Marcy Kaptur

Ms. KAPTUR

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Ms. KAPTUR

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, this week Matthew Drake, a soldier who had been serving our Nation in Iraq, was awarded the Purple Heart for grave injuries he sustained on October 15, 2004, in Anwar Province, Iraq. May I please extend to him and to his family warmest congratulations and deepest gratitude on behalf of the people of the United States. Private First Class Drake, a resident of Toledo, Ohio, and graduate of Sylvania North High School, while driving a 6-ton truck became the only survivor of a bombing. Comatose, he had a fractured skull, severe head injuries, multiple back injuries, many broken bones, and damage to his right arm and shoulder. He underwent many surgeries while hospitalized in Germany at both military as well as German private hospitals and more after traveling to Walter Reed Army Hospital here in Washington where he remained in a coma for many weeks. Matthew Drake survived by all accounts miraculously and will undergo rehabilitation for a very long time. He has been courageous in his journey. He said this week that on receiving this Purple Heart he wanted to be able to stand from his wheelchair in order to have it pinned on him. Throughout the months since Matt was wounded, his family has struggled to afford what is necessary to help him to travel to the hospitals on our coasts where people have been trying to help him. For his family to be near him and to help his very long rehabilitation, a fund was established at Sky Bank in Toledo, Ohio, on his behalf. Last week, I attended a spaghetti dinner which was a fundraiser arranged by Matt's family and friends to raise the money, at least part of it, required for this son of our Nation to continue his progress with the support of his family. And before I left, they gave me this T- shirt to remember Matt. And it says on it, ``The Long Road Home, Matthew Drake, Army Special Forces Injured in Iraq. He was there for us. October 15, 2004.'' Matthew Drake was born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1983. He was raised in Sylvania and attended Maplewood Elementary School. He played soccer and was a Boy Scout and a member of Olivet Lutheran Church. While a student at Northview High School, Matthew was a wrestler and excelled in gymnastics. He trained in the martial arts, played guitar, and was an honor roll student. After graduation, he started college at Bowling Green University and worked for the United Parcel Service, but 1 year later he felt duty- bound to serve our country. He left college and enlisted in the United States Army on October 13, 2002. Following training, he was assigned to Special Forces Bravo Company and sent to Iraq on September 7 just having turned 21. Not 6 weeks later he was promoted to specialist and 2 days after that the attack that changed his life forever occurred. Now facing the greatest challenge of his young life, to return from a near mortal head and bodily injuries and trying to regain as much strength as he can, Matthew Drake's dream of becoming a physical therapist have turned to dreams of gaining inches of recovery day by day. He had always planned to work in a profession where he could be of help or service to other people. Yet his commitment to his family, his feeling responsible to protect his younger siblings brought him to a most dangerous place. He felt he had a job to do, and he did it. How many times have we heard that sentiment echoed by the families of the more than 11,000 service members injured in Iraq? Matthew Drake joins the 6,050 of those who were not able to shortly return to duty and whose future in service to America and their God will take another form. Matthew faces struggles of rehabilitation most of us cannot imagine. Even swallowing whole food is still not possible. Matthew's story represents one family's heroic struggle multiplied by more than 11,000 families whose loved ones have been injured and the over 1,550 who have had to lay their loved ones to rest. Our government must assure that we properly care for and fully compensate these young people through their entire recuperation and lifetimes. Why should a family have to have spaghetti dinners in order to have the funds necessary to travel to be with one of these severely injured veterans who have come home? Matthew is a quiet and shy young man who loves to laugh, especially enjoys children and animals, and who joined the Army to make the world safer. He represents the citizenship ideals of hundreds of thousands of service members whose value we should not forget. The explosion that so injured Matt on October 15, 2004, killed all his colleagues but him. His injuries were grave. He was never expected to live. Matthew Drake survived by miracle and support of his family. His mother, Lisa, has never left his bedside since he has returned Stateside, and his father Tom has traveled time and again to be with him. On April 18, 2005, with his mother and father by his side, along with his immediate family and friends, Matthew was awarded the Purple Heart. Matthew had made a promise to his parents that no matter what he would try to stand dressed in his uniform to receive this special honor. He needed help to do that, but he did it. Four Star General Douglas Brown, who presides over the Special Operations Units for all branches of the military, was given the honor of presenting the Purple Heart Award to Specialist Matthew T. Drake. Our hearts swell with Matt and his family, not only because he was awarded such a prestigious and significant medal but because he lived to receive it and understands the meaning of words duty, honor, and country. Congratulations to Matt. We love you. [From the Toledo Blade, Oct. 19, 2004] Sylvania Soldier Survives Suicide Attack; Northview H.S. Grad is in Coma, with Skull Fracture, Injuries to Arm, Shoulder (By Elizabeth A. Shack Blade) A Sylvania soldier was seriously hurt in a car bombing in Iraq on Friday that killed four other people, and his family and friends are anxiously awaiting word on his recovery. Pfc. Matthew T. Drake, who is in an Army Psychological Operations unit based at Fort Bragg, N.C., arrived at Ramstein Air Base in Germany last night on his way to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center. On Friday, Private Drake was driving a truck near the town of Qaim near the Syrian border. Two other psychological operations soldiers, a Marine, and an Iraqi translator were killed in the suicide attack. Private Drake was in a coma when he reached a military hospital and also has injuries to his head, right arm, and shoulder, including a fractured skull. ``It's an unbelievable miracle that he survived,'' his aunt, Linda Marie Domini, said. He has had several surgeries for his head injuries and will have more surgeries when he is in a more stable condition. He will eventually be transferred to Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Private Drake graduated from Sylvania Northview High School in 2001 and attended Bowling Green State University for a year. In October, 2002, he left to join the Army. He wanted to protect his younger siblings, Heather Schuster, a sophomore at Northview, and Michael Schuster, a sixth grader at Arbor Hills Junior High. ``He really felt called to serve,'' his aunt said, ``He wanted to go fight the terrorists over there rather than have them come over here.'' A member of the 9th PsyOp Battalion, Bravo Company, Private Drake left for Iraq on Sept. 7, two days after his 21st birthday, assigned to a three-man psychological operations unit. He drove an armored six-ton truck with a speaker. His aunt said he felt that he had a job to do and he was going to do it, and he promised his mother, Lisa Schuster, that he'd come home. His father is Thomas Drake of Toledo. ``He's coming home a Purple Heart veteran,'' his aunt said, her voice breaking. Private Drake, who was a wrestler his junior and senior years in high school and is a certified personal trainer, was thinking of becoming a physical therapist, Mrs. Domini said. Friends and family described Private Drake, who belongs to Olivet Lutheran Church in Sylvania, as a kind, funny, and generous man. Matt Serror, who has known Private Drake since they played soccer together in elementary school, said he was quiet and shy in high school but always helped people out, whether he was shoveling snow for an elderly neighbor or dropping a dollar in a can by a cash register. ``It's the little things you might not think about,'' Mr. Serror said. ``He's one of those people that doesn't come around every day.'' When his aunt's 150-pound Rottweiler was recovering from surgery, Private Drake carried him outside when needed to go outdoors. In an e-mail to his mother a week before the attack, he wrote that he had befriended a feral dog that ran around the encampment where he lived with two other men in a room the size of a two-car garage. ``We pray that when he does come out of his coma that he's still Matthew,'' Mrs. Domini said. Sky Bank branches are accepting donations to the Matthew T. Drake fund. His aunt said that if he doesn't survive, the money will go to families of other wounded soldiers. But she said their family is one of strong faith, and they believe he's going to make it. ``We certainly ask for people who believe in prayer to pray for his recovery,'' Mrs. Domini said.

Ms. KAPTUR

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, I would like to agree with the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown). The Commerce Department just announced another record trade deficit for our country. As an avalanche of imports comes in here and a whimper of our exports go out, we do not have free trade. We have a free fall in trade. This month the Commerce Department sent out a press release saying this past month had a record-breaking trade deficit. The U.S. trade deficit soared to an all time monthly high of $61 billion negative. The Commerce Department said that, in fact, the February imbalance was up 4.3 percent from the record gap in January of $58.5 billion. It looks like the executive branch's promises are faltering again. When it was proposed, free trade for China was promoted as a boon to America's exporters. But if we look at what is happening here, every single year the trade deficit gets deeper and deeper and deeper. And this year it is going through the bottom of the chart. Once again, month after month, we see our manufacturers taking a hit. America truly is losing its economic prowess and our economic independence. In fact, under President Bush's watch, America has lost another three million manufacturing jobs. One of the hardest hit sectors is textiles. For February, imports of textiles and clothing from China rose by nearly 10 percent. One can honestly ask, Is anything made in America anymore, other than debt? The Bush administration's so-called free trade agenda is on course to bankrupt our economy. For the first 2 months of this year, just the first 2 months, the annualized trade deficit is 3 quarters of a trillion dollars, a full 100 billion more than last year. And we are watching oil prices going up over $50 a barrel, and that is adding to this growing deficit. Combined with our faltering dollar, soaring fuel costs and an expanding Federal deficit, America is anything but independent. We are in hock to foreign countries that hold nearly half of our public debt, and we are paying them hundreds of billions of dollars annually now in interest. The President talks about his risky plans to try to overhaul Social Security by borrowing trillions more dollars. Have they got a printing machine for money over there at the back room of the White House? This is not the American Dream. It is the American Nightmare. Tonight Congress should be taking a stand against this irresponsible fiscal policy. The golden rule of trade should be trade balances, not trade deficits; and we should operate by the golden rule, free trade among free people. We should reject CAFTA and any other trade bills that keep pushing American jobs offshore and pushing the trade deficit further into red ink. We should only support trade that is responsible and creates a level playing field and, at a minimum, trade balances and hopefully trade surpluses like we used to have. Until this President can give us a plan for a healthy economy based on security and economic independence, we should say no thank you. No more NAFTAs, no CAFTAs, no more trade agreements that do not produce a balance and a surplus. In fact, for every agreement that is currently on the books that is in the red, we ought to go back and require renegotiation if it has been in the red for 3 years or more, because it is not operating in America's interest. It might be operating in some global corporation's interest; but we should be worried about the American people and jobs here at home, both in manufacturing and agriculture, in resource and mining, in the real muscle of this country. We should be here to fight for America's future. It is time the President and the entire Congress did the same.

Ms. KAPTUR

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to assume the time of the gentleman from Washington (Mr. McDermott).

Ms. KAPTUR

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time. I want to speak from love and compassion, not just the law, and embrace the strongest pro-family position as we move in this debate. The Schiavo and Schindler families need our prayers to do for Terry what not a single one of us wishes to imagine, to make a decision on the life of a beloved as they traverse the jagged edge of being. Terri's family, all of them, love her. She is not alone. But her being belongs not to us but to God and to them. All of us are mere bystanders, the Speaker, ABC News, Jeb Bush, and every single one of us. Only Terri's family has walked the profound journey of accompaniment with her for the last 15 years, and it has been a long suffering one. Of one thing I am certain. This decision on Terri does not belong in this Congress. In fact, it does not even belong in the courts. It lies with the family, those closest to her, even when that family is divided, bitter, exhausted, and unable to reconcile.

Ms. KAPTUR

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, I rise tonight to honor the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) and their historic achievements. For more than 35 years, FLOC has represented the guest workers who labor in our fields and farms bringing food to our tables. They are striving to achieve the American dream, a good-paying job in a safe workplace and the ability to provide for their families. Something that everyone in America can understand. Under the leadership of FLOC's president, Baldemar Velasquez, the organization has achieved historic gains--including the first labor agreement in U.S. history to cover guest workers. Other significant achievements include increasing workers wages, improving worker housing, and protection against harmful pesticides. FLOC's actions will provide a safer working environment for its members and a better product for the consumer. Today, FLOC will open an office in Monterrey, Mexico, it's first outside the U.S. The office will help oversee the recruitment and transportation of guest workers. All of us have heard the nightmarish stories of coyotes smuggling workers across the border only to have the workers trapped in de-facto indentured servitude or perish in the unsafe crossing. FLOC has worked to bring workers to the U.S. legally, informing them of their rights as guest workers. Without FLOC's assistance, so many workers would fall through the cracks. Today I celebrate FLOC's accomplishments and success. Their legacy is greater than the agreements signed. Their legacy is a workforce that is paid a living wage and laboring in a safe environment. Their legacy is hope.

Ms. KAPTUR

Ms. KAPTUR. Madam Speaker, if Mr. Greenspan had been doing such a good job, the value of the dollar would not be declining every single week. Let me just say that the budget that just passed here is a national disgrace. It only passed by a couple of votes. If two people had changed, we might have gotten a real budget resolution on this floor, just by the narrowest of margins. Last week, the U.S. Commerce Department announced the largest one- month budget deficit in U.S. history. Somebody better pay attention. Mr. Greenspan ought to pay attention. In fact, now we have the second largest trade deficit in history. The ships are lined up outside L.A. harbor as far as you can see out into the Pacific and they go back empty. What is wrong with these accounts? Gas prices, by the way, are up 19 percent. The value of the dollar has declined by more than 33 percent, more than a third against the Euro in the past 3 years, and our economy is sputtering. The demand for oil is just about to increase with summer and vacations on the way. No wonder the stock market fell more than 100 points last week, based on investors' fears about, you guessed it, rising oil prices. The February budget deficit of $114 billion was the first time the deficit for any one month exceeded $100 billion. Every day America goes more in hock to foreign lenders. They are the ones that are propping us up. In fact, if you just look between a year ago, October 2003 and November 2004, you can see who we are in hock to. Japan holds most of the paper, over $714 billion now. Next comes Europe, over $380 billion. China, Hong Kong, but they are going up very fast, $241 billion. We get down here to the oil exporting countries. OPEC, over $141 billion. And every day we owe them more and more interest as America goes into hock to foreign lenders who now own about 40 percent of us. Equally troubling is the record trade deficit in January which increased to $58.3 billion as imports coming into our country continued to swamp exports going out. Even the lower value of the dollar has not helped with exports because the fundamentals are bad. Higher deficits mean more U.S. jobs get shipped to China, to India, to Latin America, jobs everywhere, good jobs. But not here in the United States. U.S. light crude flirted with $55 a barrel, near-record levels of last October and Ohio's gasoline prices at the pump rose 15 cents, up from the last week of February. Currently, Ohioans are paying over $2.10 for their gasoline and the upward trend just keeps on going. What is truly dangerous and tragic about this trend is America's utter dependence on foreign sources of oil. Here we have it. We are supposed to be energy independent in this country. You go back to 1982, every single year America has become more and more dependent on imported petroleum. It means we are strategically vulnerable to disruptions, as over half the petroleum we use is imported. It is time for a new age of American energy independence. But is this Congress or the White House up the street paying any attention? The Wall Street Journal reported last week on corn-based ethanol and whether the visionary farmers who are leading this effort across the Corn Belt would lose their shirts as some of these multinational interests would come in and buy up the meager investments that they had been able to make out of their own back pockets. This is where the Federal Government needs to step in. My Biofuels Energy Independence Act of 2005, H.R. 388, does exactly this by helping these visionary Americans hedge predatory oil companies who lock their product out at every gas pump in this country. They need long-term financing, not a comatose President and Congress. Imagine an America that was energy independent again and where energy independence rose to a national priority and where we put the dollars we are paying for imported fuel into the pockets of producers here at home. The administration is cutting support for advancing biofuels by over $84 million this year alone. I ask people who is locking out a new energy age for America? Who is locking them out at pumps across this country? Who is putting their hand in people's pockets? Freedom for America in the 21st century should mean freedom from dependence on petroleum. America could create thousands and thousands and thousands of new jobs and billions of new dollars back in our own pockets if we but understood what is affecting every single user of petroleum in this country and why we are falling further and further into hock. It is time for an age of American energy independence again. Will Washington hear the message from the countryside?

Ms. KAPTUR

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. I rise in strong support of the Tierney amendment, and frankly think it would be irresponsible not to vote for the Tierney amendment. All the gentleman is asking for is fiscal accountability on over $200 billion that is being spent far beyond these shores. The gentleman is asking for accountability. To not pass the Tierney amendment is to be fiscally irresponsible and to continue to be unaccountable to the taxpayers of this country. Let me remind Members, the amount of money we have now spent in Iraq is over $200 billion. We do more checking on the books of churches around this country than we do on the expenditure of $200 billion. According to a 2003 GAO report, ``Iraq appears to be the first case where the United States Government has used private contractors extensively for protecting persons and property in potentially hostile or hostile situations.'' Indeed, it is estimated there are as many as 20,000 private military personnel in Iraq. What are they all doing? Why are private companies protecting some of the highest level officials we have there rather than our U.S. military? Who is writing those contracts? What about Abu Ghraib? What kind of contract was struck there? What kind of accountability existed? Well, it did not, why not? We ought to be investigating as a Nation. Mr. Chairman, what happens with $200 billion, our people have a right to know. Never have we had a military conflict where so many private contractors are involved. We should be concerned about this and concerned about who is writing these contracts. A recently Congressional Quarterly article indicated, ``Neither the Defense Department nor private industry says it has exact numbers of how many people are on private payrolls under contracts paid by U.S. tax dollars.'' We should do what is right with the money of the American people. There does not appear to be any legal framework in place to handle and deal with the role of nonmilitary personnel in a war zone. Indeed, the liability of contractors who violate the law operating in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay is ambiguous so we have more responsibility to have strong oversight over these dollars that are being expended. I cannot think of a better amendment to pass than this one. Federal procurement data suggests that money allocated to military contractors via Federal procurement has jumped by more than $70 billion in the last 3 fiscal years. Someone here should care. We should do what we would do within our own families and look at every single line in these accounts. There is an awful lot of slippage. In January, the Special Inspector General for the Iraqi reconstruction reported that the Coalition Provisional Authority could not account for over $8.8 billion. Mr. Chairman, I want to commend the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Tierney) for doing what is right, what is fiscally responsible, what provides the accountability that we have responsibility for. I heard another reference on the radio this morning that Iraq is going to be a generational commitment like World War II was. If we are going to spend that kind of money, we ought to make doggone sure that every dollar is properly accounted for. I was pretty upset when I saw big photos of big stacks of money being handed out on the streets over there. I asked one of the top generals the other day if we are paying for the training of the Iraqi National Guard and these troops that are supposed to replace our troops. He said, no, Congresswoman, someone else is paying for that. I am still looking and want to know who is paying for some of these units. I say congratulations to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Tierney), who has an uphill struggle here. But he is doing what is right for America in order to make sure that we are responsible to the taxpayer and accountable for every single dollar being expended. Please support the Tierney amendment.

Ms. KAPTUR

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, here we go again. According to Reuters news agency today, oil prices held just below record highs on Wednesday as fund buying continued to dominate the market even though the United States Government said crude oil stocks had risen to their highest level for 8 months. Looks like the Saudi campaign promised to keep prices low before the election has now come to pass. Now that we are past the inauguration, oil prices are going through the roof. Today, U.S. light crude rose 11 cents to $54.70, within a dollar of record highs hit last October. Oil prices are up, the dollar is down, and our economy is sputtering. And the demand for oil is just about to increase with summer and vacations coming on. The stock market fell by more than 100 points today based on investors' fears about these rising oil prices. The price at the pump has also gone up significantly in the last few weeks if you have not noticed. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, the average price at the pump this week is $1.99, up seven cents from the end of February and a 26-cent increase from 1 year ago. What a down draft on economic growth that is. In fact, the gas price increase is up 15 percent. That is more than five times the rate of inflation. Ohio's gasoline price at the pump today is 11\1/2\ cents up from the last week of February. Currently, Ohioans are paying over $2.05 for their gasoline and the upward trend is not going to stop there. We in the Midwest are facing the highest increases in gasoline prices in the last year, with an increase of over 32 cents a gallon. That is over four cents higher than any other region of the country. Residents in Cleveland are paying today more than $2.07 a gallon, an increase of over 12 cents from the last week of February and over 33 cents per gallon from a year ago. What is truly dangerous and tragic about this trend is our continued dependence on imported sources of oil. It means that our Nation is strategically vulnerable to disruptions in those with over half of the petroleum we use imported. That is why, when I asked Secretary Donald Rumsfeld this week when he was before our defense committee what he was doing as the Secretary of the largest Cabinet agency in the government of the United States to help lead America to a new energy era, I was very surprised to hear his answer, which I quote from the record: The Department of Defense has no authority to do anything about oil. Needless to say, we don't get funds appropriated by this committee for doing things that relate to reducing our Nation's dependency on oil. I was shocked at his answer since we were considering the supplemental appropriation bill this week for the Defense Department, and just in the supplemental, there is over $1.411 billion related to unforeseen fuel price increases, for fuel delivery costs. For instance, the Defense Logistics Agency is going to pay $742,300,000 more just in the supplemental; the Marine Corps, $311,380,000; and the list goes on and on. Indeed, the Institute of Local Self-Reliance, in a report done just a few years ago, says that in any fiscal year, our government spends over $100 billion just allowing oil to flow into this country. We are not inventing any new energy sources. We are just becoming more dependent every day. Imagine an America that was energy independent again and where energy independence rose to be a real national priority. Biofuels that our farmers can grow could displace a huge amount of imported petroleum in the short term. Not 10 years from now, but within 3 years, we could displace 25 percent of what we currently burn in our tanks with ethanol-based fuel and biodiesel-based fuel and other derivatives. Yet the Bush administration, is it trying to move America in a more independent direction? No. They are cutting their support for biofuels, the minimal amount of research and development dollars in the Department of Agriculture, by over $100 million this year alone. Grain- based ethanol and grain-based biodiesel truly can help America wheel her way to a new energy future. The American people need a new Declaration of Independence. We need to cut the umbilical cord to Saudi Arabia and the Middle East and every other undemocratic regime around this earth to which we are attached because of our oil dependence. There is no better time than now to begin. I just wish someone in the Bush administration was paying attention to the gouging going on at the pumps across this country and the fact that Americans cannot buy biodiesel and ethanol even when they want it and when Detroit is manufacturing cars that can use it. Ask yourself, who has got a lockout at the pumps across this country? Freedom for America in the 21st century should mean freedom from dependence on imported petroleum.

Ms. KAPTUR

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to claim the time of the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Millender-McDonald).

Ms. KAPTUR

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, I am honored to recognize an historic anniversary in my district in Northern Ohio. St. Vincent Mercy Medical Center celebrates 150 years of service. On Wednesday, February 23, 2005, the hospital will mark this sesquicentennial with a dedication and blessing of its Historic Donor Wall and Marguerite d'Youville Sanctuary. In 1737 Marguerite d'Youville and three friends dedicated their lives to serving the poor. They established a Hospital General, a hostel for the destitute. Because the hospital only admitted men at first, Marguerite took poor women into her home. In 1747, Marguerite and her companions took over the administration of the Hospital General, restored the buildings and provided a combination veteran's hospital, nursing home, orphanage, mental asylum, VD clinic, reformatory for prostitutes, and overflow ward in case of epidemics. The religious order Marguerite thus established was the Grey Nuns. Their successors continue her work. In 1855 four courageous and idealistic Grey Nuns took their lead from their foundress and traveled from Montreal with a mission to care for the sick and needy in Toledo, Ohio. St. Vincent's hospital was summarily established. The nuns' mission was soon broadened to include the education of health care professionals, patients and families. One hundred and fifty years later, St. Vincent Mercy Medical Center still holds fast to the ideals of Sr. Marguerite d'Youville in its unwavering mission to provide dignified and quality medical care to those in need. Today, St. Vincent's is a member of the Mercy Health Partners system, a faith-based consortium of six hospitals in Northwest Ohio and Southeast Michigan. St. Vincent's is a Level I certified trauma center, Life Flight air ambulance base, home of the Mercy Children's Hospital and state of the art acute care hospital. With 3,500 employees including almost 1,000 physicians on staff, it is one of our region's primary employers. Nearly 500 volunteers augment the staff. St. Vincent's has not only taken its hospital mission to heart, but also its role as a community leader. The hospital has transformed the near-downtown corridor on which it is located and maintains an influential and benevolent partnership with the neighborhood in which it is situated. St. Vincent Mercy Medical Center celebrates 150 years caring for the poor and sick by living Christ's teaching that ``Whatever you do to the least among you, that you do unto Me,'' as the recent photo of Sister Lucius in the hospital atrium, and the scholarship foundation in her name, attest. Onward!

Ms. KAPTUR

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, on March 1st, the Peace Corps celebrated its 44th anniversary. It is especially fitting in these troubled times that we recognize the quiet dedication of the men and women of the Peace Corps. Since the inception of the Peace Corps in 1961, more than 178,000 Peace Corps volunteers have served in 138 countries, promoting the Peace Corps' mission of world peace and friendship. Today, the program remains phenomenally successful. The Peace Corps has 7,700 volunteers currently in the field, the highest number in 29 years; 5 of those hard working volunteers hail from our 9th District of Ohio. The Peace Corps is a cross section of our population; recent college graduates work next to retired citizens. Individuals of all races and ethnicities devote their time and dedication, giving of themselves to help people who are less fortunate. The Peace Corps operates in 72 countries. Just recently Peace Corps volunteers volunteered in Mexico for the first time, and another 20 countries have expressed interest in working with the Peace Corps. Peace Corps volunteers serve as teachers, business advisors, information technology consultants, health and HIV/AIDS educators and youth and agriculture workers. These volunteers serve as ambassadors to the world, promoting international understanding. During National Peace Corps Week we honor all the volunteers past and present who have brought help and hope to people in need. Peace Corps volunteers serve from Belize to Ghana, Armenia, Mongolia, East Timor and beyond. We honor their service and compassion. I especially would like to thank the volunteers from the 9th District: Gwenna Corvez, Michael Heydt, Lenore Johnsen, Bethany Tebbe and Sarah Wilson, who are serving in Uzbekistan, Dominican Republic, Ukraine, Togo, and Moldova. You bring honor to all of us.

Ms. KAPTUR

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, here is the trade record. The United States is moving deeper and deeper into red ink with every major country with which we have a trade agreement. In fact, when we sign the trade agreements, the deficits get worse. Last year, it rung in at well over $600 billion, nearly two-thirds of $1 trillion, money that flows out of this country someplace else. I rise tonight to join my colleagues in opposition to the newest idea that is being proposed, CAFTA, the Central American Free Trade Agreement. There is nothing free about free trade. We are united in support of worker rights, the environment, family farmers and working men and women. This is not about us in our country versus people in other countries. It is about supporters of fair trade, teaming up for trade agreements that raise standards of living for everyone, and put people and communities before multinational corporations that pit one Nation against another. Free trade can only exist among free people. Where that does not exist, trade then equals exploitation of people and communities. During the 10th anniversary of NAFTA, I led a delegation to Mexico last year to examine NAFTA's trade, economic and social record applications. Unfortunately, NAFTA's story does not have a happy ending. In Mexico, real wages have declined, not increased, as promised. Millions of farmers and rural dwellers have been kicked off their land, fueling an exodus north to the Maquiladora zones that the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Solis) so aptly described. Here, at home, factory after factory continues to shut its doors to the cheap labor of the Maquiladoras, and U.S. workers have been handed pink slips by the thousands, by the hundreds of thousands and the border ecosystem has taken a major hit. Thousands were told we would have trade surpluses with all of these countries. Well, there is another false one. Here is Mexico. Ever since NAFTA's signing, we have moved into deeper and deeper trade deficit with the Nation of Mexico, now nearly $50 billion a year, and the same is true with Canada. How can the Bush administration propose to expand NAFTA to five more countries? I know his father did this for NAFTA, but should we not have learned something by now? I am not sure the President is willing to learn from past mistakes. If something does not work, are we not supposed to fix it? Should we not be fixing this? The same is true with China. Another agreement was signed with the Nation of China. Have we moved into trade balance with China? Absolutely not. In fact, we have the largest trade deficit in history with China today, now totaling over $170 billion, and the red ink just gets deeper. With all of its faults, NAFTA's negotiations took 7 years. CAFTA's negotiations took barely one year. One year? Do we really want to base major policy trade decisions on such a rushed process? Do my colleagues know why it only took 1 year? Because Congress and fair trade organizations were shut out. It did not even get a chance to testify. President Bush expects to bring this to the floor for a simple up or down vote under fast track. Is that really the way to develop international trade policy? Besides, what is the rush? The combined GDP of Central America is equal to one-half of one percent of the United States. What Central America does have is idle hands, not consumers with dollars ready to spend. We should take the time needed to address serious concerns in labor, so those folks can actually earn a decent living, agriculture and their right to eke out a decent living, investment rights and many more topics as we did with the Jordanian trade agreement. Let the public then get a good look at it here in this Congress and decide do we want more NAFTAs. The labor provisions of CAFTA are shameful. The only requirement is to enforce laws already on the books, and let me ask, what labor rights exist in El Salvador? They are nonexistent. Would people rather work in the United States or in El Salvador? CAFTA is another example of a rush to the bottom. Just like the fight over China trade, we are being promised great markets for our goods. They obviously have not happened in China. Two- thirds of Central America's poor live in desperately poor rural regions. They are not going to be rushing out to buy Microsoft Office systems. Let us be realistic. I support trade with Central America, but free trade ought to occur among free people, and America ought to stand for internationally recognized labor rights, the right to own and farm your land, the right to a clean environment and the right to economic security.

Ms. KAPTUR

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, Social Security, our Nation's largest retirement insurance program, is supposed to be one leg of a three- legged stool of retirement security for all Americans. The other two legs are private savings, private savings like certificates of deposit, for example, and private pensions like IRAs and 401(k)s, or defined benefit and contribution plans. However, in an age when personal savings are virtually nonexistent, and company pensions are being scaled back or often stripped away, Social Security has become the basic retirement insurance plan for most Americans, and surely for women. That is one reason why we have to protect it from those who would harm it. Unfortunately, President Bush wants to dismantle the one guaranteed element of retirement income that Americans have, by privatizing Social Security, by making retirement security a gamble. In fact, he is borrowing down the Social Security trust fund to mask huge shortfalls in other places in his budget. So he is creating the real problem in the Social Security trust fund, because it will not be able to meet future obligations. I ask, how can the President defend his plan in the face of the statistics regarding the diminishment of personal savings by most Americans and numerous recent news reports regarding the collapse of pension plans? Over the past 3\1/2\ decades, personal savings, as a percentage of disposable income, has trended downward in our country. During the 1970s, the average rate of savings was about 10 percent. Then it kept going down, downward to the last first three quarters of last year; it was less than 1 percent per family. Meanwhile, consumer credit card debt is going through the roof and has up-trended from an average of $41.8 billion in 1955 to $2 trillion in November of 2003. Even as the savings rate has plummeted, pension plans too are becoming less reliable. In Southern California, Abbott Labs recently spun off a division and cut the retirement benefits for employees of the so-called new company. Shortly after the spin-off, employees were told that Hospira would be freezing their accrual of pension benefits and eliminating retiree health care for many of them. Several of those employees are now suing the companies in an attempt to get back their promised benefits, accusing the companies of plotting the spin-off specifically to deprive the oldest workers of their benefits. In my own district, Owens-Illinois, one of the world's leading producers of glass and plastics packaging, recently announced that it would be cutting prescription drug coverage for its retirees in favor of forcing the retirees to participate in the Medicare prescription drug plan. The company will cover the $35 premium for this plan, but will not guarantee that the dollar amount will increase should the plan premium change. Another local company, Doehler-Jarvis, was a manufacturer of aluminum die cast automotive parts that had two plants in Toledo. The company went through many takeovers such as Harvard Industries, which then filed for reorganizational bankruptcy. At that time, the company canceled retirees' health benefits, but did not tell them. They just stopped paying claims over the weekend. Finally, they filed liquidation bankruptcy and were unable to continue paying pension benefits, so the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, the Federal insurer of the Nation's private defined benefit pension plans, had to step in. While this helped the situation somewhat, it was by no means perfect. Only actual retirees get benefits under the PBGC, not their survivors; and those who chose early retirement options previously offered by the company were unable to collect benefits at all until their regular retirement ages under the reorganization. In addition, given the flood of recent companies that have experienced pension problems or breakdowns, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation is no longer failsafe as it once was. In fact, the General Accounting Office recently placed it on the watch list of high- risk Federal agencies for the second year in a row. In fact, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation went from having an $11 billion surplus in fiscal year 2002 to a record deficit in 2003 of $11 billion and a $23 billion deficit in 2004. Unfortunately, the President's fiscal year 2006 Federal budget will only put more pressure on already-struggling pension plans under the PBGC. Buried under the fine print of his budget is a multi-billion dollar premium hike for the Nation's underfunded defined pension plans. The weakest pension plans will be forced to pay almost $2 billion in new premiums next year and $3.3 billion for fiscal year 2007. The premium hike is in addition to billions more in make-up payments that companies with weaker pension plans must pay to become adequately funded. Yet through all of these turbulent times with private pension plans, retirees have known that they had one guaranteed source of income that they earned as insurance against old age, one monthly check that would be coming into them called Social Security. We must continue to ensure that the fundamental security of Social Security remains in this vital and successful program. There should be no gamble with the Social Security guarantee, no roulette of our retirement earned benefits. Let us keep security in Social Security. Our people have earned it.

Ms. KAPTUR

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to reclaim my 5 minutes.

Ms. KAPTUR

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from California for yielding me time, and rise with my colleagues to support this resolution recognizing the life of Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. We condemn in the strongest possible terms the terrorist bombing attack that occurred February 14, 2005, in Beirut, which took his life, killed so many others and wounded dozens and dozens of people. Let me just say that Prime Minister Hariri, when he first took office in the early 1990s himself pledged to lead his country in what he called a quantum leap forward to resurrect it from the civil war that it had endured, a tragedy of over a decade. He said ``I want to go down in the history books as the man who resurrected Beirut.'' And as a Member of this Congress who traveled to see part of that resurrection in Solidaire and the rebuilding of that war-torn country, it goes to show how one person's vision can literally transform a corner of the world. When I think about our conversations with him, I would have to say he was a man who was very measured. He was someone who actually did not have to be doing what he was doing in the political realm because he was so financially wealthy. He did not need any of this. He did not have to give his life for the country he so deeply loved. He founded the Hariri Foundation. Through that foundation he helped to support so many young people for their education, for their future, for health care, indeed all of the charitable works for which the Hariri Foundation has been responsible to pull the people of Lebanon forward. The son of a grocer, someone with humble roots, he had an incredible career as a construction magnate in the Middle East. Really his power in the current Parliament in Lebanon was sufficient that he could have blocked actions by other leaders in that country, but he chose not to do so. He believed very much in peaceful evolution. He was the architect really of the rebirth of modern Lebanon. I feel so sorry that this has happened, because truly he is someone who would not want to incite more violence in that very troubled part of our world. I understand that the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. LaHood) was down here a little bit earlier talking about the letter we signed to the Bush administration. It urges that in order to help to try to keep the calm in that region, to use our commodity programs through the U.S. Department of Agriculture more effectively, especially at this time, throughout that region, in order to turn food into development assistance. We should aim to keep the calm in a very tender and difficult moment in history. I truly extend deepest sympathy and condolences to the family and to all the victims of this terrorist attack. I shall miss his counsel and his measured strength, as he came here to advise not just about Lebanon, but about many topics of concern to fair-minded people of the world. I would hope that the world community would not be too quick to judge who is responsible for this murder. In fact there should be teams set up to actually investigate and to try to ascertain who might have been involved. Let us not be too quick to point fingers at who might have done this, because in fact Mr. Hariri himself would never have done that. He would have gotten to the bottom of any situation. Again, I thank the gentleman for rising in support of this very important resolution to honor the life of former Prime Minister of Lebanon, Mr. Rafik Hariri.

Ms. KAPTUR

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, last week the President sent his 2006 budget request to Congress. Just yesterday, he added to that request for supplemental funds for fiscal year 2005. His own estimate shows staggering budget deficits to be handed down to the next generation, and to many future generations. In fact, this administration is setting new world records all over the place. Not only record budget deficits but also, importantly, record trade deficits. In fact, they have now created a two-headed monster. This administration is exporting its bankrupt economic policies around the world through failed trade policies. Just look at the numbers. Never has America had trade deficits over one-half trillion dollars. Last year, $617 billion, every year going deeper and deeper, sinking deeper into trade deficit with our trade competitors around the world. This is not an issue for Republicans and Democrats. This is going to hit everybody's wallets, from Wall Street to Main Street. The trade deficit for calendar year 2004 smashed every record on the books. That is right. Over one-half trillion dollars. Now, who are these deficits with? Let us start with China. If you go out to San Diego and Los Angeles harbor, you can see ships coming in from Asia as far as the eye can see. Every single year of this Presidency, we have seen the red ink from China get deeper and deeper. In fact, last year we were in debt to them, just for last year, over $162 billion. That was up almost a third from the prior year. The manufacturing portion of our overall deficit worsened to $465.8 billion, 16 percent more than the record set the prior year. With every billion dollars, 20,000 more jobs in this country vanish. The deficit in advanced technology products, which was supposed to save us, worsened to $37 billion in 2004, fully 38 percent worse than the record the year before. One can look in every sector with almost every major trading nation and America is deep in red ink. One other dubious record. People talk about NAFTA. Here are the figures for Canada for 2003, the highest level on record, over $67 billion. And with Mexico under NAFTA, the budget last year was close to $50 billion, nearly a $110.8 billion deficit in trade with those two countries under NAFTA in 2004. The net result of all of this is the weakening of our dollar. Even Bloomberg says the steady decline in the dollar is likely to resume again. Secretary Snow says the administration believes in a strong dollar, but what is happening does not match his rhetoric. Meanwhile, prices go up for our consumers in everything, including petroleum, which is the basis for gasoline, and prices have been going up there. Make no mistake, America ends up owing somebody else. But, in fact, it is our children and grandchildren that end up becoming less independent as a nation because of these deficits as we see one industry after another decline. The President's trade deficits and budget deficits are setting these all-time records. I ask myself, in the major sector of deficit, which is oil, when is America going to wake up? When are we going to have real leadership here in Washington for new sources of energy so that these numbers stop heading in a downward direction? Dependence is not what America's founders had in mind. They did not envision an America in hock to the world. We want an America that is strong and independent, not saddled with debt and beholden to foreign banks. It is time to tell our President to stop; stop letting our trade partners walk all over us; stop negotiating trade deals like CAFTA that hurt our workers and give workers in other places no chance to improve their lot when there are no labor standards and environmental standards that are enforceable; stop trading away America's economic future. America needs a positive economic future that will help create good jobs, new wealth and new opportunity, not the Bush administration's bankrupt trade and fiscal policies that send our jobs overseas, our wealth to banks in Beijing and Saudi Arabia, to whom we now owe interest, and the bill for all this nonsense to our children and grandchildren.

Ms. KAPTUR

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to take the time of the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. DeFazio).

Ms. KAPTUR

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to take the Special Order time of the gentleman from California (Mr. Schiff).

Ms. KAPTUR

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, Social Security should remain a guarantee of one's earnings, not a gamble, and surely not a gamble by well-connected investors who might have some political connections. President Bush and his Republican Party are proposing radical and reckless changes to Social Security. Nothing they have attempted to date, even shifting major portions of the tax burden to the middle class from the most wealthy in our country, are as brazen and audacious as this misguided plan to undermine our Nation's most successful insurance program for retirement and disability, affecting millions and millions of our people who have earned these benefits. Social Security is security for the majority of the American people. Social Security represents the best, the best, in the American Union. Like the preamble says, ``We the people,'' not I alone withdrawing from the Union. The Democratic Party has long championed we, the people, surely, to collect those earnings that people need in their retirement years, and one out of six families need in the event of unexpected disability. The system does not work if we make it every man and woman for himself or herself, something the President and his party, unfortunately, now are advocating. It is our patriotic duty as Democrats to oppose this privatization scheme. The President claims that the country will save money because of privatization. Again, I say he needs a better set of accountants in the White House. What he does not mention is that his plan requires trillions of dollars of borrowing, and I might say, from foreign countries now, because we are not saving as a society, leading to higher taxes in the future and interest that we pay them, not ourselves. Yes, he is borrowing for a savings plan. What kind of sense does that make? Well, you would really think maybe he never had to think too hard about handling his own finances by the cavalier manner in which he is trying to affect the earnings of the vast majority of the American people. Borrowing $2 trillion to finance so-called private accounts will further increase America's escalating debt. President Bush has already increased the national debt to the point that the currency's value is dropping internationally, and a family of four's share of that debt has increased by thousands of dollars. In addition, his plan actually cuts benefits in the future, and really those earnings should be the source of any true savings for the Social Security program. This is because he creates an offset, almost like a new downward notch in Social Security, that would cut guaranteed Social Security benefits over the next 75 years by $3.6 trillion. The cut would apply to all beneficiaries, whether or not they have chosen a private account. And this chart actually shows what happens. The blue represents the benefits that you would get based on your earnings. The red represents what his plan would do. In essence, down the road, every succeeding decade you would actually receive less than in the current Social Security program. These private accounts he is proposing will not even make up for the 46 percent cut in benefits that Republicans have proposed. For example, a 20-year-old who enters the workforce this year, if they can get a good job, would lose $152,000 in Social Security benefits under the Republican plan. A private account is unlikely to make up for this benefit cut because the plan would also take back 80 cents of every dollar in the private account. It is like an offset. It really is not your money. In fact, it appears no one will get back the money that they would put in these private accounts. They would only get back some share of the interest those accounts earn. So you do not get your principal back. We should not sacrifice the retirement and old age and disability security of our families at the altar of short-term political gains. And surely we should honor our father and our mothers. We should value our children, and we should prepare through an insurance program for the unexpected. We must keep Social Security strong so it is there for years to come. Believe me, we need to fight to save a program that truly is sacred. It represents the best values that are in us as a people, and it must continue to be a guarantee and not a gamble. When I first came to Congress during the 1980s, Claude Pepper, a beautiful Member from Florida, stated some of the following words when we refinanced Social Security in the spring of 1983. He said, ``This is the people's program, intended by President Roosevelt and those who were authors of the measures in those early days as some measure of assurance that those who retired would have a decent sustenance upon which to live, that those who died would have a measure of protection to transmit to their widows and their children, that those who became disabled under another phase of the system would have some support.'' We need to rise to that original vision.

Ms. KAPTUR

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, the theme for my remarks tonight is honor thy father and thy mother. The Congressional Budget Office has confirmed, and I might say they are nonpartisan, that the projected budget deficit for this year for our country will be over $368 billion, not even counting the additional $80 billion that will be added to that when bills come before this Congress for additional funding for Iraq and Afghanistan. Though these dollars literally are coming from the Social Security Trust Fund itself, the Congressional Budget Office noted that last year was the largest deficit in the history of our Nation, $412 billion, is the reason that the dollar value of currency is dropping. In fact, if we add up the last 3 years, we have the largest budget deficit in the history of the Republic. When President Bush came into office, there was a $5.6 trillion surplus. In fact, I thought it was rather funny at the time, Alan Greenspan was starting to get worried that we might actually pay our bills. He was a little uncomfortable that maybe the bond market would not be completely happy. What would we do if we paid all our bills? But now we have a $2.6 trillion deficit. That is a reversal of nearly $3 trillion. It is obvious this administration and their allies in the Congress cannot handle the pursestrings of this Nation. The very same people who brought us this fiscal train wreck, which is getting worse, are now proposing radical surgery on Social Security. Nothing President Bush has attempted to date, not even his incessant effort to shift the tax burden off the shoulders of the rich onto the middle class, is as brazen and audacious as his misguided efforts to try to gut Social Security. There is no crisis in Social Security. Repeat, there is no crisis in Social Security. There is only a crisis in the Bush administration's handling of the budget. Why would anyone trust the Bush administration on anything regarding Social Security, seeing that they are a miserable failure in terms of the management of the account of the people of the United States? Social Security is the most successful domestic program in the modern history of our Nation. Approximately 45 million Americans receive their Social Security insurance benefits and disability benefits. Just over 7 million of those are disability recipients. In the State that I am from, Ohio, 1,922,406 individuals receive Social Security insurance benefits and 208,000 disability benefits. We do not know what is going to happen to our families. One out of five families in this country are going to have an unforeseen happening that will require eligibility for disability. There is no private sector policy that will ever offer it. These are insurance and disability benefits. They are not private accounts. They are not 401(k)s. They are not certificates of deposit. This is an insurance and disabilities program. It has always been that. The Congress voted repeatedly not to allow the executive branch to dip into the trust fund, and yet that is exactly what is happening today. The President is trying to whip up a frenzy in the country and say the sky is falling, the sky is falling, trying to scare America's seniors and our young people who are going to get old someday into thinking Social Security is in crisis. Even the head of the AARP has said Social Security is not in crisis, the program will remain solvent, and what we have to do over the next 50 years is just to make sure that the gap financing that is there will cover future beneficiaries. We can do that in several ways. We have done it before. We can do it again. In fact, what is interesting, the Bush administration's four enacted tax cuts being made permanent would cost 2 percent of GDP over the next 75 years, which is three to five times as much as any of Social Security's future financing needs. Under their plan, instead of benefits being tied to prevailing standards of living during the course of a worker's career, the change would freeze Social Security benefits at today's standard of living, which means we would keep regressing backwards, and future generations of retirees would have lower and lower benefits compared to their wages during their working lives. This cut would apply to all beneficiaries whether or not they had chosen to have a private account. It should not be an either/or, private accounts or Social Security. It should be both, and make sure Social Security is solvent. Stop borrowing against it. And fine, let us encourage private savings like we used to in this country up until the last few years. Social Security should be a guarantee, an insurance guarantee and a disability guarantee, as Democrats have not only promised but have delivered from the time of Franklin Roosevelt. Social Security should be a guarantee, not a gamble. Let me end with the words to the Republicans, I can only say if they want to fight on Social Security, bring it on, because this Member intends to honor thy father and thy mother.

Ms. KAPTUR

Ms. KAPTUR. Madam Speaker, I would like to place in the Record the compelling story of Mr. Marian Wojciechowski, now a U.S. citizen, who is an Auschwitz survivor. The book ``Seven Roads to Freedom'', in which his chapter is included, traces the tragic journey of 6 million human beings who perished in Nazi death camps. Mr. Wojciechowski and his wife Wladyslawa survived, by a series of miracles and brave encounters. History must record these noble stories so their vast sacrifice shall be remembered and honored. May the world save itself in the future from this horrific suffering. This story, translated into English, from the original Polish publication deserves our attention and respect on this 60th anniversary commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz. Seven Roads to Freedom (Edited by Miroslawa Zawadzka and Andrzej Zawadzki) The Martyrology of Poles in Hilter's Death Camps (Translated by: Anna Wojciechowski) (A Presentation delivered by Marian Wojciechowski on May 8, 1998 to the Discussion Club at the American Polish Cultural Center in Troy, Michigan, USA). ``Who is victorious shall be free, and who has died is already free.''--words from ``Warszawianka'' 6 million victims of the Holocaust in Poland in the years 1939-1945: 3 million Christian Poles; 3 million Jewish Poles. The historians of future generations will research the archives, evaluate and then write how many additional hundreds of thousands of Polish Christians--on whose orders, where, by whom and under what circumstances--were murdered in the years 1939-1989 by the henchmen of communist authorities. 1. introduction I'm very happy that I came here, because I see that I have already met here many colleagues and friends from past times--now pleasant ones, in America--as well as from the times of our national martyrology: the occupation and the concentration camps. I was in three concentration camps, in Auschwitz, Gross Rosen and Leitmeritz, and here I meet after many years my colleague, Mr. Romanski, who was in the same camps and we knew each other in Gross Rosen and met there together quite frequently; and with the husband of Mrs. Romanska, who is here today--Zbyszek Romanski and I were friends, and we talked for many hours during the time free from labor in the Gross Rosen camp. At the beginning I would like to make clear, that I am describing my wartime and concentration camp experiences not for the purpose of inciting any hatred in anyone, or anger, or a desire for revenge. Absolutely not. For a long time, I was unable either to speak or to write on this subject, because there stood before my eyes all the macabre scenes which one saw then, as well as deaths, which took away many of my friends and acquaintances under horrible camp conditions. I was afraid of these memories; I did not want to talk about them. But time heals wounds, and in the end, we see that it is necessary to touch on this subject, because history repeats itself. History repeats itself especially there, where it is forgotten. We pass it on, to avoid forgetting it and repeating its horrible moments. Some of us (for example, my colleague Romanski) are still in the possession of authentic notes written in the heat of the moment, in the camps, in pencil, already faded today. These historical artifacts should not be allowed to disappear; we have to take care of their conservation. My narration pertains to my own experiences. As those who survived the concentration camps also know very well, in the same camp, and even during the same time period and commando--it was possible to have more luck or less, to encounter better or worse conditions and treatment, to survive or to perish. My reminiscences then cannot be related exactly to the fate of other prisoners. Almighty God helped me in these oppressions, and I survived. I will begin with my youth, which has a connection with the main topic of my story. I come from the region of Sandomierz. Forty some kilometers to the south of Sandomierz, there is a small town called Polaniec, laid out on sandy soil. In the area, there were two or three mills, and at that time there was no factory or work establishment, besides the Ruszcza estate where one could get agricultural work. I remember, that in those difficult times after the First World War, the local small landowners ate bread only on such important feast days like Christmas and Easter, or during the harvest. For everyday meals, there was barszcz and potatoes for breakfast, lunch and supper. Not until somewhat later, around 1937, did construction begin there (for example, the embankments near the Wisla river). which gave people work and better conditions for living. Besides, these people worked very well and the results were very beautiful. Afterwards, industrial centers (COP--Centralny Okreg Przemyslowy) were also built, and the situation was systematically improved. After finishing elementary school in Polaniec, in 1939 I received my high school diploma in Busko-Zdroj (in the beautiful newly constructed building) and went to the Szkola Glowna Handlowa in Warsaw (Warsaw School of Economics). My parents, who were small farmers, did not have the funds to pay for my tuition, clothes, and room and board. That's why, during the four years of high school, my brother and I earned money for our keep by tutoring for money. I would get up at around 5, no later than 6 in the morning, and I would go to bed after 11 in the evening. During the last two years I was a so-called ``Marszalek'' (the chairman of chairmen) of the high school. During my college studies in Warsaw, I was able to get a job as the assistant of the secretary in the Union of Agricultural and Economic Cooperatives (Zwiazek Spoldzielni Rolniczych i Zarobkowo-Gospodarczych), with the benefit of being able to do my work during the day or at night, during the workweek, as well as on Saturdays and Sundays. Even before the beginning of my studies I belonged to the Polish Scouting movement, I participated in military preparation, I was interested in various political directions and social problems, trying to find answers to the question, how we should manage our country, in order to improve the welfare of the people. During my college studies. I had many colleagues with various persuasions. There were many forms of the so-called ``sanacja'' of the former Pilsudski camp, such as Straz Przednia, Legion Mlodych, BBWR, OZON, various shades of the Stronnictwo Narodowe, Polska Partia Socjalistyczna, Stronnictwo Ludowe. There were some who communized (Jerzy Wuensche, Roman Ujma). There were also a few who usually played cards in the restrooms of the library, and some who were not interested in anything beyond their studies. I studied two faculties simultaneously: cooperatives and business education; and of the required foreign languages, German and English. I joined the group of friends of the Stronnictwo Ludowe. In discussions then we searched for the appropriate road to improve the conditions in the country. While still in high school, I read a copy of Kapital by Marx, translated into Polish, which I borrowed from the local Jewish library. By such searching around, I came to the conclusion that in Poland we must work out our own way, and I found--the cooperative movement. Working in the co-op movement, first as the secretary's assistant, and later as an auditor of the agricultural-cooperatives, I made contacts with many people of the Warsaw and Lodz provinces, which helped me very much during WWII in the underground resistance. Immediately after my studies, I performed my military service in the School of Ensizns of the Cavalry (Szkola Podchorazych Kawalerii) in Grudziadz, and after finishing there, I was assigned to the 21st Regiment of the Nadwislanski Lancers (21-szy Pulk Ulanow Nadwislanskich) in Rowne Wolynskie, in the Luck province. During military service in the cavalry military college in Grudziadz, I taught evening courses after service hours about cooperatives for the non-career soldiers in Grudziadl. I organized courses in wheat-product (``zbozowo-towarowe:'' purchase. cleaning, milling, revision, storage, sale as well as basic bookkeeping). The point was that after returning to their homes from the army, they could join in the co-op work in their hometowns. That's a broad view of what my prewar past looked like. 2. THE WAR OF 1939 During the war in 1939 I was with my regiment in the Lodz Army, in the Wolynska Cavalry Brigade, in the region around the locality of Mokra near Czestochowa. History appraises our battles there very positively. During the retreat towards Warsaw, my platoon was in the rear guard that is in shielding formation, Before reaching Warsaw, I received the order to march on Garwolin and further on east for regrouping. But other detachments of my regiment, walking behind us, received an order to remain in the vicinity of Warsaw to defend the capital (I learned about this from the leadership of the regiment after the military actions of 1939 were over). Because Garwolin was already burning, my platoon and I joined in with various detachments of the Army of General Kleeberg--the grouping, of Lieutenant-Colonel Mossor (Czas Ulanow, Bohdan Krolikowski, page 217 and we took part in the successful cavalry charge of Cavalry Captain Burtowy (ibid, page 221) at the same time that Lieutenant-Colonel Mossor surrendered to the Germans with the rest of the grouping in the forest near Osuchowo. The disbanding of our detachment did not take place until the area near Uchnowo or Rawa Ruska at night, when the Germans were attacking us from one side of the forest, and Soviet detachments were attacking from the other side. The order was: bury the weapons and ammunition, give the horses and uniforms to the peasants, change into civilian clothes, march home and await further orders. Over half of the soldiers of my platoon came from Wolyn. The entire detachment was a well-harmonized group, fought bravely, heroically. The losses in human lives were large. My deputy, a Wolynian, Corporal Szkurski was killed in the first week of the war. I filled the losses in this way, by putting always-willing volunteers, stray infantrymen, on the horses left by those who were killed. I named as my deputy one of the leaders of the section, a senior lancer. He fulfilled his function very well. After changing into civilian clothes, groups of people started to form in a loose march towards different directions: to their homes, to nearby relatives and acquaintances. I proposed a march through Hungary or Rumania to the Polish Army in France. Two colleagues joined in: one a second lieutenant of the reserve of a different detachment, who was originally from Warsaw, and one ensign of the career school of cavalry. As I recall, his name was Bratkowski or Bartkowski, having finished his second year. We agreed to go to Stanislawow, stay there with a colleague of Bratkowski's and look for a way to cross the border. After a few hours the Russians detained us, and added us to a group of demobilized soldiers headed for Lwow. After various difficulties we were able to leave the barracks in Lwow and get to the colleague's house in Stanislawow. We were received hospitably, but with fear that the Soviets might find us, because then the whole family was in danger of arrest. After a few days of gathering news, we determined that the Rumanian border was surrounded by the army with dogs, and that crossing the border seemed to be impossible at that time. After about a week, we decided we couldn't place Bratkowski's friend's entire family in danger, we had to return to Warsaw. We reached the new Soviet-German border and there we fell into Germans hands. They packed us into autos and conveyed the entire transport to Radom, where we were unloaded onto an empty field fenced in with barbed wire. During the night, the two of us dug our way out under the barbed wire and fled in the direction of Warsaw. Sometime towards the end of October 1939, we got to the locality of Pyry near Warsaw. The farmer let us sleep in the barn. The next day we were invited in for breakfast, and they told us about the destruction and lack of food in Warsaw. After breakfast my colleague and I parted company. He went in the direction of his home, and I towards my rented room on Narbutta Street. A friend of mine from studies in the Szkola Glowna Handlowa (Warsaw School of Economics), Hieronim Tatar and I rented one room, two other student acquaintances rented the second room, and the lanlords took up the rest of the house. However, it appeared that the landlords had already signed the volksliste, so that after a few days, my colleague Tatar and I moved in with a colleague from school--Andrzejewski, on Mokotowska Street. The two of us took up one room. The rest of the house was occupied by our colleague Andrzejewski, his mother and his elderly grandfather Jakubowski (the mother's father). 3. PROFESSIONAL WORK AND THE UNDERGROUND Immediately the next day after returning to Warsaw, I went to my place of employment, the Zwiazek Spoldzielni Rolniczych i Zarobkowo-Gospodarczych (the Union of Agricultural and Economic Cooperatives) in Warsaw, 11a Warecka Street. The Kasa Spoldzielcza (Cooperative Cashier) occupied the first floor, the second floor was taken up by the Okreg w Warszawie (Warsaw District), the sections Rolniczo-Handlowy, Jajczarsko-Mleczarski (agricultural-commerce and ovo-dairy), as well as the cashiers and Banki Spoldzielcze (Cooperative Banks). The third floor was occupied by the Zarzad Centrali (Central Administration), and the Institytut Spoldzielczy (Cooperative Institute) was on the fourth floor. Many workers ``camped out'' there with their families, because family members were slowly finding each other. During the siege of Warsaw food supplies were exhausted, the prices on the black market were very high, and a large part of the populace was starving. Situations were especially difficult in hospitals, children shelters and so on. Many of my coworkers denied themselves part of what were rightfully their own rationed portions to jointly gather food supplies, for example for the hospitals. The director of the section of agricultural-commerce cooperatives was senior colleague Franciszek Kielan, a very honest individual, unusually generous and universally much respected. He convinced the German commissar on cooperative matters in Warsaw to transport food for the employees from the cooperative in Kutno (the largest cooperative in the Warsaw district). Along with fellow friend Jan Boniuk, we set out for Kutno and brought to Warsaw, to our office, a food-filled ladder wagon harnessed to three horses. Part of the food was designated for hospitals, and the rest was divided according to the number of members in each family, regardless of the employee's position. A majority of the younger co-op employees began to carry food to the hospitals. In this way, I found in the hospital (probably the Ujazdowski Hospital) the leader of my regiment, the 21st Regiment of the Nadwislanski Lancers from the Wolynska Cavalry Brigade Lieutenant-Colonel Kazimierz Rostwosuski, as well as many officers from our regiment and brigade. I have to admit, that from that time on the food situation in the hospital improved very much. After a certain time, we learned that the officers in the hospital were going to be transported somewhere, and that the Germans were already examining the lists of patients. I had the most acquaintances in the municipal offices in the former Sandomierski district. So I set out on a circuit and brought back as many as possible of clean unfilled personal identification documents (identity cards) and municipal seals. I brought all these back to Warsaw and handed them over to the reconnaissance liaison from Sluzba Zwyciestwu Polski (SWP--Service for the Victory of Poland). I already belonged at that time to the underground group ``Raclawice.'' After a few days, the sick officers were released from the hospital and directed to an agreed upon residence location. The new identity cards turned out to be very good--they passed the test. One day, the wife of Lieutenant-Colonel Rostwosuski contacted my office to let me know not to spend the night at home, because her husband was arrested during a street roundup (lapanka) and would be interrogated by the Gestapo that night. Luckily the next day, she advised me that he had already been released on the basis of a previously issued identity card (as I recall, it was issued to an ``agricultural engineer'' from an estate somewhere in Podole). After the end of the September campaign, there began the underground phase of the battle. I was very much engaged in two groups. The first one was the group ``Raclawice'' belonging to the peoples' movement (most from the pre-war ``Siew''). In connection with my work in the co-op movement, I was invited to prepare the statutes and to help with the organizational work of the newly established restaurant in Warsaw, the ``Wymiana,'' on 73 Mokotowska Street. This was only going to be a cover for the ``Raclawice'' group in its underground resistance work. After a few months there occurred a desconspiration (wpadka) of a cell of our group in Lublin (from where we received printing paper for the underground press). Using torture, the Germans forced information about our Warsaw group from the arrested members of that cell, but for now did nothing to us as yet. One day a friend of mine, with the same first and last name besides (we called him Marian Wojciechowski number one, I was number two) came to me and asked if I could help them in the following matter. Apparently there was for sale an entire printing press hidden from the Germans by one of the printer compositors somewhere in a barn in the countryside. But for this printing press, the compositor wanted money--which needed to be organized. I didn't promise anything at first, because I didn't have the money, but I began some efforts in that direction. In Rawa Mazowiecka the director of the agricultural cooperative was my friend, Zygmunt Jedlinski. I went to him, explained the situation and asked for help. Over the time interval of several weeks, Zygmunt sent two ladder wagons loaded with food (all the automobiles were requisitioned by the Germans, and for the Poles they were unattainable). The printing press was purchased for the money received from the sale of this food on the black market. This was one of the first printing presses in service of the Polish underground in Warsaw. The Germans depended very much on the agricultural cooperatives that supplied food for them on location, as well as for the residents of the Reich. Because of this, they wanted to have precise reports and inventories regarding existing cooperatives. The execution of such reports also constituted my work. Traveling around to the cooperatives as an inspector, I had special privileges in buying tickets for busses and trains, of course only in work-related matters. I made the most of these trips to contact other organizations. They were given information, and communiques, meetings and terms were discussed, and so on. Springtime 1941 was the date set for the meeting of the representatives of the organization ``Raclawice.'' This meeting was to take place in the cooperative restaurant in Warsaw in the evening. I was going to that meeting from Nowe Miasto near Pilica, where I was staying with my brother after recent surgery on my appendix. At departure, my brother asked me to take along his wife, who was going to visit her family in Sandomierz and continue further on to Polaniec, and was going to have to change trains in Warsaw. I agreed readily and promised to help my sister-in-law to transfer from one train station to the other. Meanwhile, my sister-in-law suddenly got sick on the train, so that in Warsaw, instead of escorting her to the second train station, I took her to my place on the Aleje Niepodleglosci. I brought over a woman doctor acquaintance of mine, brought medicine from the pharmacy and gave it to my sister-in-law. She already felt significantly better. I announced to her that in the evening I was going to the meeting. My sister-in-law began to cry, she didn't know my landlords, they didn't know her, she was afraid to remain by herself without my care. She finally convinced me with this lamenting so much, that I resigned from attending the evening dinner meeting of the underground organization ``Raclawice'' in the co-op restaurant. I planned to find out about the details the next day by going there for breakfast. At five in the morning I received a phone call from my colleague Wegierski (he was my friend from the cooperative and the ``konspiracja''), who asked me if I was coming for ``breakfast.'' I answered yes, because I wasn't at the ``supper'' yesterday, so I should go for ``breakfast.'' And my friend replied: ``Better don't go there, because last night there was some poisoning with mushrooms.'' In our language, ``mushroom poisoning'' meant deconspiration or betrayal. It turned out that the Gestapo arrived before the hour designated for the meeting in the restaurant, and planted all the halls as well as the stairway with its people, both in uniforms and in civilian clothes. And afterwards, they would admit all incoming guests, but they were not let in. In this way, they arrested about 30 people. From this group of arrested individuals, two women (a cook and her daughter assisting her) survived; all the remaining people died from exhaustion at labor or were executed by shooting--the men in Auschwitz, the women in Ravensbruck. I would undoubtedly have shared their fate, if not for the fact that my sister-in-law's illness and strong pleas kept me at home. But I survived luckily for some time afterwards, until the next year, 1942. Because I was informed that at the Gestapo they are inquiring about Marian Wojciechowski, and I didn't know which one, then I would change residences often (more or less every 4-6 months). The last residence I rented in Warsaw was in Zoliborz, in the housing co-op of musicians--the landlord of the residence, who also was a Wojciechowski (but Kazimierz) besides, was a musician. I continued to travel around the General Government region. One day, shortly after the arrests at the restaurant, Kazik Wegierski came to me and announced to me, that he would like me to meet his sister who had just arrived from Lodz. I went to visit them, we talked some, and when the family went to bed, Kazik's sister told me that she has a task for me. She worked in reconnaissance and needed a place near the border of the General Government on the train line Lowicz-Zychlin- Kutno, where couriers crossing the border could stay the night for some rest and a place to sleep. After a few months, her brother advised her to ask me for help. I promised that I would look around. Under the German occupation Warsaw, Sochaczew and Lowicz still belonged to the General Government, however the next train station--Zychlin--was already on the side of the Reich, or territory incorporated into Germany. As quarters for the woman courier, Lowicz seemed the best fit to me, especially since I had very good relations there in the local agricultural-commerce co-op. That person was a woman courier of the Polish underground (Kazik's sister from Lodz, Wanda Wegierska). Because of the assignment of the liaison of the Polish underground, she took on German citizenship, traveled quite often across the border into German territory, met there with our intelligence personnel and brought back from them information, among other things including the localization of German armament plants. This information was transmitted from Warsaw to London via radio, to be utilized for bombing raids by the British air force. The woman courier (a young girl, about 18-19 years old) realized at one point in Berlin that she was being followed, and she fled to hide in the hotel. Sometimes even very sensible and brave people sometimes do tragically stupid things. She did just such a stupid thing. Back in the hotel, she wrote several letters, addressed the envelopes and mailed them. One of those letters was addressed to me. The Gestapo intercepted the letters and copied them along with the addresses. The woman courier was arrested in Berlin only after three or four months during her third trip. All the recipients of her letters were also arrested. I had already organized for her a point of transfer, everything was prepared, but unfortunately it was too late. Sometime during the second half of 1940 or maybe at the beginning of 1941, I believe it was Kazimierz Wegierski himself who came to my office room with his friend and asked me to help him as much as I would be able to, after which he left the room, leaving me alone with his friend. I asked what was it all about? It was about making contact with people through whom he would be able to acquire smaller or larger quantities of every kind of food. In my travels around the co-ops for inspection, before and even during the occupation--I knew the remaining stock products of the co- ops, and I tried to get to know people whom I could trust. Verifying the percent of so called ``tluczek'' (breakage) of eggs, ``rozsyp'' (spillage) of flour, cereal or grain, I knew roughly how much and of what it was possible to take away without putting people at risk of suspicion by the German authorities. If there were suspicions about the black market, that was only just half the problem. People were in danger of being thrown out of work, being sent to labor in Germany and so on. However, if there was suspicion that the food was being handed over to partisans or to Jews--there was the threat of punishment by death, preceded by torturing all suspects and their families. We had to help, but always we had to be cautious. My colleague Wegierski's friend came to me to the office several times, and if I had them--I always gave him some contacts in the cooperatives of the Warsaw or Radom districts. A contact could be the director of the cooperative, the director of a certain section. the warehouse keeper, the bookkeeper or also even an ordinary laborer who was initiated into the underground. Only after the war, looking at a photograph in the press, I recognized that friend of my colleague Wegierski. It was Julian Grobelny, founder of the Council to Assist the Jews, ``Zegota.'' During that time he was buying food and was more than likely providing it for Jews. 4. arrested by the gestapo I was arrested in Radom, where I had moved, because in Warsaw it was ``too tight'' for me, the Gestapo was tripping over my heels. In Radom, I resided at the local high school teacher's home (as I recall, his name was Oder). On April 23, 1942, at night, the Gestapo was battering at the door of the house where I lived. At that time I was not at home, and the landlord tried to open and escape through the back door, but they shot him in the leg. His son died from the wounds received during the shooting. The Gestapo inquired about me and found out that I was working in the cooperative. The next day, they went to the office of the Union of Agricultural and Economic Cooperatives, and without mentioning my name, made a general survey of the employees. They made accusations that the office produced fictional work cards for people who in reality don't work there. Under that pretext, they checked the entire registered personnel ``from a to z,'' what and where a given individual did during a given day. By this method they got to me, and learned at which co-op I was performing an inspection at that point in time. It was in the Wloscianska Agricultural-Commerce Cooperative in Piotrkow Trybunalski. They returned to their headquarters and telephoned the order to arrest me by the local Gestapo. The Gestapo came to the commissar of the cooperative during the dinner hour asking about me. Meanwhile, not expecting anything, I had just had a secret meeting at the cemetery and returned at noon to the co-op bureau. There I found a message that the commissar of the cooperative, a German, wanted to see me in his office. This was nothing unusual, so I calmly went to his bureau, and the Gestapo were already there waiting for me. They checked my personal documents and informed me that I was under arrest. The protestations of the German commissar, who needed my help in the work of the cooperative, did not help. I was arrested; the Radom Gestapo demanded my immediate transport to Radom. At the moment of the arrest, I had on my person several ``trefne'' (secret under ground) documents, that is, such that should not, under any circumstances, fall into German hands. Handing over my briefcase to a colleague who was my assistant- apprentice, I told him quietly to burn whatever could be damaging to us. Unfortunately, I also had some papers on me in my clothes; I could not get rid of these without attracting the attention of the Gestapo. We arrived in Radom (that was April 24, 1942) around 11 pm at night. And here, fate was kind to me in a most miraculous way. Now, about a month earlier I was taking the train from Radom to Warsaw. At the train station, using my cooperative inspector's identification card, I could buy a train ticket without having to wait in line (this was no small matter: there were barely 20 tickets available for about 200 people in the queue). At that time, there walked up to me a stranger in the uniform of a prison guard, asking me to help him to buy a ticket: he had received a telegram that his sister in Warsaw is dying and he desperately wanted to visit her (he was going to be busy at work the next day). I like people and I like to help them. Therefore, I agreed, and I bought him a ticket in the next ticket cashier's window to avoid suspicion. And it so happened, that we were passengers in the same train car and chatted with each other a bit. When, in accordance with their received orders the Gestapo brought me to the Radom prison that night, it was this ``acquaintance'' from the train station who was the guard on duty! On the first floor of the prison building there was the criminal section (for prisoners accused of theft, etc.) and on the upper floor, I believe either on the second or third story, there was the political section. After bringing me in, the Gestapo led me to the guard on duty and told him to sign a document that I had been delivered. When he signed the receipt for my person, they left, leaving me in his responsibility. We were left alone, and we began a discussion as to what to do next. My eventual escape would risk reparations against our entire families (his and mine), as well as against my colleagues from work and from home. I felt that it was too dangerous not only for my loved ones, but also for the family of the prison guard. I decided that I do not have the right to put so many people in danger, and I decided not to escape. The guard advised me to destroy anything that was ``trefne'' (secret underground documents) that I had with me. In the middle of a large hall on the first floor in which we found ourselves, there stood a huge stove (so called ``koza'') with a fire burning inside. The guard lifted the cover of the stove and said: ``Throw it in here.'' I had with me a notebook with coded names, telephone numbers and addresses. Without knowing the code, it would have been difficult to decode them. However, the Gestapo could come to the conclusion that the information in the notebook is coded, and with additional beatings maybe get that necessary information out of me. Without a moment's hesitation, I took advantage of the ``koza'' and threw in my notebook along with the rest of the ``trefne'' papers into the fire. 5. interrogation and torture in radom And so I fell into the hands of the Gestapo, but with the exception of what they already knew about me, I did not provide them with any other indications. Everything I possessed was ``clean,'' because anything else had been burned. During the first few days of my stay at the prison, I received a package with a large pot of buckwheat cereal. The Gestapo checked this cereal rather thoroughly, but fortunately, they did not find the tiny rolled up ball of paper hidden inside it. It contained only the brief piece of information, that the Wegierskis had been arrested with their entire family. I did not receive any additional information: why, who and how. Kazik Wegierski, a scout instructor (I believe from the scout troop ``Wigry'') was that colleague from work and the underground, who had informed me earlier in Warsaw about the ``mushroom poisoning,'' or ``wpadka'' (deconspiration of a cell of my underground organization). He was very actively engaged in the Polish underground, and his sister was that courier who traveled to Germany for reconnaissance. I wasn't sure what the Gestapo already knew or what it didn't know, but just in case, I didn't admit to anything. For the first interrogation, there arrived at the prison a special envoy from German intelligence, who spoke Polish perfectly. As it turned out. he knew Poland, and about two weeks earlier, that is, right before the outbreak of war, he had returned to Germany from a ski trip to Zakopane. He wanted me to tell him everything that I knew about people acquainted with me, where they work, what they do. Naturally, when it came to Wegierski, I pretended not to know anything. At that point, there was not yet any beating or anything of that sort. The person leading the interrogation said, that's too bad, that I don't know anything. and left the prison. About two weeks later at the next interrogation I was beaten so thoroughly, that after finishing they threw me into the cell completely disabled. Normal interrogation took place in this way, that in the attic of the Gestapo headquarters, they would put handcuff the prisoner's hands in back of him, tie the handcuffs to a rope hanging from the ceiling, and pull the rope upwards so that one would hang above the floor of the attic at the height of an average chair or table. Then, there would take place a beating over the entire body, including the head and legs. A person would be completely covered in blood. Because I was hanging by my hands with the entire weight of my body, and sometimes pulled downwards by my legs, I lost complete use of my fingers and hands already after the second interrogation. It was possible to prick me in the fingers, and I would not be able to feel it. I could not bend my arms at the elbows, so that when eating, for example, a piece of bread, I had to use a spoon, because I could not reach my mouth with my hand. They maltreated me horribly. Luckily, my prison guard acquaintance alerted the persons indicated by me about my imprisonment. These individuals tried to help me through the commissar of the co-op union where I worked, and also through his secretary. As I learned later in the Gross Rosen camp, where I met the son-in-Law of my Radom landlords, it was that German woman secretary who suggested that one of the stapo (he had a high position and loved to play around) be bribed. Of course, there could in no way be any agreement about my release from prison, but it was about sending me to Auschwitz without a death sentence. Normally in similar incidences the prisoner, after the interrogations were concluded, was executed by shooting in the prison or in nearby forests, or sent to Auschwitz with a death sentence. This sentence was executed by shooting in the camp after a two- or several-month stay. Such a sentence was not sent after me. I was transported to Auschwitz, but all my things were returned to my mother with the announcement of my death. They didn't want to release the body, but they sent a message that I am no longer on this earth. 6. AUSCHWITZ In the camp I met with a series of events that appeared to be miraculous, or perhaps accidental coincidences ordained by the Providence of God. It is difficult for me to say that God wanted to retain my person, because there were so many who were so much better and so much more needed. But it all happened so that I was saved. I arrived at Auschwitz as a complete human ruin: I could not bend or move my hands. At the camp apels, when the orders ``caps off'' or ``caps on'' were issued, I grabbed the cap on my head without feeling it in my fingers. Not obeying the command risked being beaten or even being killed on the spot. They took me to Block 11, the block of death. Had they learned about my state and that I was unable to work, a death sentence would have been immediate. I was unfit for work, so there was no reason why I should be kept alive. In such a state, I was held in the death block for a day or two. I was hit over the head with a club several times, but after about a week they sent me, in a group of about 20 prisoners, to the kitchen for food, for the afternoon soup. This soup--a bit of water with some thing like nettle in it--and yet hot, was carried on poles in barrels of various dimensions (25, 50 liters) by two prisoners. They sent a few too many people to carry the soup, under the assumption that there would be more barrels. But as it turned out, the barrels were larger and a few of us didn't have to carry anything. I tried to walk in the back, so that they would not choose me when changing carriers, because I knew that I would be unable to carry the barrel. And spilling the soup, especially a barrel of soup-- that would have been death on the spot for certain, for the reckless denial of food for many people. And after all, I could not tell them that I had no feeling in my hands. So I walked in the back of the group of these carriers down a street leading to Block 11, and suddenly I saw a man in front of me, coming closer, also wearing prison garb, but shaped and well-fitting. We got closer to each other and both of us stood: ``Marian, is that you?'' and I answered, ``Zdzisiek, is that you?'' It turned out that this was my friend, with whom I shared a room in 1937-1938 at the cavalry training center in Grudziadz for a period of about 9 months. At that time, after military service, I returned to work in the co-op movement, and he remained in the army as a candidate or a career officer. During the occupation, he was rounded up along with all the remaining men on a train on the Krakow- Tarnow line and sent to Auschwitz. Because the man was strong and healthy, he survived the first few months in the camp not all that badly, and then people like that, if they were able to do something, were assigned various positions in maintaining the camp. My friend Zdzisiek Wroblewski was appointed as the block scribe: he had the responsibility of keeping the prisoners' register up to date, where and what each one was doing at each hour. We briefly recounted to each other our histories; he decided to accompany me. He went with me to block monitor--it was a German criminal, who beat and killed people without hesitation; he told him not to do me any harm, because I was his friend. In about a week, Zdzisiek arranged to have me transferred to his block. I don't know how he did that, but at the new place there were many former colleagues and acquaintances from various political parties and factions, from various universities and various cities. They already had formed an entire underground organization Auschwitz, and everyone helped each other as much as was possible. Zdzisiek drew me to him and said that he would make me a ``sztubowy.'' The ``sztubowy'' was responsible for one large camp ward. I told him that I was not suitable for that function; I saw that a ``sztubowy'' beats people, hitting them with a ladle wherever it fell. I was not suited for this. Zdzisiek replied, ``Listen, this is the way it is here, that either you will beat, or you will be beaten.'' But I refused; I wanted to be in the middle, to not beat and not to be beaten. So I bounced here and there, working in different commandos in the camp territory. A typhus epidemic broke out. Two blocks were reserved for the sick. The Germans were not at all that concerned about the prisoners, who were dying in masses from the typhus, but they were afraid of getting infected themselves. Because the prisoner worked in many sections, for example, in the canteens where they had contact with SS-men, they could infect them. One day, two large trucks arrived, onto which were loaded all the people in those two ``typhus'' blocks: the sick, the reconvalescing and the orderlies. They were all gassed. Less than a week later, I fell ill with typhus myself. My companions in adversity took me arm in arm and led me to the receiving hall for the sick, and then they themselves had to quickly report to work. The doctor in reception, a young Jew fresh after medical studies (probably from Hungary) had already been alerted about my coming by my colleagues or their acquaintances. At that very moment an SS- man appeared. He was an older man, who went about the camp and observed the prisoners, writing down the numbers of those who were working poorly--as well those who were so weak that they could not work. These numbers were then passed on to the camp registry office. All those recorded prisoners were then immediately murdered in the gas chambers or (more frequently) by injection with phenol. At the moment of the SS-man's arrival, I had already been examined by the doctor, with a filled out health card. The SS-man came up and took my card, and noticed the high fever. Seeing this, and knowing that in a moment my number would be recorded and passed on for execution, the doctor quickly reported: ``High fever, for observation.'' In the Auschwitz camp, on Block 10, there were performed various types of observations and medical experiments. German doctors inoculated male and female prisoners with bacteria of various diseases, performed research and observations, and then of course they killed the subjects. In connection with this, the visiting, SS- man understood that I would be sent there for observation; he put away his notebook and did not record my number. At that time, I was already semiconscious. Next, they sent me to a newly opened ``revier'' for those who were sick with typhus. I was visited there by my friend and one of the leaders of the conspiracy--Kazimierz Wegierski, who was arrested even earlier than I. During his interrogation, the Gestapo beat him so severely that his kidneys, liver and other internal organs were damaged. As a result, this very slender man was so badly swollen that I could not recognize him. He died the next day, without betraying anyone to the very end. From the entire group that was arrested along with him, not one person broke under cruel interrogation, no one was betrayed. His sister, Wanda Wegierska, caught by the Germans and accused of spying, was sentenced to death and executed by beheading in the prison in Berlin. Working for the Polish intelligence, she presented herself as a German citizen and that type of death was administered to her. For her achievements in the underground resistance movement, she received the Virtuti Military Cross posthumously after the war, and was also promoted to the rank of second lieutenant. She was the woman courier about whom I spoke earlier at the beginning of my lecture. After getting well, I was sent back to the block of my friend Zdzisiek, who started to look for work for me. He found for me the position of bookkeeper for a German civilian--an engineer, assigned to supervise the storage of building and construction materials intended for the camp, as well as for military objectives. At the Auschwitz camp there was a main warehouse of that type. At the beginning, we observed each other: on the third day of such an acquaintance, the engineer placed a piece of bread with marmalade on my table, and later we began to talk with each other. Of course, I did not admit to my underground connections. Our conversations were held cautiously and only inside the building. The German warned me that if our contacts were revealed, then he would become a prisoner like myself, and I would end up in the crematorium. We worked together, we exchanged words of greeting, the relationship between us was arranged on a level plane of not so much as work colleague or friend, but human being nonetheless. After about two weeks, my work was changed: at the Sunday morning apel, I was assigned along with about a hundred other prisoners to clean the overgrown drainage ditches outside the camp. Standing on the bottom of the ditch with water up to the knees, one had to deepen the trench and hand the soil up to people located higher. The work assigned to me was at the bottom of the ditch, and any kind of protest would of course risk a beating. At that time I already had enough feeling in my hands so that I could hold a shovel, but my fingers were still not fully functional (moreover, that condition has persisted till this day). I worked this way for a full day; it was already the middle of November, the water was very cold. After returning to the camp I was shaking with the cold, but the next day I went to do the same work, not saying anything to the German engineer with whom I had worked previously. After the second day of working in the ditches. I got a very high fever during the night, and they took me for a medical examination. It was pure luck that there were Polish doctors there, who, even though they had no medicines, were able to do advice what to do. They diagnosed pneumonia, pleurisy, water in the side as well as inflammation of the kidneys. They had no medicinal supplies, because people were held in the camp to be finished off, completely without any care as to their medical treatment. And once again, I met with Divine Providence. In this so-called hospital to which I was taken, there worked a prisoner--called the block tailor, who had been arrested along with one of my friends. This friend, like me, was a recipient of one of the letters from our woman courier, which had been intercepted by the Gestapo. The Gestapo came for him at his place of work--a tailor shop on Wiejska Street right nearby the Sejm. He was arrested along with other workers. A handy tailor from just that group by the name of Wladek Dabrowski was presently in Auschwitz. He performed a series of tailoring tasks for the camp ``dignitaries''--the functionaries and the SS-men. Wladek and I recognized each other and he helped me in the treatment. Once again, God showed His mercy. How was I treated? They cut off a small barrel and installed heating elements in the form of several light bulbs. They would place me on blankets on the ground, they would place the so ``armed'' barrel on my chest, and they would connect the electrical wire conduit to the electrical contact. After a half hour of such heating, I was almost unconscious, but the blanket on which I was laying was completely wet from the water coming out from within my body. Besides this, the water from my side was extracted with the help of a syringe. When the SS-man who was writing down the numbers of the prisoners for execution, because they were very sick and not fit for work, would draw near us, a well- organized camp intelligence would warn us ahead of time. Then I would be pulled out of bed, wrapped in a blanket and placed on the ground by a wall. That was done with prisoners who had already died, because at the morning, afternoon and evening apels every man in every block had to be accounted for. After the SS-man left, my friend the tailor, along with his friends, put me back into bed. This would be repeated during my entire stay at the hospital. Meanwhile on the block to which I belonged. Zdzisiek had a fatal fallout. He organized contacts from outside the camp for the purpose of bringing in medicines for so many sick prisoners. This was realized in the following way: Some of the specialists (for example, welders, plumbers. and so on) needed in the camp were imported as civilian workers from outside the camp. Zdzisiek would pass on a list of needed medicines to them, which they would bring to the camp at the next opportunity. One of those workers was caught with such a list during inspection, and under torture revealed who had given it to him. Zdzisiek was arrested immediately along with the two ``sztubowy'' who were responsible for the wards, which Zdzisiek frequented most. Despite the tortures, all three did not betray anyone and did not admit to anything; they all perished either from starvation, or by phenol injection. Had it not been for my stay in the hospital, because I was so closely connected to them, I would have probably been also taken, tortured and bestially murdered. I stayed in the hospital until the moment that my fever dropped, then I had to go back to work. I was released from the hospital one Sunday and assigned to a different block. This was the block of the so-called ``Zugange'' (prisoners newly-arrived to the camp as well as prisoners discharged from the hospital). The ward of the block I was assigned to was located on the first floor; I was so exhausted by the illness that I would walk up the wide stairs on all fours. I had a card of discharge from the hospital and was assigned to work the next day. This time the work consisted of arranging in layers boards, still wet, freshly brought in from the mill, in tall stacks with some air draft to dry the boards. To accomplish this, some of the workers had to climb upwards and pull up heavy boards handed up from below. I barely managed to drag myself to the place of work; I was assigned the work at the top, but I lacked the strength to climb up the stack. Even if I had been able to do so, with the frosty weather (and it was about the middle of January) I would undoubtedly have frozen to death or, unable to climb down, would have been pushed off to the ground, breaking my bones. I thought to myself then, there is no point in climbing up, better let them kill me here on the ground and it will be the end of it. I decided not to go to the top of the stack--this was a refusal to work, which in the camp meant inevitable death. At that time there was in Auschwitz an obercapo of the Bauhoff (building section), a German criminal prisoner known as ``Bloody August,'' who was renowned for his cruelty. Tall, thin, with long hands like an ape. It was enough for him to smack a prisoner with such a hand, to make a corpse out of him. I suddenly saw that ``Bloody August'' from a distance of about 10 meters. I thought that this is the end of me; but he suddenly became interested in someone else, jumped to the side and reached him, getting further away from me. However, the other person accompanying him came up to me. Normally, a prisoner of the concentration camp when approached by anyone from the camp administration, was obligated to take off his cap and stand at attention. I did not do this; it was a matter of complete indifference to me whether they would kill me or not. The person approaching me noticed that, came up closer, looked at me and said in German: ``Marian, is that you?'' I recognized that it was the German engineer, for whom I had worked as a bookkeeper. He asked what I was doing here, why I didn't come to him to work. I answered, that they assigned me to different work, that I had been in the hospital and then they told me to report to the present work site. I added, that I could not perform the work, because I did not have the strength to do it, therefore because of that they will kill me. The engineer looked at me and told me to come with him. He took me to a huge storage place for pipes and other plumbing parts. Outside the building there were all kinds of concrete pipes, and inside there were copper and nickel pipes, as well as all sorts of joints for pipes. The director of this whole warehouse was a prisoner from Stalowa Wola, engineer Sledziewski or maybe Sledzinski. The German led me to him and said that he is leaving me with him as his responsibility, turned around and left. Sledziewski knew nothing about me, but he saw that I was barely able to stand on my feet. He told me to sit down, brought me a piece of bread, pointed to the hot water for bread soup. And I sat like that next to him, by the hot stove, not doing anything for about two or three days. Under camp conditions this was something completely unheard of and meant inevitable death. Soon we began to talk with each other; I told him everything about myself honestly. When I had rested some, I started to help him more and more. I worked in this way to approximately the middle of March, 1943, when the transfer of prisoners from Auschwitz to other camps was begun, because the Auschwitz camp was already overloaded. 7. GROSS ROSEN--ROGOZNICA I was sent to the camp in Gross Rosen. The stay in Gross Rosen began as usual with a quarantine. Even before it was over, I was sent to Hirshberg (today, Jelenia Gora) to work on the construction of a factory to make products from wood fibers. The task of the workers was construction of timbering for cement walls. I volunteered as a carpenter, trying to avoid work with sand or cement, where one had to work full speed running with wheelbarrows filled with sand or cement; with this, one received a lot of lashes. The work of a carpenter, requiring precision in matching timber or boards, was slower. Later, I was even appointed the secretary of the entire group, because it turned out that the former candidate for the position was unable to write well, and quickly. So I held the position of carpenter and secretary until about November, when they brought us from Hirschberg back to the mother camp of Gross Rosen. There I was again employed as a carpenter in the construction of new barracks. One had to work very fast, because everyday there arrived new transports of thousands of prisoners pulled from many other camps (from Majdanek and others). In the construction of the barracks there were used ready-made slabs which had to be put together, next the windows were mounted, and also finishing work was performed. Part of the work was done in the interiors, where it was hot, and for other types of work one had to run, and fast at that, outside. Under these conditions I caught a very severe cold, I was close to pneumonia, I had trouble with breathing and speaking. My olleagues decided to help me, taking me to the ``revier'' where I could rest. I stayed there, and already on the second day there came to my bed the ``revier'' kapo by the me of Siehsdumich and started a conversation with me. I told him a bit of this and at about myself, of course hiding my activity in the underground; he asked me from here do I know German so well, and learning about my education he proposed a more responsible job. He suggested a project employing me in the camp post office, the parcel section. This change suited me very much and I began the new work of receiving and delivering parcels. Some time later there came to Gross Rosen a transport of prisoners from Majdanek. Right after that, a few weeks later, this was followed by a large shipment from Majdanek of food parcels which had been sent to these prisoners by their families. The director of the post office, SS Unterscharfurer Layer, decided to send the packages back to the families, because some of the addresses were no longer current. The parcels were delivered to the prisoners in accordance with their prisoner number as well as the number of the block in which they slept and ate. The first and last names of the prisoners were not important, it was only those numbers that mattered. However, after arrival in Gross Rosen from Majdanek, prisoners were located in a new block and received a new prisoner number, so that finding the original addressees among so many thousands of prisoners was unusually complicated. Therefore, the director of the post office decided to send back the entire transport of parcels to the senders. I knew that with the hunger prevailing in the camp, the return of the food packages constituted a huge loss: in addition, the families of the prisoners receiving the returns will be convinced that the addressees were dead. This type of explanation would not be effective with the director of the post office, who was an SS-man. Certainly he was not concerned with the hunger of the prisoners and the pain of the families. I decided then, to propose other arguments to him. I told him that returning the packages places an additional burden on the communication centers, whose main purpose should be services for the German populace and armed forces. I cited the slogan placed on German trains: ``Die Rader rollen fur den Sieg'' (``The wheels are rolling for victory.'') With this I convinced the German, who asked me for advice what to do, because it would be difficult to just distribute the packages at random. I offered to help: if I received permission from the commandant of the camp and his deputy (Raportfuhrer Eschner) to spend additional hours during the week working in the camp chancellery after normal work hours, then I would attempt to find the addressees of the parcels, by comparing their former registered numbers with the currently assigned numbers, as well as searching for the block in which they were presently residing. In the camp registry office, there were card index tiles of the mother camp Gross Rosen and all the subcamps of this region, all living and dead prisoners with their new numbers, occupation, and cause of death in case the prisoners were no longer alive. After receiving the consent of the camp authorities, I spent the next week working additionally until about 11 or 12 at night, in search of the owners of the parcels. The beginning was the hardest, that is, finding the first few. Next, those who were found helped me to find the next addressees. And in this way during the week we unloaded the entire shipment of parcels, additionally earning the confidence of the director of the post office, SS-man Layer, and of Raportfurer Eschner with this work well done. Shortly thereafter, this SS-man's goodwill, earned in this way, became very useful to me. For one of the prisoners, it pains me to say--a Pole (he currently resides in Warsaw), supplemented his food rations by stealing the best foodstuffs from some of the packages, for example, pieces of sausage. Noticing this process, of course I did not denounce him, but I sharply called his attention to it to have him stop doing this. I even threatened him, that the next time this offense occurred, he would receive from me a healthy lesson. The angry prisoner, along with another Polish ``volksdeutch,'' wrote a denunciation about me, that I was taking advantage of my work at the post office to send letters outside the camp, even though I was under the so-called ``Postsperre'' (forbidden to write letters, and to receive letters and packages). I knew nothing about this denunciation. One day, when I arrived at work, the SS-man, director of the post office Unterscharfuhrer, called me to his office and told me from whom and what kind of denunciation was deposed about me. The main chief of the political section of the camp, representing the highest authority of the Gestapo in the camp, came to him to verify this and to eventually take me in for interrogation. ``My'' SS-man supervisor guaranteed that it was not true, that I am a very good worker, and that the denunciation was probably caused by jealousy. In the conversation with me he added, that he was not asking me if the accusation is true, but warned me not to do anything like that, and also not to mention our conversation to anyone. This SS-man saved my life then, because the denunciation about me was true. Of course, having correspondence forbidden to me (camp authorities ordered such types of prohibition concerning certain dangerous prisoners). I would occasionally send letters, availing myself of the kindness of my colleagues, who were able to write once or twice a month to their loved ones. From time to time (for example, once a year) they would give up one of their own letters so I could send one of my own, signed with their name and number (and to these same numbers there could also come a reply to me from my family, which they then transmitted to me later). Luckily, the matter of the denunciation ended on this note without any consequences. Additionally in my favor there was also the following fact from the recent work time spent building the warehouse in Hirschberg. Due to intervention from the International Red Cross to the highest German authorities in Berlin, it was demanded that all prisoners receive the order one Sunday to write a letter home. I reflected on what I should do. Since I had the ``Postsperre'' (under penalty of death, it was forbidden to send out or receive any kind of correspondence or parcel, which effectively made the prisoner ``dead'' to the outside world), I delayed with writing the letter, in fear of the consequences. So I went to the commandant of the subcamp Hirschberg and asked what I should do. After coming to an agreement with the main camp, he said that the prohibition is binding and that I am not allowed to write. This proof of subordination was registered in my records, and also helped me to survive in face of the denunciation. A group of prisoners from Majdanek, who received food parcels thanks to my work, was most grateful to me. Hunger ruled in the camp; food parcels were unbelievably valuable. They invited me most warmly for a tasty treat, but I declined--not accepting even a piece from anyone. At that time, I worked inside the building and not that hard, so it wasn't very bad for me; if they wanted to, then they could share the food products with their friends and colleagues. Helping my colleagues I saw as my duty, without accepting even the smallest payment, not even in the form of food. 8. leitmeritz In January 1945, the German-Russian battles already moved to the west of Wroclaw. The prisoners were transported by train and on foot to the west. As I recall, on the 4th or 5th of February 1945 there occurred the final liquidation of the concentration camp Gross Rosen. They loaded us on various uncovered train cars (for example, coal cars). They packed as many of us as possible into each train car, putting in one or two SS-men with machine guns. All prisoners were told to kneel or to sit, and who ever raised himself or stood up was immediately shot. The train drew near several locations where there were concentration camps, but they were already overfilled. On some stops, the bodies of dead prisoners were removed from the wagons. Finally we reached Flossenburg, and from there the subcamp Leitmeritz. It was a camp of murderous labor in digging tunnels into the rock walls, into which were then placed machines to produce armaments and ammunition. The mountains protected the production against bombing explosions. Those prisoners who were still alive in the last few train cars, where I also found myself, received orders to take the corpses out of the wagons outside, and lay them out on the embankments along the railroad tracks. This caused a considerable delay in entering the camp itself. Walking in through the gate, I heard someone calling my name. It turned out that they were the former prisoners of the Majdanek camp, and later Gross Rosen, whose parcels from their families I had rescued in Gross Rosen, with that additional night work in the camp registry office. After the quarantine, the entire transport of prisoners was sent to set up camp Leitmeritz, and many of them now occupied good positions (for example, as functionaries of the camp's firefighting service). Out of gratitude, they fed me and my colleagues, assigned me a bed to sleep on (many of the prisoners slept two or three on one bed or on the ground) and arranged work for me outside the main camp, under good conditions, at the construction of a house for the camp commandant. Because the German criminal prisoners, and especially those so-called ``kapo,'' had already been dismissed by then from the camps, and after a short training were sent to the eastern front, they made me the ``kayo'' of that group. I chose the following individuals for the group: (1) Kazimierz Wisniewski, former student of the Szkola Glowna Handlowa in Warsaw (Warsaw School of Economics), still sick after typhus. (2) Jerzy Cesarski, pre-war activist of the PPS (Polska Partia Socjalistyczna) and an active member of the underground. (3) A German (whose name I do not remember) ``kapo'' of the electricians in the commando ``Steinbruch,'' the exploitation of the quarries in camp Gross Rosen. He was known for secretly constructing a radio receiver together with a few Poles and Germans; they jointly listened to the radio broadcasts from London and also news about the situation of battles on the fronts, and passed them on by word of mouth to their colleagues in the camp, by which they really raised their hopes for surviving. And that was a great deal. Caught red-handed listening to this radio, despite terrible beatings and other tortures, he did not betray anyone, taking the entire responsibility on himself. The liquidation of camp Gross Rosen probably saved him from death. One evening, a group of Polish colleagues at work digging the tunnel, reported to me--explaining, that the German supervisor working there, who murdered people at work, had already promised one Pole that he would finish him off the next day. This Pole, already sentenced for extermination, was engineer Dr. Henryk Stankiewicz, docent lecturer of the Warsaw Politechnical School (as I recall, before the war he specialized in research on the endurance of building materials). Because I could not take more than three people to work, I had to release someone in order to take in Stankiewicz. I decided to dismiss Jerzy Cesarski, who scolded me terribly, that I was sacrificing a political activist in favor of some kind of engineer. Fortunately, both survived and both returned to Poland. On a marginal note on this matter, I will only add that as I recall, the 68-year old SS- man who watched us, of Czech origin, and who knew the Czech, German, Russian and even the Polish language rather well, stated to us at the very beginning, that in his presence we can say whatever we like about Hitler and the Germans, but if his wife or his daughters arrived, we were not allowed to say anything, because they were real Germans and would immediately report this fact to the Gestapo. To build the house for the commandant of the camp (it was already under roofing) we had absolutely no materials and no desire. We spent our whole time looking for wood remnants nearby, which we exchanged with the local residents for a beet, a turnip, a few potatoes, or a piece of bread. From these products we would make a soup, which we shared honestly with our guard. This commando was kept for me for a long time, so that I think that it was due to the gratitude shown me for that time in Gross Rosen. I have great respect and gratitude for my colleagues. 9. ESCAPE FROM THE TRANSPORT ON FOOT In the months of March and April 1945, the Russian armies were pressing to the west. One could hear in the distance somewhere the bombs bursting and the cannonade of the artillery. All work outside the barbed wire of the camp was halted, and also within our commando. Whole columns of prisoners were prepared to march out one after the other somewhere to the west. On May 5, 1945, my colleagues Wisniewski and Stankiewicz, and I were included in such a column marching on foot. In the camp it was already a public secret that the prisoners in the transports on foot, who no longer had the strength to continue further, were finished off with a rifle shot and left by the roadside to be buried by the local residents. Long marches, often without food and water, left numerous victims. Therefore, at the first occasion during the night, walking through a dense forest, at a given password all three of us jumped into the roadside thicket. We waited until the entire column passed us and then we hid ourselves in even thicker shrubs and waited for sunrise. In the morning, we turned into the first forest path crossing, which led us to a Czech village, where we were greeted very, very hospitably. Bathed, fed and dressed in clean undergarments, and in clean albeit old clothes, we finally felt like human beings. The Czechs informed us that the Russian armies were already in Prague (or in the vicinity of Prague), and the American armies were in the area of Pilzno. While still in the concentration camps, we all knew about the fate of the Polish officers at Katyn. The German press made this known, and it was confirmed by the Polish underground press, with the exception of procommunist gazettes. We already knew about the mass arrests of Poles on territories taken over by Russia and of their transports under terrible conditions to Siberia. We already knew what would be waiting for us there, if we believed in the communist prattle and headed east. That's why we had already planned earlier to head west. The roads were already obstructed with German deserters and other nationalities in all directions. Almost everywhere there were organized kitchens for the fugitives. Without greater obstacles, we made it to the vicinity of Pilzno. There, on the main road to Germany, we were stopped by an American patrol. Only those who had documents proving that they resided in the west were allowed to go on. Residents of Central and Eastern Europe were to return to their homes. The three of us went off to the side to consult on what to do. A young Czech boy was listening in on our conversation. Apparently he understood our situation, because he informed us that he could show us where to cross the border. He returned with us part of the way towards the village, then turned off to the side through the field boundary strips, in the direction of some small shrubs and thickets, and said that beyond those shrubs we would reach a grove, and beyond that would be Germany. That's how we made it to the German locality in the area of Schwandorf, and then further on to the town of Amberg, where a Polish DP (Displaced Persons) camp was being formed. There the commandant of the camp, a prisoner of concentration camps, a major in the AK (Armia Krajowa--Polish Home Army), Wojcik (Jozef was his first name, I think) greeted us, and in a pleasant, friendly new-camp atmosphere we slowly regained our old selves mentally and physically, after the tragic experiences of the preceding years. The nightmare of German concentration camps still remained in our subconsciousness for decades and even now after more than fifty years of freedom, sometimes I wake up from a terrible dream and I see the silent pleading eyes of my friends standing in front of the camp administration office in Gross Rosen, under the guard of SS-men, I hear the shots into the back of their skulls; and I sense and I see in the dream the black cloud of smoke weaving lazily out of the crematorium. Those who survived this hell did not speak of it for a long time. But it is necessary to talk about it, so that the memory will not be obliterated, so that the history of the Polish Holocaust will not be further falsified. 10. THE POLISH CIVILIAN GUARD In August and September 1945, the news spread around in Amberg that: (1) the Polish DP camp in Amberg would be transferred to a larger camp in Wildflecken, (2) the Americans were organizing the Polish Civilian Guard and Transitional Training Camps. The commandant of our camp, Major Jozef Wojcik, became the commandant of one of such camps (Wincer) and asked me to help in enrolling participants. I traveled around the DP camps, made speeches and kept sending to Wincer even more candidates for the Civilian Guard. Finally-late in the autumn of 1945, 1 also went through a period of training as a second lieutenant, and at the beginning of 1946, our Civilian Guard company was sent into service at Bad Aibling (near Rosenheim by Munich). As I recall, there were three of our companies all-together. We performed our duty by guarding German POWs; mechanical vehicles and their spare parts; and stores of weapons, ammunition, etc. In the summer of 1946. they transferred our company for repeat short training do Mannheim Kafertal. There I found many young officers and soldiers whom I knew from my college years, my military service and during my professional work. I became friends with the deputy of the leader of the Civilian Guard of the American Army, Lieutenant-Colonel Wladyslaw Rylko, and he, knowing that I am a member of the cooperative movement, asked me for help in organizing co-ops in the Civilian Guard companies. I began work on preparing the statutes as well as the accounting forms and cash settlements. However, since part of the company to which I was assigned was transferred to Buttelborn near Gross Gerau in the vicinity of Darmstadt, in order to guard the warehouses of automobile parts and automotive service columns, I went along with them. After a few days in Buttelborn, I became aware of two things: (1) the members of the companies and their families were still somewhat hungry; (2) the American army would employ the Civilian Guard only for as long as they needed us. In case of dismissal, our soldiers will go looking for work in Germany or through emigration, without possessing any practical professional skills. I resolved to do something to remedy both these cases. Regarding the suffering due to hunger, I again started up the company cooperative. making the bookkeeping, the accounting, and the periodical rights of control by members (the auditing committee) more efficient. Regarding the guardsmen's lack of professional skills, I held a meeting of the soldiers and asked them, who would like to learn which profession. Next, I applied to the local village resident Germans individually, owners of trade workshops, with a request to accept our candidates for training in the profession. In this way I was able to accommodate all who wanted to learn. Next, I sat down with my friend, the leader of the company. Captain Roman Wcislo-Winnicki, to work out the scheduling of guard service for afternoon or evening hours, so that those who wanted to learn could go to work during the day in the trade workshops and learn the trade skills. With the help of the educational officer of our center, Captain Jerzy Wilski (my colleague from the concentration camp Gross Rosen), a scouting instructor before the war, we founded clubs for soccer, basketball, volleyball, and an educational club with a handy reference library and so on. The work came out just fine. It was time to think about myself, too. Lieutenant-Colonel Wladyslaw Rylko suggested that I transfer to the center of civilian guard training in Mannheim Kafertal. I applied to the University (Wirtschaftshochschule) in Mannheim for admission to studies and to work on a doctorate in economics (Wirtschaftswissenschaft). They accepted me and assigned study subjects and an amount of time for two semesters, that is, with a possibility of finishing studies in one year. Unfortunately, just after I passed the examinations for the first doctoral semester, I was dismissed from the Civilian Guard of the American army in the summer of 1947 (Reduction In Force). Because this was equivalent to depriving me of financial resources for me and my entire family (wife and daughter), I had to resign from further studies. Luckily, before the dismissal, and with a greater cooperation of a special co-op committee, I was able to work out the statutes, bookkeeping, and plant the seed of trade courses in very many guard companies, so that the Civilian Guard of the American Army could rightly be proud of beautiful attainments in education, culture, profession, charity and finances--and always in the spirit of the true independence of Poland. During the autumn of 1947, I moved with my family to the Polish DP camp in Hochenfels (Lechow) near Regensburg, where I was drawn immediately into collaborative work with a circle of farmers; and I began lectures on economics and accounting subjects. After a few months, they offered me a position with the chief Polonian organization in the American-occupied zone in Germany, called ``Zjednoc zenie Polskie'' (``Polish Union'') with headquarters in Regensburg--Brunnleite 7. But that is a completely different topic. 11. ADDITIONAL INFORMATION, WHICH WAS NOT PRESENTED AT THE DISCUSSION

Ms. KAPTUR

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, I join my colleagues in congratulating the people of Ukraine on their free and fair election that elevated Victor Yushchenko to the office of President. I have joined my colleagues in extending an invitation to President Yushchenko to address the Congress. Just days before the elections, I traveled to Ukraine for the ninth time. On November 21, Ukraine held a run-off election for the office of President between Victor Yushchenko and Victor Yanukovych. International observers immediately found widespread fraud and declared the election invalid. Immediately following these events, supporters of the opposition party took to the streets to demand a recount or a new vote in what has been dubbed the ``Orange Revolution.'' The Ukrainian Supreme Court agreed and called for new elections. Our six member Congressional delegation added our voices for a free and fair revote in the Presidential elections to be held December 26 in that nation of nearly 50 million people. My first journey to Ukraine inspired a three-decade long quest that now explodes in the hearts of the people of Ukraine. The momentum of the opposition party in Ukraine is with the young. They crowded into the streets of Kiev. They blazed a trail on email. They are building a new future for Ukraine and this election cycle has been a transformational moment for them. Ukraine was host to thousands of election observers from around the world, and from within Ukraine, with the purpose of preventing the abuses that characterized the earlier elections, particularly manipulation of mobile voting stations and absentee voting. Laws had been passed in parliament to avoid these pitfalls. However, election observers were critical in assuring a fair vote. I continue to ponder how much Ukraine has changed in my lifetime. When I first drove into Ukraine in 1973, there were no other cars on the road other than military vehicles. Today, though far from an open society, Ukraine is making major strides toward developing liberty's institutions. The impact of this election in inspiring the next generation of Ukraine's youth cannot be underestimated. There is enormous fervor among the young people. Their free assembly is allowed in many regions of the nation. As Co-Chair of the Congressional Caucus, I look forward to building strong ties between our nations. Just a few weeks ago, the Congress held a videoconference with members of the Ukrainian parliament, the Rada. As part of our 1999 agreement, we will continue to hold these discussions, both in person and via videoconference. Our relationship has just begun to blossom. I am very hopeful for Ukraine and her people.

Ms. KAPTUR

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, Ohio symbolizes that the Help America Vote Act fell short of the lofty goals set by this Congress. Ohio's Secretary of State, Kenneth Blackwell, a Republican, in a State in which all statewide offices are controlled by Republicans and, in our State legislature, Republicans outnumber Democrats two to one in both chambers, our Secretary of State repeatedly took actions to make it more difficult for as many Ohioans as possible to have their votes fairly cast and accurately recorded. No national standards were set for voting equipment because the Bush administration appointed members of the Election Assistance Commission so late that their confirmation was nearly a full year later than required by HAVA itself. They had no time to recommend standards until it was too late, and those standards are still not in place today. The Ohio Secretary of State tried to force county boards of elections to buy equipment that his own reports showed to be flawed. Federal dollars that this Congress appropriated to help modernize elections became stuck in Ohio between the Secretary of State's office and local boards of elections who were often in deep disagreement as to which machine standards were trustworthy. Just prior to election, Secretary Blackwell continued to frustrate the enfranchisement of Ohioans with actions ranging from specifying paper weight standards for voter registration forms that even his own office could not meet, and then fighting the availability of provisional ballots right up until 3 p.m. on Election Day. In fact, people who had requested absentee ballots and had not received them were denied provisional ballots until a Federal court ruling that was issued at 3 p.m. on Election Day, after who knows how many Ohioans were denied ballots that they were prepared to cast for the candidates of their choice. No one can change the outcome of this election; but believe me, hundreds of thousands of Ohioans do have questions about the way that this election was handled in Ohio, in a State in which the winning margin was only 118,000 votes. Implementing the actual intent of HAVA and amending it where necessary deserve the full investigation of this 109th Congress, and it ought to be our first order of business. I commend the gentlewoman from Ohio (Mrs. Jones) of Cleveland who experienced these abuses in her area for bringing this to national attention. We are very proud of her. We are very proud of the Members who have chosen to join her. I would ask my Republican colleagues, starting with the Committee on House Administration, to join us in this effort to make HAVA really work as we approach the elections of 2006.

Ms. KAPTUR

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of this resolution commending Second Harvest and other food banks around the country who do such a wonderful job in providing essential assistance to people who need it. I am thankful each and every day that they are able to provide help to hungry people, as are the people who receive the food. As the ranking member on the Subcommittee on Agricultural Appropriations, I have been torn over the level of funding we provide for our many food assistance programs. I am happy that we are able to provide as much funding as we do, while recognizing that there are still are other programs like WIC, Commodity Supplemental Feeding, and the Senior Farmers Market Nutrition Program, that could still use more. I am unhappy about the growth in these food programs because they are supposed to be countercyclical. If our funding levels are high, then it means many among us, including many who have full time jobs, are not doing well economically. They need these food programs to help make ends meet. Consider the following: In fiscal 2001, we provided $20.1 billion for Food Stamps. In the fiscal 2005 bill approved by the House in July, we included $33.6 billion, an increase of 67 percent in that one program. Do the additional 5.8 million program receiving these benefits think they are better off than they were four years ago? According to testimony provided by USDA, in 2002, 47 percent of all infants born in the nation--1.9 million out of 4.1 million--were receiving benefits under the WIC program. What happened to meaningful jobs for their parents? Last year the Toledo Blade reported of cases in which the families of individuals called up for active National Guard or Military Reserve Duty had to seek assistance from the WIC program because of lost family income. This is taking care of our servicemen and women and their families? A population survey from the Census Bureau found that 12.1 percent of Ohioans were living in poverty in 2003, up from 11 percent in 2001. There is definitely a connection between increases in poverty and the thousands of jobs that have been lost in Ohio since 2001; In 2003, the Toledo-Northwest Ohio Food Bank reported that food pantries and soup kitchens in the area served 28,000 households. By the end of June of this year, this number increased to 40,000 households. People who in past years had donated to food banks are now becoming recipients. Local grocery stores had been generous in their support of food banks in prior years, but because of local closures and consolidations, the food banks are finding that the donations they are receiving are down while the need for the program has increased. As a nation, while we support these programs of assistance because it is the right thing to do, no one should ignore the fact that there are reasons why people are on these programs. America needs more jobs that pay a living wage. America needs an increase in the minimum wage to be sure that families can live in dignity, not in despair. America needs to end the harsh choices we expect too many young families and too many elderly to make--do they pay the rent, pay for utilities, pay for health care, or leave money for food? America, frankly, needs better days than we have seen for the past four years. I ask unanimous consent to include at this point in the Record an article from the October 3rd issue of the Toledo Blade, entitled ``Ranks of Area's `Invisible' Poor are Increasing''. [From the Toledo Blade, Oct. 3, 2004] Ranks of Area's ``Invisible'' Poor are Increasing More Ohio, Michigan residents are living on the edge than ever (By Karamagi Rujumba) Gary Robertson was laid off from his warehouse job eight months ago. With no steady income and the bills piling up, he soon lost his apartment. A couple of friends put him up for a while, but that didn't last for long. So one day, he was finally forced to do something he never imagined: He spent a night at a men's homeless shelter at the Cherry Street Mission. ``I was homeless and that was hard for me to accept. I had never been to a food pantry or a shelter,'' said Mr. Robertson, a native of Alabama who moved to Findlay 17 years ago and got a job at an area warehouse. ``I was doing well until I lost my job,'' Mr. Robertson said. He came to Toledo hoping for better luck in a larger city, but has since failed to find a regular job here. He has been working odd jobs to make his portion of the rent for an apartment he shares. When he needs food, he goes to the Cherry Street Mission's food pantry. Mr. Robertson is far from alone. ``We are seeing an increasing number of people who rely on pantries and soup kitchens, especially this year,'' said Lisa Hamler-Podolski, the executive director of the Ohio Association of Second Harvest Foodbanks, a Columbus-based agency that donates food to food banks across the state. A U.S. Census Bureau report released last month confirmed what many volunteers at area food pantries and soup kitchens have known for a long time--that more people in Ohio and Michigan live in poverty today than in past years. Area Census figures Poverty is defined in terms of family size and income. For 2003, the Census Bureau reported that a family of four living on a total annual income of $18,810 or less is considered to be in poverty. And statistical benchmarks show poverty is on the rise in Toledo, Ohio, and Michigan: In the last Census report, Toledo was ranked eighth among cities that have the highest number of children living in poverty. A recent population survey from the Census Bureau found that 12.1 percent of Ohioans were living in poverty in 2003, up from 11.9 percent in 2002, and 11 percent in 2001. In Michigan, 11.4 percent of the population was living in poverty last year, compared to 11.6 percent in 2002 and 9.4 percent in 2001. In 2003, the Toledo-Northwest Ohio Food Bank, Inc., reported that the various food pantries and soup kitchens to which it distributed served 28,000 households. By the end of the first six months of 2004, the same pantries and kitchens reported that 40,000 households were dependent on their services. ``The people we are talking about appear to be invisible, but you see them everyday. They serve you at restaurants, take care of your parents in nursing homes, and make your beds in hotels,'' Ms. Hamler-Podolski said. ``They are the new poor. People who have always had jobs and now, due to plant closings and downsizing, find themselves struggling to put food on the table.'' Demand high at pantries Julie Chase Morefield, the director of marketing and operations at the Toledo-Northwest Ohio Food Bank, agreed. ``The demand at area pantries and kitchens is way up and it has been a problem finding enough food to distribute,'' she said. Her agency serves 330 pantries and soup kitchens in eight northwest Ohio counties, including Lucas, Defiance, Fulton, Henry, Ottawa, Sandusky, Williams, and Wood counties. ``It is worse than we have ever seen it. We've never really seen numbers this high,'' Ms. Morefield said. ``There are a lot of people out there who are really struggling.'' John Urban, a retired vacuum cleaner salesman is one of them. Standing in line for a food bag at the Helping Hands of Saint Louis pantry in East Toledo one recent Tuesday morning, Mr. Urban said his Social Security income of $900 a month no longer was enough to sustain him. ``I come here once a month and they give me enough food to last a couple of weeks,'' said the 64-year-old, who was born on the city's east side. After showing his proof of residence and income, Mr. Urban was handed a brown bag stuffed with loaves of bread, bagels, macaroni, spaghetti sauce, several cans of soup, and powdered milk. The line at the pantry on this particular morning was not very long. That is because it was the beginning of the month, said Linda Lupien, the director of Helping Hands. ``The middle and the end of the month are usually very tough because that's when people run out of money,'' Ms. Lupien said. ``We are seeing new faces every day and people who are hitting the pantry line because they simply cannot make it anymore.'' Al Baumann, a retired pastor at Saint Mark's Lutheran Church in East Toledo, is the director of the Toledo Area Council of Churches, which runs the Feed Your Neighbor program. ``There are a lot more people in Toledo who rely on food donations. You see them everyday, but you just don't know it,'' Mr. Baumann said. ``We serve more than 30,000 families a year through our program.'' Feed Your Neighbor is a food voucher system involving 12 Toledo churches that was started in 1975, when the council of churches started distributing emergency food supplies because of the drastic economic downturn of the 1970s. While the current economic climate is not as dire, Mr. Baumann said the number of people in need of food is growing every month. ``We're finding more people, even in the suburbs, who can no longer make ends meet,'' he said. ``A lot of people are not aware of the economic hardships their neighbors might be experiencing because of the way that we are economically segregated as a society.'' Cutting food stamps Drastic cuts in federal government subsidies to food stamp and similar programs serving the poor is another reason that more people are lining up at food pantries, Mr. Baumann said. According to the Lucas County Department of Jobs and Family Services, there are now 27,784 households receiving food stamps and 4,574 families on cash assistance through the Ohio Works First program. The county has seen a steady increase in the number of people seeking cash and food assistance, said Cindy Ginter, the program manager at Lucas County's Department of Jobs and Family Services. In 2003, the county had 25,286 households on food-stamp rolls and 3,736 families on cash assistance. ``We would like to not have seen this kind of increase, but because of the economy, the numbers just keep increasing,'' Ms. Ginter said. The sluggish economy also is cited by the county's Women, Infants, and Children program for the record number of low-income earning families that depend on its services, said Tom Kuhn, the agency's director. In 1999, WIC, an agency of the Ohio Department of Health's Bureau of Nutrition Services, served 12,326 families in the county. This year, that number has jumped to more than 15,000 families. ``The numbers have been steadily rising, but this is the highest they have ever been,'' Mr. Kuhn said. Sheldon Danziger, a professor of public policy at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, said the federal and state governments are not doing enough to stave the rising numbers of people living in poverty. The Ohio Department of Jobs and Family Services came under fire last week because $431 million in federally-allocated funds have been sitting unused for months in the state's Temporary Assistance for Needy Families account. Director Tom Hayes confirmed the funds are being held while the state and counties design programs to spend the money. Economic problems Mr. Danziger argued that it isn't because of a failure of antipoverty programs that poverty has remained high for Americans since the 1970s. He said it's because the economy has not delivered the benefits of prosperity to all workers, and because politicians and the public have lost faith in the ability of government to deal with the problem of poverty. ``Wage stagnation is one of the reasons that we still see people lining up at food pantries,'' Mr. Danziger said. ``Since the 1990s, labor market changes have meant that workers with a high school education or less have had wage rates that have not grown relative to the rate of inflation.'' He said the government has failed to implement public policies like a higher minimum wage adjusted for inflation, which would be the quickest way to help people who are struggling. The last time the minimum wage was adjusted was in 1997, when it was raised to $5.15 per hour. If it were to be adjusted to current inflation, the professor said, the minimum wage would be $6.10 per hour. Global poverty increase Mr. Danziger said the gap between the rich and poor is not only increasing here, but in many developing nations of the world where more than a billion people continue to face extreme poverty. According to a report released by the World Commission on the Social Dimension of Globalization in February, more than a billion people lived on less than $1 per day in 2000. The commission, which was established in 2002 by the International Labor Organization, a United Nations agency, reported the gap between the richest and poorest countries has widened dramatically in the past four decades. In the U.S., increasing unemployment benefits and implementing more tax credit programs for low-wage earners would be a critical step in helping the unemployed get back on their feet, Mr. Danziger said. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington think tank, 17 States and the District of Columbia so far have enacted earned income tax credits for low income residents, which supplement the federal government credits. Ohio and Michigan, however, are not among them. These tax credits, Mr. Danziger argued, go a long way in meeting day-to-day expenses for low-wage earners. George Garcia, a Toledo truck driver, said he could have used some help when he almost lost his house after breaking both his legs in an accident that left him unemployed for more than six months. ``I was down to the last week and $1,500 behind on my mortgage. I had to tell the children that we were about to lose our home,'' said the 39-year-old father of three. After borrowing from several friends, he kept the family's home. But because he had no health insurance, he spent all his money on medical bills and had to turn to the Cherry Street pantry for food. ``The pantry was great. I always got enough food and when I took it home, it was like I had just come from the grocery store,'' he said. Though he now makes enough to support his family most of the time, Mr. Garcia acknowledged that ``every now and then, I have to go to the pantry to get by.''