EICHTEN: And good afternoon. Welcome back to Midday on Minnesota Public Radio news. I'm Gary Eichten.

Today is Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. And we're going to mark this day here on Midday with the stories of two Minnesota women who survived, Sabina Zimering and Lucy Smith. Zimering and Smith both successfully hid from the Nazis in Poland. Zimering assumed a false identity. She pretended she was a Catholic, got a job working in a German hotel, hiding, as it were, in plain sight. Lucy Smith was just a small child during the Holocaust. She and her mother hid in attics and in cold cellars.

Both Zimering and Smith told their stories to Minnesota Public Radio's Dan Olson as part of our "Voices of Minnesota" interview series. We're going to begin this special Holocaust Remembrance Day Midday with the story of Sabina Zimering. Zimering chronicled her experiences in a book titled Hiding in the Open, which was turned into a play by the same name. That play first premiered in 2004, and the Minnesota History Theater is bringing it back to the stage next February. This interview was first broadcast in 2002. Here's Dan Olson.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

DAN OLSON: 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, well, 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: Right. 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 Ceglow, which was my favorite summer place that we couldn't go that summer. And from there on, go 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're here. They're 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, somehow their-- what do you call the march? Goose step? 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, and they 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 an 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. 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, 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.

SABINA ZIMERING: Right.

DAN OLSON: 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 is pick names you want, 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 we made a left turn. We were-- a few steps later, we were on the verboten Polish part of town.

DAN OLSON: Subject to being shot on sight.

SABINA ZIMERING: Right. That's right. And 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, an 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: As she 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-- 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 hometown 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. We'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 the arm-- the workforce is very 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: Right. Well, I didn't have to wait very long. The things in the factory were going well. When I was transferred to the office, my helper was a young 17-year-old German boy who just admired Hitler. He said, oh, yeah, we have already most of Europe. England and America will be next, and nobody can stop us anymore.

And so he said, well, there are some-- I mentioned, there are some neutral countries. What about Switzerland? He said, ha, 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 if he-- all I have to do is make him suspicious. So that was the end of me talking to him. But things in the lager where we lived were not going too well.

DAN OLSON: The barracks for the women.

SABINA ZIMERING: Right. The barracks for the women, one big open hall with the bunk beds. I was on top or my sister was on top.

But anyway, the transports kept coming all the time. There was still a 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. I mean, the people that we worked 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 it. The looks were good. Their 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 told 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-- ooh, 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 ran 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 it 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. What are we going? How are we getting away not to get caught out of open a lager?

So we decided-- we worked in the 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 we were waiting for them to open the platform. And all of a sudden, three or four German policeman rush in, lock all the doors, stopped everybody, and said, [GERMAN], ID. everybody had to show the [GERMAN], even the Germans. So everybody was pulling out that.

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: The 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 them on 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 sister's 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. He was-- the eyes, darting eyes, and he was not very tall, but talked fast, and so on. Well, anyway, I gave him the story again. And he said, stop lying. He went up and he hit me, a very strong hit in my face. I remember my head shook, and my pain was just spreading into my jaw. And my-- and, um, tell the truth. And it looked like he was ready to hit me again.

And somebody at the door walked in. Two of the 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 pulled 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 that other man was much milder. And again, he was too busy with other things. And he sent us back to the employment office.

[LAUGHTER]

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 I would just practically rub shoulders with them. And they greeted me. They would heil Hitler, or [SPEAKING GERMAN]. fraulein.

So a couple of things-- one was very interesting, to live and work among Germans for the two, three-- what was it? From the 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 some-- there were-- a lot of women were unwed mothers, and their grandchildren were with-- I mean, their children with the grandparents. And they lived and worked in the hotel.

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

SABINA ZIMERING: The hotel began-- 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. Young, 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 hear the Americanos.

So we ran upstairs. And they were just like what I saw in Poland in '39-- a 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 kaput. American soldiers, young American boys-- Hitler kaput. [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 tried to hide my tears.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

DAN OLSON: With their own quick thinking and courage, with the help of friends and the compassion of strangers, Sabina Zimering and her sister 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.

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GARY EICHTEN: Minnesota Public Radio's Dan Olson in a 2002 interview with retired Saint Louis Park physician Sabina Zimering.

To conclude this hour of Midday, we're going to hear the story of another Holocaust survivor who ended up in Minnesota, Lucy Smith. Lucy was a child when the Nazis started rounding up Jews in Poland. Her father obtained false documents for Lucy and her mother, but he and most of the other members of the Smith family were killed by the Nazis. In this 1997 "Voices of Minnesota" conversation, Lucy Smith told Dan Olson how she and her mother hid during the entire war.

LUCY SMITH: Oh, just relatives were taken one by one and shot, or taken to a concentration camp. And so, eventually, we were just two of us left.

DAN OLSON: You knew this was happening. The relatives were being taken. They had documents?

LUCY SMITH: No. No, they did not. We didn't not-- we didn't have documents at the time either. So we were taken into the ghetto. And we lived in the ghetto.

DAN OLSON: This was a separate part of the city.

LUCY SMITH: It was like a neighborhood that was surrounded by fences or walls. So essentially, the neighborhood became a prison, from which we could not get out. And then from time to time, there were actions, which meant intensified energy with which Nazis were taking people, rounded them, and sending them to a concentration camp, or killing them right there. And people were just in panic.

They believed in all kind of documents that the Nazi were giving, if they work here or there, and that they would be safer somewhat longer. And my mother never believed in it. We were hiding.

DAN OLSON: You didn't have enough food, I assume, or the food was of poor quality. Was there running water?

LUCY SMITH: Yes. We had one faucet in the kitchen. And sometimes there were fights around that faucet.

DAN OLSON: But you lived in abject terror, because I gather the Nazis were coming totally unannounced. As you say, you were living in what amounted to a prison. And they were just taking people away.

LUCY SMITH: Right. But it was not all the time. It was a special week or two, or 10 days, or a period of time during which was that intensified action when they were going with dogs, and getting into apartments. But we were usually hiding at that time.

DAN OLSON: Describe the hiding. What do you mean by hiding?

LUCY SMITH: Well, we were hiding even before we went to the ghetto. And the first time was really a Nazi who was an administrator assigned by Nazis for a business that used to be my grandfather's. And my grandfather was dead by that time. But the business still existed. And my uncle would have been the owner of the business. But he ran away towards Russia. And he was taken into Russia.

But even if he wasn't, all Jewish businesses were taken. And Jews had no right to own their businesses anymore. So they assigned all kind of administrators for those businesses. Ours happened to be Ukrainian men. And I would like to tell his name, because he was such a decent person. It was Eugene Sarap.

And when the first action came, and we didn't even know about it, he rushed very early into our apartment and told us to hide in the attic. And he stayed in our apartment to prevent anyone to come to the attic. He was just a decent person.

DAN OLSON: He knew this was happening.

LUCY SMITH: Yes.

DAN OLSON: He came to you and said, hide.

LUCY SMITH: Hide, right. There were several more times where he was helping us that way.

DAN OLSON: And so what would you do? You would run to the attic?

LUCY SMITH: We ran to the attic. We stayed three days and three nights in this attic. And he was staying in our apartment, because whoever would go to the attic would have to pass by the door of the apartment.

DAN OLSON: And he would lie. He would say--

LUCY SMITH: He would lie. He would lie, yes. When I'm going to school, I used that often, too, and ask people, what do you think? What is more moral, lying or not lying? And because we have such a one-sided mind, and we don't look at our ethics from the point of view, what is really right and wrong?

DAN OLSON: Why do you think he did this?

LUCY SMITH: I believe he was born decent. Can't have other explanation, because he had nothing out of it.

DAN OLSON: Did you get to know him? Did the family get to know him at all?

LUCY SMITH: Yes, we trust him. And later on, one of my two uncles, who were both shot by Gestapo, had a store, which was kind of like a cosmetic part of a drugstore. Since whole family was already taken away, my mother got keys to this store, and we were hiding there.

Now, in order to hide there-- that was still before ghetto was started-- we had to trust this man to lock us in, because he came, and he locked us in. So from outside, it would look locked. And we had to trust for him to come back when it was safe and open the door. He was also leaving a note for us by the window so we could take some information, and brought us some tea. There was no water there whatsoever.

DAN OLSON: You would hide for days at a time.

LUCY SMITH: Yeah, like a week or two.

DAN OLSON: And what kind of provisions did you have for hiding? You had the clothes you were wearing. What kind of food? What kind of water did you have?

LUCY SMITH: Some bread, usually.

DAN OLSON: And all around you, what was going on all around you as you were hiding?

LUCY SMITH: We could hear only-- that was later on when we were hiding in the ghetto, in the cold cellar, so we could hear from that cellar dogs barking, and SS men screaming, shouting. But otherwise, we didn't know anything till we were getting out. And so many people were gone, absent.

DAN OLSON: You had numerous hiding places then, besides the shop, the attic, a coal bin.

LUCY SMITH: Actually, not that many, because we were just going back to the same hiding place, mostly this coal cellar, which had a camouflaged door, because in the same house that was in the ghetto lived an engineer. And he got some place equally dusty old bricks as the rest of the walls were made of. And since in Poland, the main fuel, even to this day, is coal, everyone that lived in a house had a space for keeping this coal during the winter.

So one of those spaces were transformed into hiding place by this engineer by building a-- camouflaging the door, by building the same space throughout, practically a whole door, except for a small space between floor and that upper part of the bricks that we used to get in on our bellies, kind of snake-like. And the last person was pulling behind a box full of coal to camouflage that space. This was a very good hiding place.

DAN OLSON: This was a very elaborate and very ingenious hiding place.

LUCY SMITH: Right. However, the man who did it never succeeded to get into it. He was on his way when he was caught.

DAN OLSON: You were by now eight years old. And you had a clear understanding, I assume, of what was going on, that this was a life and death situation.

LUCY SMITH: Oh, absolutely, because, for example, children normally play. For a while, at the very beginning of the life in the ghetto, I played with the few remaining children on the ruins of a synagogue that was right next to the house where we lived. The synagogue was basically new, and the population-- the Jewish population was very proud of it, because they just built it before the war. But the Nazi dynamited it.

So there were just ruins. And we played on this ruins. Ruins are always very attractive to children. But we were not allowed to do it too long because Nazis were shooting children when they-- kind of like rabbits on site. So it was very dangerous to play outside.

DAN OLSON: You mean just sniping away, shooting at-- shooting and killing children.

LUCY SMITH: Shooting and killing children, and old people were the first to be disposed of.

DAN OLSON: You had been living in the ghetto now, as you relate this story, for months.

LUCY SMITH: It was almost two years. And then my father got those papers and managed to send us those papers to the ghetto. One day my mother was called to the gate, and there was a man who gave her those papers.

DAN OLSON: The papers creating your new identity and your mother's new identity.

LUCY SMITH: And my mother got the papers. I also had a lot of lice. There was delicing house-- delousing house, and that was part way in the ghetto and part way on the other side of the fence. It was kind of a house on the border, on both sides of the fence.

And so we went there, saying that we needed to get deloused. And there were some people that were waiting for us on other side and arranged that the door was open. So we just crossed the house and ran.

DAN OLSON: And that--

LUCY SMITH: It was the evening, towards the evening. So they took us to the train station. And we went to Warsaw with them. We needed to get documents of registration, something that you still need to get in Poland. When you arrive any place and stay for a while, even not long, you had to register in the police station. And you get this piece of paper that you did register. So we needed a false one saying that we registered much earlier than we really did, so we will be kind of longstanding inhabitants of Warsaw.

And we were waiting for this group of people to arrange this document. And as soon as my mother got it, she decided to slip away. And so they would not know where we went, because she was afraid of them. I don't know if it was rightfully or not. And she went out, and she simply rented a room based upon some advertisement on the wall, or sidewalk, or whatever. So we lived there for maybe a year or so.

DAN OLSON: How was it that you came to be blackmailed?

LUCY SMITH: Because there were people who felt that that was a great way of making money.

DAN OLSON: They suspected they knew you were Jews.

LUCY SMITH: If they suspected someone, regardless if it was or not, they would follow us on the streets. They would come to our place and ask to see our documents, and examine us, and all that.

DAN OLSON: Who are these kids?

LUCY SMITH: Oh, they were people. They were not kids. They were men, mostly, men that wanted to have something for drink, or whatever. So with the little money we had, my mother usually gave them something, and tried to get rid of them. And she had a very good way with people, even with Gestapo.

A long time before we went to ghetto, we had a visit of two Gestapo men. And it was the same two who shot my two uncles on the street. So I was petrified. And I was in a room. My mother was in the kitchen. I was with one. The other was with my mother.

So here again, I was not witnessing it. She told me later that he put a gun to her head and told her, where are your valuables? Tell me where are your valuables? Because you will die. And she said, "We will all die. You will die, too. And you will regret your life in the moment of your death as much as I will regret mine."

And somehow she reached him, because he put away this gun, and they left without harming us. So she used the same methods to whistle those blackmailers. And somehow, she managed to reach them.

DAN OLSON: In all of this, what emerges is the story of your mother. She must have been a remarkably brave and resourceful woman.

LUCY SMITH: She was very nervous, as they called. She was emotionally not always quite right. Before the war, relatives didn't keep her in very high esteem. So she was kind of subdued.

And then came war, and her ability, it was really her time. It was very strange, but she was quite special during the war. And all these relatives that didn't consider her so capable, they didn't manage it. She did.

So she was very, very inventive and imaginative. She was able to think on her feet, find the right word to say, and really was wonderful. But then the war ended, and here she returned into her poor, helpless person kind of posture.

DAN OLSON: It's an adventure story. It's a story of survival. It's a morality tale. It's an amazing story. You were a child, and yet you must have grown up very, very fast.

LUCY SMITH: I guess I did. Yeah. And matter of fact, when I came back, I was very bored with my peers. So I was mostly staying with grownups, because they were far more interesting.

DAN OLSON: Maybe one of the important lessons from your story is the will to survive. And what other lessons, what other things come out of the story, do you think?

LUCY SMITH: It's that we need to be very careful what we say, that words have great power. Matter of fact, I am going to schools with the story. And it kind of came recently. I changed and developed it, according to what feels right.

But recently, I started to use-- I draw a picture that is usually used in during Halloween of a witch, because it is a crooked nose and chin up, and all the people consider to be ugly.

And then I ask children, what is it? So of course, they say, witch, witch, witch. And I ask them, what do you know about a witch? So they come with all this usual, "She's mean. She rides a broomstick. She can throw a spell on you," and all those things.

And then I proceeded telling them, listen, do you know that once ordinary women like your mothers, your sisters, your aunts, and grandmother, anyone who were accused of all those things, and they were burned for all those things, and haven't been burned for about 200 years. But the story is still with us, and accusations are still with us.

So if we use this type of accusations and finger pointing against each other-- it happens in Washington now-- those things stayed. And it is not done in the name of goodness or morality. It really is evil.

DAN OLSON: When you have gone to schools and have told your story, and your name has appeared in the paper, people have responded to you, including people who spread hate. What has happened?

LUCY SMITH: Well, I was interviewed after I was a guide for an Anne Frank Exhibition. And a couple of days later, I got this envelope that says, American Information Center as the following address. There is no other following address.

So what are those informations? Mostly the things that-- a variety of literature stating that the Holocaust never happened, that it was an invention of Jews, and that there was no concentration camp. I think they were just baking bread there, or something like that. Anne Frank is a hoax, and things like that. So I called a journalist, and she got it, too.

DAN OLSON: The feelings are still out there?

LUCY SMITH: Yeah, the feelings are definitely out there. And we really need to be more courageous. because people are composed of really decent people, really evil people, and the masses of neither, people who are-- well, they don't do any evil deeds, but they are afraid to stand up against someone that does those things.

And I don't know how, but we really need to keep educating, keep talking, and keep encouraging the masses to take stand for something decent, and learn the difference between good and evil, because it is still the same, kind of an old play that is being replayed again, and again, and again through history. And I don't know if there is any hope, but I hope that there is.

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GARY EICHTEN: Holocaust survivor Lucy Smith in a 1997 "Voices of Minnesota" interview with Minnesota Public Radio's Dan Olson. Both Lucy Smith and Sabina Zimering still make their homes here in Minnesota.

Well, that does it for our Midday program today on this Holocaust Remembrance Day. By the way, all of our "Voices of Minnesota" interview programs are archived on our website, minnesotapublicradio.org. It's a rich, rich treasure trove of interviews with famous and not-so-famous people who living around here in the state of Minnesota. Check it out-- "Voices of Minnesota," minnesotapublicradio.org.

That does it for our Midday program today. Gary Eichten here. I'd like to thank you for tuning in. And I hope you can join us tomorrow. Alice Seagren, the State Education Commissioner, will be joining us first hour Midday to talk about some of the big education issues facing the state.

And then tomorrow on the 39th anniversary of Earth Day, we're going to be broadcasting a program, a new documentary, that takes a look at a variety of new technologies that could help combat global warming. That's tomorrow on Earth Day here on Midday. Again, thanks for tuning in today.

SPEAKER 2: Programming is supported by the Minnesota Historical Society's book signing with the Minnesota on the Map author David A. Lanegran Tonight, from 5:00 to 8:00, exhibit and book information at mnhs.org/mnmap.