For decades, Morris Goldner didn’t talk much about his Holocaust experiences. “It was too painful,” says the Rogers Park resident, who grew up in the town of Straszecin, in southwestern Poland. After emigrating to the U.S. in 1947 Goldner settled in Chicago, where he worked in the garment district and helped his wife raise their three daughters. “I was too busy making a living for my family,” he explains. “I didn’t have no time to think about it.”
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Goldner told the interviewer that in the spring of 1941, when he was 15 or 16 (he’s not sure what year he was born, and the records were destroyed in the war), his family was rounded up with other local Jews and taken to the town of Sedziszow. After being separated from his parents and twin sister in the town square, Goldner says, he saw his grandparents machine-gunned to death and infants stuffed into wooden barrels and suffocated. Small for his age, Goldner slipped to the perimeter of the crowd and then, miraculously, walked away. With the help of a neighbor, he survived in a forest for several months before meeting up again with his father, who’d also managed to escape. After subsisting in the woods for nearly a year, they went to the town of Grabiny and approached one of his father’s old schoolmates for help. The man turned them over to the Nazis, then assisted in shooting and bayoneting them.
While doing some fabric-cutting work out of a studio in the Gorton Community Center in Lake Forest in 1996, Goldner struck up an acquaintance with Loraine Stillman, who was making prints in an adjacent work space. Hearing Loraine refer to her husband, Larry, as a writer, Goldner gave her a copy of his videotaped interview.
But Stillman felt certain he’d gotten it right when he showed Goldner his description of the scene in the Sedziszow town square. “I wanted to make sure I wasn’t adding anything that didn’t happen,” he says. “I said, ‘Did I get that pretty close to what was happening?’ He said, ‘Did I really say those words?’
