- Good morning.
- I'm glad that you've agreed to come here this morning
- and interview with us about the holocaust, and surviving it.
- Can you tell us your name?
- My name is Mike Jacobs.
- I was born in Konin, Poland.
- Our city, the Jewish people settled
- in our city 1397, one of the first cities
- of the Jewish people who settled in Poland.
- I had a family of three brothers, two sisters,
- and my mother and father, and a lot of relatives.
- In 1939, when the Nazis marched into our city, the first thing
- they did, they put a curfew.
- The Jewish people were not allowed
- to walk out from their homes from 6 o'clock at night
- till 6 o'clock in the morning, and the non-Jewish people
- from 9 o'clock till 6 o'clock in the morning.
- They took hostages, Jewish people and non-Jewish people.
- They put them to jail.
- They took also all the intelligentsia, the teachers.
- They took them.
- They brought them up to the Jewish cemetery
- and they were shot, 99% non-Jewish teachers.
- Went into our beautiful ancient synagogue,
- they took out all the prayer books, the Torah,
- the five books of Moses, the prayer shawls and all
- the religious memorabilia, and they put it into the square.
- After they empty it, all everything from the synagogue,
- they made a horse stable.
- And I remember as a little boy singing in choir.
- We used to wear prayer shawls with the little
- you know high yarmulkes, kippahs,
- high ones, special ones.
- And I wanted to save.
- And I went in over there, and I saved my prayer shawl
- and a little yarmulke, or the--
- You mean your own yarmulke?
- Yeah, my own yarmulke, my kippah.
- Now did you say that the Nazis made a horse stable out
- of the synagogue?
- That's correct.
- They made a horse stable out of the synagogue.
- And I remember like today, they brought out
- our rabbi, an elderly gentleman in the 70s,
- and they told him to put a match to it, to the all the prayer
- books, and the Sefer Torahs, or the five books of Moses,
- and it caught on fire.
- I can remember like today, because we
- used to live in the square.
- When it stopped burning, a miracle happened.
- That's what I think was a miracle.
- It start raining.
- For three days and three nights, it was burning.
- For three days and three nights it was raining.
- When it stopped burning, it stopped raining.
- We were not allowed to congregate
- for our daily prayers.
- All the synagogues, and the small and the big synagogues,
- they used to have small little synagogues,
- we used to call the shtiebel, that we were not
- allowed to go and pray.
- If somebody prayed, they had to watch in the front of the house
- and congregate and pray.
- One day, on Friday afternoon, they
- said that everybody should come to the other square.
- In Poland, in the cities, you got small little squares.
- Well how large a town was Konin?
- We had about 3,500 Jewish people.
- And the whole town was about 15,000 people.
- 15,000?
- 15,000, yeah.
- And there was 3,500 Jewish people.
- That's correct, yes.
- And nobody wanted to go to the square.
- But I decided as a little boy, 14 years old, going on 14,
- I decided to go to the square over there.
- I thought just the orchestra is going to play,
- the soldiers are going to march, and I was waiting.
- They brought up two hostages, two people, one Jewish person
- and one non-Jewish person.
- The Jewish man with the name was Schlotzky,
- and the non-Jewish man was Kurovski.
- And they put him into the wall, not knowing
- what's going to happen to them.
- All of a sudden, I saw both people get shot.
- That was the first time in my life I saw people get shot,
- and the first time in my life I saw blood floated down.
- I guess that was the start of the beginning,
- or the beginning of the start.
- When I came home, and I told my parents and my neighbors what
- happened, they couldn't believe it.
- They said, why?
- Those people didn't do nothing.
- See, my father was a hostage too in those days.
- The reason was they said that some German was shot
- in the outskirts of the city.
- And they had to take out two people
- to be shot to let us know that no German should be touched.
- That was the biggest lie they could give.
- Nobody was shot.
- They put in a fear to the populace from this little city.
- We used to live not too far from the German border.
- Konin is not far from Poznan, Posen, that's not
- too far from the German border.
- Now, the provost marshal, what you
- call the guy what was in charge from the city,
- came into our rabbi or to the elders.
- And says, OK.
- We want so much money from you people.
- And the elder said, we cannot deliver it,
- because the people were not rich.
- They were all working, hard-working people,
- very few business people that could afford.
- Most of them hardly made a living.
- And I remember, I went around and started
- to collect money, and deliver to the Germans.
- There was 1,500 zlotys I had to deliver.
- And the 1,500, every day, they knew.
- They knew pretty exactly how much money is in the city.
- Later on, they said they want all the silver.
- I went around and we collect all the silver.
- I remember I took a sack.
- Well, what did you think about all of these things?
- Nothing at all.
- You see, I was young.
- The question is always asked, what do I think?
- I knew I wasn't free anymore.
- I knew that I was not allowed to go to school.
- I knew that I cannot go to the synagogue,
- because I came out from an orthodox family.
- And our city, they were all orthodox,
- and ultra-orthodox families.
- That's what I knew, we're not free anymore.
- I know we cannot go on Friday afternoon,
- but we had the chickens and other things to be ritually
- slaughtered.
- And we were not allowed to do it either.
- Nothing.
- All the freedom of religion was taken away from us,
- all the freedom of movement was taken away from us.
- I remember when I used to walk on the sidewalk,
- in a German SS man or soldier approached us,
- we had to walk down the sidewalk,
- because we are not human.
- We are dogs and dogs are not allowed
- to walk right away over there.
- What did your family--
- did your family have any discussion about this?
- There was silence.
- They could not believe what is happening.
- We did not believe that we are going to be taken out
- and sent away again.
- We knew it's going to be a short war.
- They're going to leave.
- Nobody believed that so high-cultured nation as Germany
- can commit these kind of atrocities and genocide.
- Was there a state of war at the time
- between Germany and Poland?
- Oh, yes.
- The war was already over.
- I mean they occupied Poland.
- OK, so when was your town occupied?
- In 1939.
- What part of 1939?
- A few days after the war broke out.
- What month was that?
- September.
- In September.
- Let's go back a little.
- Because I want to know a little bit about what life
- was like for you and your family in Konin prior to all of this.
- How would you describe that town briefly, and your life
- there, and your family life, and what was going on for you?
- OK.
- In our city, as I mentioned before,
- there were all hard-working families.
- My family was working pretty hard to make a living.
- My father had to work very hard to support six children,
- till in 1935, if I'm correct, my brother became a master tailor.
- Let me explain to you what a master tailor is.
- He had to go to a special school to get a diploma
- that he can keep apprentices, and to teach
- them to be tailors.
- At this time, we already did a little better living
- in our city.
- I remember that it was times that we at night,
- you didn't have anymore bread.
- Because it's not like over here, you go.
- You came into a home.
- You had enough bread.
- You cut as much as you want.
- Over there, you had your slice or two slices
- of bread in the morning, and lunch,
- and they came home for supper the same thing.
- And you had to wait for the next day to have your other meal.
- Because it was a very hard living.
- But we always had enough meat on the table.
- Friday night we had a nice Shabbos.
- In the afternoon, we had our Cholent, and other things.
- We were a very, very close family, very, very close
- family.
- Now, you're talking about your immediate family?
- That's correct.
- Did you have other relatives?
- Oh, yes.
- I had three aunts over there, and lots of cousins,
- and all, they were all working people,
- all working, making a living.
- OK, and this was in Konin?
- All in Konin, yes.
- Did you have relatives in any other part of Europe
- at that time?
- Yes.
- We had not far, 10 kilometers was Tuliszkow.
- I had another two uncles and one aunt and cousins.
- I had another city the name is Kleczew,
- not too far away from Konin, another uncle
- and lots of cousins.
- I had an uncle what I never met in Lask not far from Lodz,
- with lots of cousins.
- And these were all in Poland?
- All in Poland, yes.
- And I had also cousins in South Africa and Johannesburg.
- And did you have grandparents at that time?
- I only remember my grandfather.
- When I was a small kid, when he used
- to come in on Friday night, I had three aunts over there.
- The only thing he came to eat, he came to my mother
- to our house to eat, the grandfather.
- That's all I remember.
- So this was your mother's father?
- My mother's father, yes.
- What do you remember about him?
- Very little.
- I remember he was an old man.
- I remember he was a very pious person because he
- had his own shtiebel.
- That's people used to come in on Friday night
- and Saturday during the day, across the street
- of the synagogue.
- They used to have a small shtiebel where
- people should come to pray.
- They used to have small shtiebels.
- Yeah.
- I'm sure you know about it.
- Yeah.
- And when he passed away, and the Sefer Torahs,
- I remember was given to our big shul.
- And all of us in Simchat Torah like to carry,
- was a small Sefer Torah.
- Was small.
- As a young boy, I used to try to carry, and walk
- around the shul, the bimah.
- How old were you when your grandfather passed away?
- I was about 11 years old.
- OK.
- So this was three years before the events of the holocaust?
- Yeah.
- Maybe longer.
- What were the conditions like for the Jews then?
- Was it very amenable towards them?
- I mean was it very accepting, the conditions in Poland
- prior to the holocaust?
- Prior to the war?
- To the war, yeah.
- I call the 1916, why do I call 1916, the boys what
- were born in 1916, part of another part
- of the city's antisemitism was very big in Poland.
- We used to live in the cradle of antisemitism, Poznan.
- Posen around over there.
- They didn't bother us in our city,
- because we had the youth, 1916 there
- were tall boys and strong.
- And they always said, don't you try
- to come in from the small little cities or small little villages
- to put up a fight or pogrom.
- We never had this experience over there.
- At school, I had problems.
- What problems?
- Because I always left--
- they call about busing over here.
- I say I was bused in 1937 by foot.
- We used to have a Jewish school.
- That wasn't just me, but only Jewish kids
- used to go to the school.
- We used to start to go where the non-Jewish kids used to go,
- because it used to be Catholics and the boys were separated
- from the girls in the same school, but separation.
- And in 1936, they said they're going
- to integrate the Jewish school with the non-Jewish school.
- They took out six boys.
- And I was the lucky one to be between the six boys.
- And we had to walk about a mile and a half, a mile every day
- to school.
- And it wasn't so easy.
- I mean one and a half mile was nothing for a small boy.
- But in winter, with the clothes and other things,
- and the shoes, it was cold to go over there.
- And we were separated, all the six boys, three boys in one 5A
- and 5B.
- And we had some problems because the non-Jewish kids,
- they used to call us the Christ killers.
- And over there in the school when
- you had to get up every time in the morning
- and say your prayer, and we didn't say the prayer.
- they crossed themselves.
- We didn't.
- They couldn't understand why we are not saying the prayers.
- And the teacher used to tell them, or the or the father,
- the priest used to tell them, they have a different belief.
- They don't believe in Jesus.
- And they don't have to pray.
- They could not understand.
- And this didn't stay good with us
- with them, because you know going to the church,
- they were always told about you know the Jewish people,
- about Jesus and so forth.
- And we had a lot of fights.
- We had a lot of Jewish kids had to pay off,
- every time because of the gang.
- I never did.
- I always fought.
- I never did.
- And it was a quiet city.
- They didn't bother us.
- Because I remember one day, they tried to come into our city
- from a small village.
- The 1916 boys, born in 1916, they
- marched in front of the outskirts.
- And they say, OK, that's far as you can go.
- And if you want to fight, you can have it right now,
- and they turned back.
- They never came back over here to our city.
- We knew everybody in the city, the Jewish people,
- non-Jewish people.
- It's a small city.
- Now, when you say city, do you mean the ghetto, or that--
- No, no.
- This was I'm talking before the war.
- OK, so did the Jews live in different parts of Konin
- or just one part of Konin?
- Like in any part in Europe, or any part
- when the Jewish people came to the United States,
- it was not the ghetto.
- The Jewish people used to live closer to the synagogues,
- or to the little shtiebels because over there, we
- didn't drive on Saturdays or on the holidays.
- Because of the orthodoxy?
- Yeah, seem that's all everybody-- very
- few Jewish people used to live on the outskirts
- of the city, very few of them.
- Where the most of them lived pretty close together, right.
- I wouldn't call a ghetto, because we
- used to have a lot of non-Jewish people living also
- too together.
- But we used to live very close together, yes, before the war.
- When did you first hear about a war with Germany and Poland?
- Do you remember any of that?
- Oh, yeah.
- Sure.
- We knew right away in 1939, September the 1st,
- I guess it was they declared the war, because my brother was
- in the army in the in those days.
- And we knew right away.
- Because right away the first day,
- I remember like today, the first day,
- they came in with the Luftwaffe, with the air force,
- and they bombed it.
- And all the Polish soldiers thought they're training.
- The Polish soldiers are training.
- When they came back, what they did
- they start to bomb not the city, but the railroad station.
- They bombed over there the railroad station.
- At this time, they came back.
- They say, oh, no.
- Till we found out these people were
- killed that were over there.
- And I think a few days later, it's wasn't
- about-- it didn't take five, six days, they were in our city.
- Was Konin bombed?
- Konin was bombed on the railroad station, not the city.
- Just the railroad station.
- Just the railroad station, yes.
- Just the railroad station was bombed.
- What did you think about that?
- Still, it's always try to remember
- and, what can a young boy going on 14 think about?
- As I mentioned, I knew something is wrong.
- I always used to question why can
- I not walk out after 6 o'clock at night.
- And that's the only thing I was questioning.
- We did not know what's going to happen to us, still
- didn't know nothing, because this city
- was occupied before World War I too by the Germans.
- So they had been occupied before?
- Yeah, you see, by the Germans till 1918, after the World War
- II, Poland took it back over.
- And that was the life, when the Jewish people in our city what
- want to tell you about my city and the surrounding cities.
- Because what was going on all over,
- I cannot make it up because I want to tell my story
- and my experience.
- Sure.
- OK.
- One day they came into our home and they said
- you're going to be resettled.
- Let me go back.
- You see, when I speak to you, it's like a picture.
- It's coming to me because that's the way I can express myself.
- Just describe the pictures.
- Yeah.
- It was I guess before Sukkot.
- And we had some geese.
- How are you going to kill, if you're not allowed?
- I said I'm going to do it.
- I took a bicycle, with a basket, two geese.
- And I drove into Golina, another 10 miles from Konin,
- and it was over there, a shochet, the guy what
- was killing ritually.
- And I remember I didn't go into his house.
- I don't remember how much I paid him.
- I guess I paid him a zloty.
- That was a lots of money, lots of money, a zloty.
- And outside he had a little shack.
- He killed it.
- He let the blood you know dry out over there,
- and I put it back in the basket and I was driving.
- And all on the road you got lots of SS driving up and down,
- and soldiers, and ask who are you, Jewish or non-Jewish?
- And I didn't look like Jewish.
- And I was driving like a happy little boy,
- with the dirty pants, with torn pants,
- with torn shirt like I'm a little peasant,
- you know driving up and down.
- But I could not make before 6 o'clock.
- And I came into the city.
- And the people know everybody was looking through the window.
- And I came in like nothing happened to the square,
- and I drove in.
- The door was open and I came in.
- You see we still believed, in our belief
- what's about the religion, about the upbringing and so far.
- That's what I used to do.
- And they came in, as I mentioned before,
- so we are going to be resettled.
- We can only take with us but we can carry under our arms.
- We walked out very dark, sad faces.
- I'm sure my mother and my father, my older brothers,
- still didn't understand what's going to happen.
- We did not know what's going to happen.
- We went to the square.
- We gathered all on the square and we marched out
- on the outskirts, where there used to be
- the Polish military school.
- They gathered us together over there.
- And we were waiting at night.
- Here it comes through the loudspeaker
- and they says, anybody what got has jewelry,
- or money, or valuables, should come forward and register,
- and leave it with them.
- When we are going to come to a destination,
- they're going to give us back.
- And people believed it, like any good person believes it.
- And they went over there, and they got a paper.
- And I said to my mother and my father,
- how poor you were over there they had lots of jewelry.
- I remember my mother and everything,
- a gold ring with chains before going to the shul,
- to the synagogue, you know to come to show off, and so far.
- And I said, no.
- We're not going to go.
- Now, it comes midnight.
- Everybody leaves.
- And we marched now again, everybody
- with a little under the arm or under the shoulder, a sack,
- is marching to the railroad station.
- As we came to the railroad station at night,
- they started to push us into the station.
- Now, I remember like today that anybody, small kid, at night
- and you walk you lose the parents.
- And they used to scream mother, father, where are you?
- When they heard this, they separate the kids away.
- They closed the boxcar.
- I guess our boxcar was built, all the boxcars in Poland
- was built for 12 cows.
- I'm sure we brought over there between 70 and 80 people
- over there in the boxcar, very packed in the boxcar.
- And the kids were put in another boxcar,
- as the parents should not know if the kids are going with them
- or not.
- You see?
- And they counted.
- And they say, when you come, you're
- going to come to the destination,
- if anybody is missing, the whole boxcar is going to be taken out
- and be shot.
- And I remember like today, the grown-up people
- used to stay at the windows.
- Some windows you could close and some of them you
- could not close, because they had the barbed wire on it.
- They used to watch that nobody should escape,
- nobody should jump through the window and escape.
- When we came to the destination, they never counted.
- We came in.
- We were traveling for three days and three nights.
- I remember we came into Warsaw.
- And Warsaw, said, no.
- We don't want them.
- Because they were already crowded.
- At this time, we were driving further up to Kielce, Radom,
- till we came to the city of Ostrowiec.
- It took us three days and three nights, no food, no water.
- The boxcar used to be our living room, our dining
- room, our toilet, our cemetery because people
- died of heart attacks, people were squashed for hunger.
- And we used to remember, we used to pile them up
- on the corner of the box car to make more room.
- We came into Ostrowiec, I remember
- Jewish people were waiting over there from the city.
- And we went into a big school in front over there.
- They tried to put us in different homes.
- And I remember they put us in a home,
- with two little small rooms, 16 people, three families.
- Our family consists of eight.
- And my future brother-in-law, and some other two families,
- an aunt of mine with the two daughters, and another
- my future sister-in-law with the family over there, because we
- were staying together.
- And the rest of my family, my relatives, I mean
- were standing in different homes.
- And this was the ghetto.
- People died of hunger, of sickness.
- I remember as a small boy, I still
- did not believe what's going to happen.
- I don't think so too many people believed it,
- what's going to happen.
- People died.
- You looked at them.
- I remember mothers used to put the smaller of the children
- used to beg for food, used to keep the small little child
- close to her breast, but no milk.
- The biggest killer was typhus, because typhus you had the head
- typhus and the stomach typhus.
- And if the quarantine went through after 14 days,
- people survived, if not they were dead.
- In the ghetto again, I used to go out from the ghetto.
- I really don't remember on which arm I used to wear the armband,
- the Jewish people used to wear the armband
- with the star of David.
- Because very seldom I wore one.
- If I did wear one to protect myself,
- I used to roll off my sleeves and keeping something,
- say it's too hot.
- I used to go out and organize, deal with the farmers.
- My brother used to make pants and a jacket,
- and go out and bring in some flour, some food.
- Or I used to go work for the German soldiers helping
- load bread and organizing.
- Stealing was a dirty word.
- Organizing was more sophisticated.
- And I used to bring home and give to my parents.
- My parents used to give to my relatives.
- I used to do a lot of things going out from the ghetto.
- One the doctors used to say, they
- need oranges, oranges and vitamin C for the typhus people
- and so forth.
- And they couldn't get no oranges.
- But I knew.
- I remember like today I can see the picture.
- It was a brewery over there, and had a lots of big basements
- to keep the oranges.
- In the fall or winter, they put in the basement.
- But every basement had a little opening in the front,
- this air can come in.
- And I said to my brother why don't you
- make me a coat, a long coat, with no pockets.
- If I put the oranges in the pocket they don't stay
- in the pocket I kind of put it in, and go down,
- in the thing and I filled up with oranges and I sneaked out.
- And I brought into the hospital.
- I remember the hospital.
- And they asked me, how much do I want.
- I said, nothing.
- I said you asked.
- You need some vitamin C or oranges.
- Here's the oranges.
- And lots of people were saved.
- About that is true of lots of things in the ghetto.
- Go out deal with them, wheel with them.
- How many people were in the ghetto?
- Quite a few people, because I couldn't tell you
- how many people that was there in the ghetto,
- because if I would tell you, I would be dishonest.
- I know there was lots of people, very, very crowded.
- That's what I can tell you, crowded.
- And all the rooms, you used to live
- with-- if you used to live in Ostrowiec,
- and you had two rooms, one room was taken away from you
- to bring in another family.
- OK, or maybe two families over there.
- Over there in this city of Ostrowiec.
- We worked over there till 1942.
- I had a sister.
- My older sister, she was blond and tall,
- and she used to be more out of the ghetto than in the ghetto.
- In fall of 1942, we felt something is going on.
- You can feel it.
- At this time, we said the night before to my sister,
- we tell her, why don't you leave ghetto and go back
- to your friend, girlfriend, and stay with her over there
- till everything is blowing over?
- And she says, no.
- She's going to stay with the family.
- So she had a friend outside of the ghetto?
- The ghetto, yes.
- A non-Jewish friend?
- A non-Jewish friend, yes.
- And she didn't want to go.
- She says, she wants to stay with the family.
- OK, fine.
- What can you do?
- She didn't want to go.
- So was it three years since you had been moved into the ghetto?
- Yeah, three years, yes from 1939 to 1942, exactly three years.
- And they came in, in the morning.
- You could see the Jewish police the ghetto running around,
- scared already.
- So one thing I can be proud of, of my brother, when
- they came in, they want him to be a policeman
- because he was a war veteran.
- We were fighting the war.
- And he came home.
- He says, he don't want to be a policeman.
- And I, myself, I asked him, why don't you
- want to be a policeman?
- Take a look.
- When you are a policeman, you can organize more,
- bring lots of food to the family.
- And he looked at us, and he says, look,
- if he is going to be a policeman,
- he will hurt other people.
- And he didn't want it.
- He didn't become a policeman.
- At this time in the morning, again, they come into our home.
- And they said, there again, anything what you can carry.
- You leave, and we start marching.
- Now this was the Germans that came in?
- Yeah, the Germans.
- Yeah sure, yeah.
- Mr. Jäger was the in charge of the Aussiedlung, of the what
- you call to take out the Jewish people from the city.
- And we start marching.
- One brother and one sister, we says don't go.
- Go up to the attic.
- But they brought them back later on.
- They caught it, you know?
- As we were marching to the square--
- So are you saying that part of your family went,
- but part of your family didn't?
- That's right.
- Later on, they brought them back,
- they caught them, brought them back to the square right away.
- You see, they knew.
- They knew with the attics.
- Because in this ghetto used to live Polish people too,
- not too many.
- They used to live there.
- They didn't want them to move.
- Everything was worked so with camouflage.
- They don't worry about every--
- still is a ghetto, still the only thing
- you can go out from the ghetto when you went to work, under--
- you had to have your identification card,
- you're going to work.
- Or you went with the SS or the police to work.
- And they brought you back at night and you came back.
- And when we went to the big square,
- I took a look to my left.
- And I see they're selecting people over there.
- At this time, I saw my older brother, the next to me,
- I said, come on with me.
- I'm going to go to the square.
- I said, come on.
- I grabbed him by the hand, and I said goodbye
- to my parents and relatives.
- The dark faces, the sad faces, could never
- see screaming and yelling people, and pushing
- and everything, not knowing what's going on.
- And I came to this selection.
- They tried to push me and my brother back over there.
- They didn't want it to go over there.
- I sneaked through.
- As I sneak through, they put us in a small little street,
- in a small little place.
- We were waiting.
- And later, we marched in.
- And I still don't know how fast they
- built it, a small little ghetto, again small, very small,
- maybe 20 buildings over there.
- We were about 1,500 people.
- And I don't know where my parents went.
- They went through the same thing.
- They went into the boxcars, and they traveled.
- We were in the ghetto.
- My brother in a short time decided to run away.
- He went to the underground, to the partisans, where he fought
- and he was killed in 1943, February 1943,
- in a small little city of Kunow.
- Fought the Germans, did a good job.
- But to my regret, didn't die fighting.
- We had two partisans in Poland, Armia Ludowa and Armia Krajowa.
- One partisan who was that they're
- going to fight together, Jewish, Poles, and other nationalities.
- And one underground says, no we are
- going to liberate Poland, Poland by Poles.
- They came in, not knowing what you call their word--
- they knew exactly what is the answers.
- But they used to live underground, underground.
- They search underground.
- And they said they wanted to check their weapons
- because they're going to be transferred to another place,
- to a bigger partisans, more bigger group to fight.
- And they believed it.
- As they give away all the guns to be looked over,
- the machine gun cut them down, threw in a grenade
- and three of them survived.
- Was this the group of the mixed partisans?
- Yes.
- That's what the polish partisans, the Armia Ludowa.
- Oh.
- OK.
- And the three ran away, they were wounded.
- They came into my cousin who lives now in Canada.
- He worked for this guy.
- He never went to camp, my cousin.
- He worked for the guy in a distillery.
- And he was taking care of his pigs and his cows over there,
- and other things.
- And they came back and they told what happened.
- That's why my brother was killed over there.
- OK?
- And my cousin later on ran away, also to the underground
- until the war was over.
- Now, I'm not understanding exactly what you're saying.
- Are you saying that this was a trap, that your brother was
- killed in an ambush?
- The brother was killed on the pretenses
- by the Polish underground, by the underground,
- what they said, that Poland can only be liberated by Poles.
- OK.
- This was the other group?
- Another group, yes.
- We had yes.
- So the other group that was Polish and non-Jewish,
- they killed the mixed partisans?
- That's correct.
- Yeah, this was only Jewish partisans, only Jewish.
- Because you had partisans that used
- to fight Jewish and non-Jewish together.
- They used to fight over there against the Nazis.
- But you had a group with only Poles, nobody else.
- They were the big anti-Semites.
- And they came in the pretenses that they're going to--
- they had the what do you call the war?
- How do you say it in English?
- When you want to come in somebody, you give a no--
- oh gosh.
- OK, that's slipped my mind.
- And that's why they were killed over there.
- My brother was killed.
- So there's the regret that at least he
- would be killed fighting the Germans,
- not to fight, not to stay over there and be caught.
- So he was really betrayed by the--
- By the Polish underground.
- By the Polish underground.
- That's correct, yeah.
- He was betrayed.
- Yes.
- And myself, being in the ghetto, they took me out to work.
- What was my job was to go in from house to house,
- and take out all the belongings and load on trucks.
- And I used to work under an SS man.
- The name was Holzer.
- And we used to go from house to house,
- and take out the heavy furniture.
- It was small and thin.
- I was thinking we used to take out some furniture,
- that the furniture would put me to the ground and cover me.
- But I was strong.
- I had to be strong, never give up.
- And load different things.
- First thing, when you came in, you had to knock at the wall.
- If the wall was hollow, you passed it.
- If it wasn't hollow, you ripped away the wall,
- because the people still believed that someday they're
- going to come back, they can find the valuables
- or their other things what they hide over there in the wall,
- and have it.
- Because nobody believed they're going to go away and never
- come back.
- You see nobody believed it.
- And sometimes you came into a room.
- It's unbelievable.
- That was spick and span.
- The people, what lived over there, they
- say, if we going to leave, they cleaned up quick the room,
- put everything in order.
- But they're going to come back everything
- is going to be nice and clean.
- OK?
- And I was going from one house to the other.
- But I was always trying to push myself to go into where
- my family used to live.
- And I came to the room where my family--
- can you imagine to come into the family,
- not knowing they're not over there.
- No, they're not over there anymore.
- And I had to take the clothes, my own clothes, and load
- on the trucks to be sent away.
- And later on, I found out they went to Treblinka.
- And as you know, Treblinka was a camp of no return.
- But that's what I was told, between 700,000 or 800,000
- people died over there.
- They went right away to the gas chambers and the crematoriums.
- This was a camp, and that's where they went,
- that's what the most people went from Ostrowiec, Radom,
- around the vicinity.
- Do you mean your mother and father went to Treblinka?
- Yeah, and my all my relatives, my brothers and sisters.
- Yes, all except one brother who had died in the partisans.
- Except for you and your brother that separated yourself
- from the family?
- That's correct.
- When you separated yourself out from the family,
- did you say anything to your own family
- about why you were separating yourself out?
- Nothing.
- You see, you have to make quick decision.
- They do not know.
- They say, say goodbye.
- I waved goodbye to them.
- And I moved away right quick, not saying
- what I'm going or not.
- What made you think that that was the thing to do?
- I had-- I don't know, some intuition or something
- what a drive not to go, because I was afraid
- if I'm going to go to the square,
- I don't want to go away anymore, be transported or do something.
- I don't know what the other group was selected to.
- I took a chance.
- I took a chance to go over there,
- and it worked out the right chance.
- I did the right thing what I did,
- because not knowing at all.
- And the parents looked at me, and what could they say?
- Hoping that maybe I'm going to be saved or not.
- Let me come back now to the hardest
- thing was to come into a room, where you could not breathe,
- was smelling.
- Because the mothers left their infant children in the cribs,
- hoping that the Polish neighbor will hear a small little child
- crying, come in, and take her out from the crib,
- and take them into the house.
- Because they will not know who the parents are.
- OK?
- God knows how long the diapers or the milk
- was not changed, how long the small infant child didn't eat.
- Some of them are already dead, and some of them were crying.
- Sergeant Holzer says to me, go ahead, and pick it up.
- I picked up the small child, wet, crying.
- I can still feel the warmth in my hand.
- I can still hear the small little child crying,
- and I was the most--
- I was so scared my body was trembling, because I knew when
- I'm going to take this child outside,
- I will have to leave it outside to be shot, because anybody
- what was caught between the ceilings,
- between the floors and the attics and the basement,
- any Jewish person was hiding was taken out
- in front of their home, and everybody was shot.
- You could see the gutters blood flowing down every day,
- hundreds of people being shot.
- I was going down, carrying this little child, trembling.
- As I walked down, he says to me.
- Sergeant Holzer says to me, the SS man, go ahead.
- Take it to the building, tall building.
- And I saw my friends also carrying small little children.
- I took it to the tall building.
- And they say, leave it over there and come down to work.
- When I left it over there, I was the happiest teenager
- in my life.
- Because I said to myself, see?
- I left this child over there.
- They're going send it back to Germany.
- It's going to grow up as a German.
- They would not know who the parents are
- and that's all it's about, and I was going on with my work.
- And some food, I had pretty much food.
- Because people left the food.
- I sneaked.
- I ate as much as I could, because he was watching me
- that I should not stuff myself.
- Sometimes I put it in my pocket, brought it into the ghetto.
- And I was walking down.
- I looked up to the tall building.
- I said, no.
- My eyes are playing tricks.
- I looked again.
- I said, no.
- It's true.
- And I could not understand and it's very hard for me
- to understand until today, those SS people,
- they were married people.
- They had their own children.
- They used to go home at night, played with them,
- cuddled them, loved them.
- How can they do this?
- Those little children what we carried to the tall building
- were thrown out through the windows,
- and they were standing, and laughing, and smiling,
- and they were taking potshots on the small little children.
- That was not enough.
- They were taking bets which child is going to travel faster
- to hit the pavement.
- Smiling, like we throw out little balls.
- They took by the small little feet and they dropped it.
- That's what one human could do to the other.
- If we are complacent and silent, and we say to ourselves,
- it's not going to happen to me, it's
- going to happen to the next guy.
- I can it happen to anybody.
- As I do speak to you over here, as I'm
- interviewed by you people, I do not speak with hate.
- Because hate breeds hate.
- That's what Hitler with his machinery and his collaborator
- started all about.
- I'm not bitter either.
- I should be very bitter.
- I lost my whole family.
- Relatives, what I can remember, what I can count up to 80.
- I'm over here to share with you and the future generations
- my experience that future generations
- can listen to our holocaust, to the holocaust survivors,
- to the living holocaust survivors, what one human could
- do to the other.
- If we sit back and say it's not going to be me,
- it's going to be the next guy, I'm
- over here to tell the story.
- It was a holocaust.
- 6 million Jewish people died, about a million children,
- non-Jewish people died too.
- Were you the only survivor of your family?
- I'm the only survivor of my family except the cousin.
- Of my family, yes.
- I'm the only survivor.
- Of your immediate family?
- Yes.
- And you're the only survivor of your extended family
- except for a cousin?
- A cousin who lives now in Canada.
- He was in the underground, and one cousin what ran away
- to Russia during the war.
- That's the two cousins, what were before the war
- living in Poland.
- And one cousin, as I mentioned before, went for long time
- ago to South Africa to Johannesburg.
- And you counted that there were at least 80 members?
- What I can remember, yes.
- What I can remember, counted down,
- because my daughter is making a tree, a family tree,
- and she wanted to know what I can remember.
- And that was going on day in and day out I had to live.
- As a teenager, I had to live day in and day
- out, see the people get shot, and still I
- couldn't make no faces, I couldn't tell
- them-- show them that I'm weak.
- But always I had hope.
- I never lost my hope and my belief
- that someday I'm going to be free.
- I remember one night in Ostrowiec,
- my mother used to look out from the window.
- Look out at night, nobody.
- We couldn't walk out.
- You could see still the Polish people walking on the street.
- Looked out through the window, was a nice clear night
- with stars on the sky.
- And she looked out with a sad face worrying about what's
- going to be the tomorrow.
- Maybe they knew about it.
- I don't know.
- They don't want to talk about, you see?
- At this time, she looked at me and she says to me, Mendel--
- my name is to be Mendel.
- And she looked at me and she says, Mendel,
- one day we are going to separate ourselves.
- You're going to go your way, and she is going to go her way.
- I still don't know what my mother is talking about.
- And she says, she's not worrying about me.
- She says, Mendel, when they throw you in a fire,
- you will not burn.
- You will always walk out alive.
- And she says when you go by yourself
- and you walk the street, never forget.
- I never thought about it till after the war,
- when I was separated, when I was liberated,
- when I started to reminiscent.
- Back home, what was going on?
- How was life?
- How was a family life?
- Because I did not have a family life, because I was young.
- See, one of us outside to talk about, how nice as a teenager
- to come home, to be scolded, to be screamed at.
- You cannot go out and in.
- I had not this opportunity.
- I didn't have this opportunity as a teenager
- to be a free teenager.
- I was a dead teenager.
- I did not experience the freedom what
- all the teenagers have now.
- And she says when you walk on the street
- and a person is approaching you, and he says or she says,
- I'm hungry, if he don't eat, she don't eat, will die.
- And I say, OK, mother, he will die.
- And she looked at me with her eyes
- I can see it now, looking with the babushka on her head,
- with the shawl, because it was cold with the shawl.
- Looked at me, and she says, Mendel, your stomach is full.
- I says, yes.
- Do you have a penny in your pocket.
- I says, yes, mother.
- I says, you hear what the guy said?
- If he don't eat, he's going to die.
- Give him the penny.
- I say, mother how can I give away my last penny?
- Tomorrow I have to buy me a slice of bread
- and fill up my stomach.
- And she says to me again, she looks at me with her eyes.
- And she says to me, you see, don't worry about tomorrow.
- With this penny, you're saving a life today.
- Then she stopped.
- And I didn't think nothing about it.
- What do I think about it?
- OK, she told me the story.
- And that's what I would like to say
- is, how our family was again, as I
- mentioned, a very close family.
- And I was working day in and day out.
- Finally, one day when everything was cleaned out, the city
- was cleaned out--
- So you were 17 when you saw your parents for the last time?
- 16.
- 16, going on 16.
- While in the ghetto, I decided it's time to go.
- I could hear.
- I could feel something is going to happen.
- But when, I did not know.
- At this time, I decided to leave ghetto.
- But I decided the wrong day.
- The whole ghetto was encircled with Polish police,
- SS people, gendarmerie, German police encircled already.
- At this time, I say, OK.
- I don't care.
- I'm going to take a chance.
- I took two towels, like I remember like today.
- I took two towels under my arm.
- I went to the wooden fence I knocked out
- two planks of the wooden fence.
- Here stays a lady.
- She wants to go too.
- I said why don't you go first.
- She says, oh, no.
- You go first.
- The reason I told her to go first, now I'm now I'm
- egotistic already.
- When she goes out first, and somebody on the other side,
- she's going to get shot.
- I cannot go out of this thing.
- She says, no.
- I'm not going to go, she says.
- At the moment she said this, I walked out.
- But it was before 9 o'clock at night.
- I'm walking.
- Here as a remember, I see the SS man,
- I forgot his name with his white shepherd dog,
- looking at the vacation pass, everybody I had my Polish.
- I forged.
- I had my [NON-ENGLISH].
- And I'm whistling very nicely, nothing happens.
- I'm walking like, and he didn't bother me
- because he was busy with the other guy.
- And now I have to decide.
- Should I run away through the fields,
- or should I go straight?
- If I go straight up, I'm going to the SS headquarters.
- Should I go down over there?
- The dogs are going to bark and they're
- going to see a Jewish guy is running away.
- They're going to say Jude, Jude, and they're going to catch me.
- I say better go to my right, around the cemetery.
- And I went around the cemetery.
- Now I have to decide again to go through the field,
- through the orchards.
- And I decided not to.
- I'm afraid of the dogs.
- I'm going straight here.
- I'm hearing halt. [GERMAN],, stop.
- Come over here.
- And I'm walking, finally they say [POLISH]..
- That's mean Polish.
- I have to understand.
- And I walk closer to SS men.
- And I would not believe it.
- Guess who it was over there?
- Sergeant Holzer, Ausweis, identification card.
- I take out.
- He looks at it.
- And I could not understand why he didn't recognize me,
- because I was different dressed like a Polish peasant
- and so far.
- And he says, you know, it's close to 9 o'clock.
- 9 o'clock, you better get home.
- What it was, I used to work at the Hermann Göring Werke,
- and the identification pass had Hermann Göring Werke,
- they used to build a railroad cars.
- Over there was a steel mill.
- And I said, where are you going?
- I say I'm going to my aunt to fix her stove.
- And I remember like today I went through
- the little narrow street.
- I went into it.
- Then I came to the field I wasn't worrying about.
- And here I'm walking through the fields.
- I had my gun.
- I had my gun already.
- And now, if they say come with us, to them,
- I had no choice to shoot him and run,
- or I would be caught or do something I don't know today.
- And I walk, and I could see a shadow walking.
- And I say, this walk is very familiar to me.
- I went into the-- it was high wheat.
- I went into the wheat, and I saw him, and I knew who it was,
- Mr. Chmelnik.
- And he says, where are you going, I ask him.
- He says he's going to the ghetto.
- What for are you going to the ghetto?
- I said, they were hiding with a Polish family,
- by 18, 19 people.
- And he says he's going to go because they
- have hidden money over there you know underground.
- I said, don't go now, because the ghetto is encircled.
- If you go there you're going to be dead.
- He says, he's going to go.
- I say, if you're going to go and honest, that's what I told him,
- I'm going to shoot you.
- You better get back.
- And he knew how I was.
- Because we were born in the same city.
- You know we were resettled.
- A landsman?
- Yeah, a landsman, yeah.
- And finally, he decided, it was more than this.
- Because I knew he was hiding someplace.
- Now I have the place where to go.
- And I'm walking with him.
- He says, Mike, where are you going?
- I'm going with you.
- He says, you cannot, because we are crowded over there.
- We have so much money to pay for every head.
- We have to pay.
- We don't have it.
- Finally, I decided not to.
- I said the only thing I want from you
- is give me enough money to buy a bottle of vodka.
- It was not a bottle of vodka, I wasn't drinking anyway.
- You see, but OK.
- This will be you know the thing that I got from him.
- I went away.
- And I went to a little store over there.
- But I used to deal with them before,
- bringing pants and other things from the ghetto.
- And I was sitting over there.
- They were looking for us.
- Yes, when I walked out from the ghetto, one guy was shot.
- They brought him back.
- They buried them.
- And guess who they thought was shot?
- Me.
- He looked like a blond like me.
- Everybody knew I was shot.
- I'm dead.
- I'm buried.
- OK.
- I came into the store, and I was sitting over there.
- And here I hear cars going up and down.
- They're coming in and I say, uh-oh.
- At this time, I couldn't act this way.
- I put some vodka on me, and everything like a drunkard.
- And they asked, I could hear they asked the lady over there.
- Who's this guy?
- And she says I'm a farmhand over here on the thing.
- And they grab me by my hair up and down, and I'm dead drunk.
- I look up I'm dead drunk.
- They talk to me.
- He says, oh he's a drunkard.
- Leave him alone.
- They walked away.
- But I couldn't stay too long.
- If the husband would be over there, he would say I'm Jewish.
- And I went away.
- I knew another ranger in the forest.
- And I was standing with them for four weeks over there,
- and everything you know I went to church on Sunday,
- and I knew all the prayers, and everything.
- And they asked the people, the forest ranger
- where I came from.
- They say from Krakow.
- What I'm doing over here?
- I'm sent by the German government to buy the lumber,
- they cut the you know the trees and send back to Germany
- and so far.
- But the neighbor, the neighbor the other forest ranger, they
- never talked to each other.
- All of a sudden, he came in and he looked at me.
- He talked to me.
- He couldn't recognize who I was again.
- At this time, we started to get a little bit fishy.
- We were afraid.
- He says, Mike, you have to leave.
- To go to his brother, about 20 miles away.
- And he will try to see that I will get to Germany,
- and to get to work in Germany.
- And at this time, I walked.
- I came down I see a bunch of guys walking.
- And I say, oh there's some Jews in town,
- because I didn't know what happened to the ghetto.
- You And I walk.
- And they see me.
- Everybody knew me, because I was in the underground.
- Everybody knew me.
- And they were walking, and they passed me by.
- And I said, maybe it's an SS man not too far,
- and they don't want to say I'm Jewish.
- I say, hey guys, don't you recognize me?
- And they look at me.
- They said, Mike, we were thinking it's a ghost.
- Weren't you shot?
- We buried you over there in the ghetto, in the cemetery?
- I say, no.
- It was a different guy.
- I said, what's going on?
- I say, it's a camp.
- It's not so bad.
- We go to work.
- That's my brother used to work over
- there, build fish hatcheries.
- And the guy, Mr. Jäger, the guy, the SS man
- was in charge on the transportation,
- now the Jewish people from the city.
- And he didn't want my brother come back over there.
- My brother was so sure that he's going to be
- selected to go to work for him.
- No, the new people.
- And I say, I tell you something.
- I go back with you to the camp.
- And I went back to camp, because it
- was very hard as a Jewish person to run around you
- know in the Polish villages and so far,
- if you don't have somebody who will protect you.
- What was the name of the camp?
- Ostrowiec.
- I went into camp.
- Now you worked over there in camp till 1944.
- Now, was this a concentration camp?
- It was-- you can call it, it wasn't a crematoriums and gas
- chambers, no.
- People were shot and tortured, and buried right away in camp,
- outside camp.
- But it was a camp.
- You know, people died.
- I mean it was a working camp, what they called.
- It was a labor camp.
- A labor camp.
- To me, it's a concentration camp.
- You can call it-- anybody can call it what they want.
- All the Jews were concentrated over there.
- OK.
- It's very hard to me, it's very hard
- to make a definition between a concentration camp and a labor
- camp.
- Now, you said that you were working for the underground.
- Yes.
- When did you start working for the underground?
- At the time when my brother went to the underground,
- because I used to buy weapons from a German soldier
- for good money, and he used to sell me lots
- of lots of guns and ammunition.
- And you used to provide that to the underground?
- The underground, yes.
- Over there.
- In 1944, the Russians come close to Ostrowiec.
- And I was working in a brick factory
- upstairs, where all the ovens, and the heat was up there.
- We used to make the bricks, special bricks for the mill.
- And we heard the Russian are coming.
- We could hear the cannons and so far.
- One tank came in, one friend of mine ran away.
- I didn't have a chance to put on my clothes and go.
- And they surrounded this camp they.
- Took everybody back to Ostrowiec, I mean to the camp.
- I, with a guy who lives now in Israel, Mr. Neumann,
- I decided this guy never went to camp.
- He was a furniture maker, a craftsman.
- It's unbelievable what he was doing for this guy who
- was in charge, a German.
- And he was staying over there in this little factory where
- we used to work all the time.
- And I went to him.
- I said, look, they're taken us back to camp.
- God knows where they're going to send us.
- At this time, we went up, upstairs in the attic.
- We were hiding.
- I guess somebody knew about it and they caught us.
- And I say to Neumann, OK, let's say the last prayer.
- They're going to take us down and shoot us.
- And I could hear them talking in German, the SS.
- We're going to save a few bullets.
- We're going to take them back to camp.
- Where did they go, they will never come back.
- I guess again somebody upstairs had a look over us.
- I was 100% sure we were going to get shot.
- Went into camp, they put us into boxcars.
- We going to destination unknown again.
- We're traveling, we're traveling come into Birkenau.
- We came into Birkenau, the boxcars
- opened, went down on the ramp.
- And we were waiting.
- As we were waiting, the orchestra was playing.
- This was 1944.
- '44, the orchestra was playing.
- And I say to my friends, my god.
- Take a look.
- We came into a paradise, clean, the orchestra
- is playing, welcoming us.
- Everybody's smiling and laughing.
- From the other side, the other side of the ramps
- was the women's camp, FL, the Frauenlager,
- what they used to call.
- A half a dozen women came out, and they
- were waving, on us, smiling.
- I ask the prisoners over there, hey, what's going on.
- Where are we?
- The answer was a smile.
- I'm sure they were not allowed.
- We were waiting.
- I look to my right.
- And I saw smoke coming out from the chimneys.
- And I said to my friends, you know,
- when they ask me what profession I am, I say I'm a baker.
- You know, if I'm a baker, and they select me
- I work in a bakery.
- I will never go hungry.
- OK, we were waiting.
- We were waiting.
- Here comes two people, more SS walking up and down,
- walking up and down, looking in the eyes,
- I remember I was short and skinny.
- I stood up on my toes, pulled in my stomach,
- looked them straight in their eyes.
- They pass by back and forth, and come back.
- And still don't know what's going on over there.
- You see?
- And now he says, to you right, to your left, to your right,
- to your left.
- I was chosen to your right, to my right.
- We were waiting.
- Now, the first group to walk down the ramp
- was the people to the right.
- And I walked down with the ramp with my friends,
- lots of my school friends, walked down over there.
- one survived, lives in New Jersey.
- The rest of them, all my school friends, they're all gone.
- From the original town of Konin?
- Konin, yes.
- We walked down.
- We come closer to those chimneys,
- with the smoke come out.
- And I say, hey, you don't smell the aroma of bread,
- it smells like skin.
- I say, oh, so many prisoners over here.
- They're killing lots of horses and cows.
- They don't know what to do with the hide.
- They're burning the hide.
- We walked around to our right, and we went into a barrack.
- And we were waiting.
- The door opened.
- They say, undress yourself.
- We undress yourself, they give us a towel and soap.
- We crossed over to the sauna.
- It was a little room over there with a little small pool.
- You stepped into the pool before you went in, because they
- had a disinfectant over there.
- You walked in.
- It was burning.
- Because the most of us had what they call boils, or cut feet.
- That's nothing.
- We had come in hot water, you hardly could stand it.
- The boy was going over our faces and our bodies, cold water.
- You went into another barrack they gave you clothes.
- And I remember like today, they gave me
- a jacket I could go around five Mikes.
- OK, they gave me the jacket, OK, with the pants.
- They gave me civilian shoes.
- Some of them got, wooden shoes.
- They were the Holland shoes.
- I had the civilian shoes.
- We walked in to another camp, not knowing
- where the camp is all about, what
- we call the quarantine camp.
- As we walked into the quarantine camp, we were waiting.
- You had to stretch out your arm.
- As you stretched out your arm, they gave you a number,
- a tattoo number.
- They gave you the tattoo number.
- And as they gave me my tattoo, B4990, the SS men came to me.
- And they says to me, do you know what this number all about?
- I said, no sir.
- OK, let me tell you now.
- You are being dehumanized.
- And you're a number.
- I still don't know what he was talking about.
- OK, I still don't know.
- OK.
- And I was waiting, and waiting, and waiting
- for my other friends to come.
- They went through the same procedure, no difference.
- But answer to go over the other side to the sauna, what
- they call it Kanada.
- --with a little small pool.
- You stepped into the pool before you went in
- because they had the disinfectant over there.
- You walked in.
- It was burning because most of us had--
- what do you call--
- boils or cut feet.
- That's nothing.
- Here come with hot water.
- You hardly could stand it.
- The [? buoy ?] was going over our faces
- and our bodies, cold water.
- You went into another barrack.
- And they gave you clothes.
- And I remember like today.
- They gave me a jacket I could go around five Mikes.
- OK.
- They gave me the jacket, OK, with the pants.
- They gave me civilian shoes.
- Some of them got wooden shoes.
- They were the Holland shoes.
- I had the civilian shoes.
- We walked in to another camp, not knowing
- where the camp is all about, what
- we called the quarantine camp.
- As we walked into the quarantine camp, we were waiting.
- You had to stretch out your arm.
- As you stretched out your arm, they gave you a number,
- a tattoo number.
- They give you the tattoo number.
- And as they gave me my tattoo number, B4990,
- the SS man came to me.
- And they says to me, do you know what this number all about?
- I said no, sir.
- OK, let me tell you now.
- You are being dehumanized.
- And you a number.
- Still don't know what he was talking about.
- OK, I still don't know.
- OK?
- And I was waiting and waiting, waiting for my other friends
- to come.
- They went through the same procedure, no difference.
- But answer to go over the other side to the sauna,
- what they call it--
- Kanada.
- They went into-- there were four buildings
- over there, crematorium 1, 2, 3, and 4, 4 buildings.
- They were pushed in, up to 1,500 people, with a towel and soap.
- The door closed behind them.
- Instead water to come out from the shower
- heads, a Zyklon B [INAUDIBLE] choking poison.
- How do I know?
- Because I was very, very interested
- to be in the underground again.
- I was interested in everything.
- Because I knew someday I'm going to be free.
- I always believed that someday I'm going to be free.
- And I were the moment I'm going to be free,
- I will never stop talking about the Holocaust.
- I will never try to tell people what one human could
- do to the other.
- That we must know about it.
- We cannot be any more caught off guard, like we,
- the 6 million Jewish people, were caught off guard
- in Europe.
- So long as we know about it, I believe we will never
- let it happen again.
- If we say to ourselves no, silence and complacency
- is the biggest killer.
- I was told later by the sonderkommando, when
- they opened the door, she asked them questions.
- Most of the people were pushing themselves to the corners,
- hoping they can have pockets of air in the corner.
- And the most of the people were scattered around
- to cover the small little children,
- hoping they can breathe longer.
- They had to go in with axes and separate them, one by one.
- As they brought them out, they looked into their mouths.
- If they had gold teeth, the gold teeth were knocked out.
- If they couldn't, they ripped out the jaws.
- And all the women's hair was cut off.
- That's what's going in day in and day out.
- In a barrack, I used to-- over there after the quarantine,
- they took me into a camp, what they called
- a camp D, the working camp.
- They put us in a barrack, up to 1,500 people,
- built for 60 horses.
- Was a long stove going through the barrack.
- Was never heated in winter.
- In the morning, we used to get up
- two or three hours before work.
- On the roll call, we were standing over there.
- And the SS man, every barrack used to be 30 barracks.
- Every barrack-- I mean 20 barracks, used to be.
- Every barrack is to have a own commandant, an SS man.
- And every barrack is to have a Blockalteste
- with the schreiber.
- That the mean the secretary.
- And they work in the barrack, prisoners, only one commander.
- Used to come, used to go up and down, look in your eyes.
- They like your look, took off your number.
- You went to work.
- At night, they call your number.
- They took you out, you never returned.
- In the morning, we used to get a little bit, slice of bread,
- with ersatz kaffee, a synthetic coffee.
- We went by to work by orchestra.
- We came home by orchestra.
- People were tortured by orchestra.
- Everything by the best musicians in Europe
- because when they said you want to take with you what
- you can carry, this mean the musician
- would take his instrument.
- Or she would take the instrument.
- You know, they brought to camp, they knew pretty close
- who was a good musician, what he played,
- and everything, that they used to play.
- Lunchtime, we got a little bit soup.
- Evening, the same thing.
- That tired, working 10 hours, 12 hours a day, beaten, kicked.
- Come back to, went to the bed, sleeping on bunks, 4, 5, 6,
- 7 people, small bunks, wooden bunks.
- We used to have a blanket.
- We used to call, we used to pull one, each other off.
- You tried to pull one each other off.
- Roll call again.
- Everybody goes down from both sides of the of the barracks,
- standing half asleep, dead tired,
- not knowing what's going on.
- The SS man comes in, make selections.
- Two hours later, everybody goes back to bed.
- Two hours later, he calls the number.
- Goes out, never returns.
- Because new transports used to come in day in, day out.
- 1944, when the last solution of the Jewish people,
- they used to burn.
- Is unbelievable when gas between 10 and 15,000 people a day.
- Small little kids to save 100th of a penny, that's
- what I believe.
- They didn't want to put into the gas chambers.
- They put throw them into the pits, the big pits,
- to burn them in the pits because the crematoriums couldn't
- burn as fast.
- One night, being in the underground, I come back.
- Maybe you're going to ask me the question what the underground
- used to do in Auschwitz.
- Maybe I told you on my own.
- I heard the orchestra playing.
- Children are singing and dancing.
- I went to the back door and looked out, put out my head
- very-- not too much.
- Because the searchlight used to go on all over the barracks.
- And the machine guns used to be pointed.
- And if they see, they took out the head.
- They get you.
- They can cut you off pretty quickly because you don't
- know when he pulls the trigger.
- I heard singing and dancing and screaming and yelling.
- See, I could take a stone and throw to the crematoriums, camp
- D, so close.
- When the wind was blowing the wrong way,
- you could smell, you know, the odor.
- People screaming and yelling.
- What happened, I found out, that the children
- were singing and dancing while their mothers and their fathers
- and their brothers and sisters are burning alive.
- When the pits quiet down, they were pushed in, too.
- That's what we have to live, day in and day out.
- It's hard to believe it.
- Again and again, I will mention what one human
- could do to the other.
- And that's what I had to live, day in and day out, over there.
- I was working in the [NON-ENGLISH],,
- what we call a scrapyard where the planes used to come in.
- And we used to take them apart, the aluminum, the copper
- wiring, the steel.
- What planes are you talking about?
- The German planes were shot down.
- They used to take them apart, the aluminum, the copper,
- and the steel, and would load them on different cars
- and send them back to the mills to be remelted again to make
- new aluminum, new steel.
- And I was working a kommando, the one Jewish guy,
- 28 Russian officers, and the kapo and Austrian German.
- That's a group that you worked with?
- Yes.
- In the camp?
- In the camp, yeah, on the C Lager [INAUDIBLE]..
- You see, we used to go up to 1,500 people.
- But everybody had a different kapo.
- And they had a little tent outside.
- I pushed in the--
- I was chosen to be a ranger master.
- This means I used to drive the train with the air force men.
- It was an air force man.
- And sometime he drive and I used to uncouple,
- you know, to set the different cars on different railroad
- stations.
- Yeah.
- And then they asked me once, the Russian guys,
- why were Russians over there?
- They ran away from a prison camp and they were caught,
- they were sent to Auschwitz from lieutenants
- to what is next to a general.
- The generals didn't go to work.
- You could see the generals with their long coats with all
- their medals, the Russian generals with the beard
- and camp.
- They never went to work, but they went to war.
- And they used to always ask me, when
- you're pushing in the planes, before you're
- going to push in I have to check the airplanes, you know,
- shut down airplanes.
- And they say, if you see some guns in the front wings,
- tell us.
- I said oh, yes.
- This car got the guns.
- This car got guns.
- And I didn't know what it's all about.
- Right?
- I didn't want to know what it's all about.
- One day, right before lunchtime, I walked into the tent.
- And I see the Russians with the kapo,
- with the German kapo sitting over there.
- And all the- closed.
- And I could see a gun.
- What they did, they took out the machine guns.
- They were so good, they was to make small little guns
- for them.
- With-- they do the something.
- And they say come on.
- You're part of us.
- I start to get scared.
- I say what do you mean?
- I say we're building guns and be sending over
- to the sonderkommando.
- The sonderkommando was the special commander working--
- and the prisoners working in the crematoriums and the gas
- chambers.
- OK?
- I'm part of them, I'm part of them.
- I can do nothing about it.
- And what they said to me, OK, you're
- going to be a leader of a group.
- And I was a leader [INAUDIBLE].
- What happened is if you were a leader or you were, I know you.
- But I didn't know your people.
- God forbid, if we're caught, you made us a promise, you know?
- We get caught, we're not going to talk.
- But on the stress and on the beating, people will talk.
- OK?
- And we used to bring in guns, put in the loaf of bread,
- thrown over over there.
- One day I was chosen to bring in a gun.
- But we used to put between the legs.
- Because we used to have what we called filzen, searching.
- We used to come into camp, used to be searching.
- You know, people used to be organizing things.
- And I wasn't worrying too much carrying the gun because I knew
- something is going to happen.
- When I came close to me, a bunch of groups from the other side
- pushed us over there from this side.
- As they pushed us in, was a big turmoil, you know?
- And they were beating with the whips.
- Now at this time, I sneaked to the other side, turned back.
- And they know I'm on the other side.
- Everything quiets down.
- They took the gun.
- They threw over.
- Today's the 10th of the month, right?
- The 7th day, 10th of the month, nobody, not too many people
- talk about, not too much is written about.
- Supposed to start the uprising, the 8th, but start the 7th.
- Crematoria number two found out that they
- are going to go this night to the gas chambers.
- You know, they used to change them very often.
- After two or three months, they used to bring in new people.
- And they start the uprising the day before.
- How they did?
- They wanted had guns.
- Working the crematoriums and the gas chambers,
- people brought from the ghettos the gold watches
- and other things, right?
- And they went to the to the lookout tower,
- the [GERMAN] we used to call, say hey, I got a big watch.
- Why don't you come down, have it?
- He said throw it up.
- I say I throw up the watch, it's going to break.
- He came down.
- As he came down with the machine gun, they put a knife in him.
- And they got machine guns, a few of them.
- You never saw a big fight.
- We were surrounded completely, Auschwitz and Birkenau.
- And we didn't have the main uprising
- in Auschwitz and in Birkenau.
- We had an uprising in Birkenau.
- And I think I had part of it because with the guns.
- We knew exactly what's going on.
- They used to make pictures and send out.
- And maybe you heard about it.
- They caught the women.
- The Polish women used to work as a cleaning woman or something.
- They caught the two underground people with her.
- When we came into camp in Birkenau,
- we saw the gallows set up.
- The orchestra's playing.
- And everybody getting a slice of bread.
- And I took a look at them.
- I said they didn't talk.
- If they would have talked, more people would save the gallows.
- As you walked by, [GERMAN] with the eyes to your right.
- Everybody had to take a bite and look to the right.
- When you looked at those people, you
- could not believe it how tortured they were.
- You could see their nails were ripped off.
- The ears were cut.
- The mouth, the tongue was hanging out.
- They did not talk.
- See, we promised.
- I'm sure they were tortured to death.
- But they did not talk.
- Thank God they didn't talk.
- And that's what I live day in and day
- out in Auschwitz-Birkenau.
- It's people died, you know, in the thousands.
- It's unbelievable.
- They tortured people.
- Didn't want to-- what do you call it-- take suicide.
- They went to the electrified barbed wire.
- This was the easiest death.
- I had friends.
- I used to beg them not to.
- They used to sit down with the dead people.
- Anybody who died, we put them outside.
- And they didn't take them away the first day.
- They kept them for three or four days.
- They sit down to die over there.
- Come in and say what for, Mike, why?
- But they die an easy death than to go on to be tortured
- and to be killed.
- Sure, I used to be beaten.
- I used to get whips.
- Had to count it.
- Had a friend, he was caught.
- Maybe he stole a potato or do something.
- And they took him out.
- I can see the picture right now.
- They gave him 45.
- And everybody had to watch from the barrack.
- He counted 43.
- I guess he forgot himself.
- He went to 42.
- He had to start again.
- But he was silent.
- They were laughing, joking.
- Put cold water on his back.
- Beat him again.
- The back opened already pretty good.
- They say he's going to scream now.
- They put pepper and salt. He start to scream.
- He silenced again, walked away.
- And we grabbed him and brought him into the barrack.
- We washed him out, the salt and pepper and everything.
- We thought everything is going to be fine.
- But two hours later, he wasn't anymore with us.
- That's what we had to live, day in and day out.
- It's hard for people to imagine.
- It's hard for people to grasp.
- How did I survive?
- I was a dreamer, a fantasizer.
- I tried to make myself make human.
- Of course, they said I'm not.
- I saw birds flying in to camp.
- I can see it right now I'm talking to you.
- I am in Birkenau, laying on the bunk.
- I could see birds flying in and picking on the ground.
- And I said to myself, what they can pick on the ground that we
- cannot see it?
- And they flew out.
- And I said why can't I be a bird?
- And I said to myself Mike, close your eyes
- and start to fantasize.
- I closed my eyes, and I was a bird, and I flew out,
- and I was free.
- When I opened my eyes, I was back in the same surroundings.
- But for the few moments when I was dreaming and fantasizing,
- I was a free person.
- I was free.
- I was somebody again.
- Did you ever see so boxcars or railroad
- cars traveling on the rail?
- So nice and peaceful, in different direction,
- nobody is telling them where are you going.
- They're pulled.
- Nobody is asking for identification card,
- no nothing.
- And I say to myself, isn't that nice and quiet?
- Why can't I be a boxcar?
- I change my sample of plank of wood, be part of the boxcar.
- And I was traveling again.
- I was free again.
- The most precious thing a person can have or can possess
- is to be free.
- Make no difference what you have, how rich and the luxuries
- you have.
- When you're not free, you are nothing.
- Dreaming and fantasizing, always reminding myself
- that I'm a person, like anybody else, kept me going.
- And I always say I never lost my hope, never lost my belief.
- When did you actually become free?
- May the 5th, 1945.
- Can you tell us about that?
- Yeah, I'm going to come back in a second.
- I know the time.
- But I said I'm going to talk very slowly.
- And I'm leaving out quite a few things
- because I don't want to go back.
- 1945, January the 18th, see I know
- every date, every part of Auschwitz,
- every part of Birkenau.
- Because as I mentioned before, I knew I'm going to be free
- and I'm going to talk about it.
- I want to be exact what I'm talking about.
- January the 18th, 1945, the Russian army are closing in.
- They stopped 40 kilometers, 27 miles from Auschwitz.
- They could walked in with one tank and liberate us.
- They gathered us in Auschwitz 1 o'clock
- in the morning of the 19th.
- They took us out.
- And we marching in snow, cold.
- 35 kilometers a day, no food, no water.
- I had plenty of water, snow.
- We marching, not know where we going.
- People what could not make it, I can see it now.
- The people, they're staring at me because they fall back.
- They lost their wooden shoes in the deep snow,
- or they couldn't make it, they fall back.
- They were shot not with a regular bullet,
- but with a dumdum bullet, with a shadow bullet.
- If the person gets shot in their head,
- the head will split in dozens of pieces.
- The side of the roads, I can see it now, was not white.
- Everything was red.
- Finally, we came a destination what I don't know.
- Was at night.
- We were packed in in open coal cars.
- They threw us in like herring.
- In a way, it was good.
- Because we had lots of bodies.
- It was warm.
- And there was snowing.
- And snow was covering us.
- And you know when you under snow, it's warm.
- We were traveling.
- They say it's Vienna.
- You could see the light.
- We drove up to Linz, Mauthausen.
- Came into Mauthausen.
- We are loaded.
- Hundreds of people died before they came into Mauthausen
- because it was a high hill to get up.
- Very hard to make it, especially in winter when it's sticky
- and everything, icy.
- People ask me today when they go into Mauthausen,
- how could you walk up?
- They have to go by car, the second gear.
- We came in over there, again, undressed ourselves,
- went into the sauna, got hot water, cold water, no clothes.
- Marching into our barracks naked, January.
- Sleeping in the barrack naked, a room
- not too big, up to 400 people sleeping like herring one
- on each other, head to feet.
- I remember like today.
- If you wanted to go, you had to go at night.
- You had to go.
- You don't want to.
- You had to step on each other.
- And everybody was screaming, beating, hitting you.
- Don't step.
- Because you want to go between the people, OK?
- They ask me--
- I'm going to leave out a few things--
- they ask me what profession I'm now.
- I say a machinist.
- They took me down to Gusen.
- It was a small camp of 7,500 people.
- Every day used to bring up a transport
- of 1,000 or 1,500 people.
- Every day was the same amount of people.
- People died.
- New people came in.
- And they put me in to work in a factory building Messerschmitt
- planes, you know, the big Jager planes.
- And the factories were built already in the big mountains.
- Every day we used to get packed in in the railroad cars.
- And we used to travel.
- Was too far to travel, they brought us back.
- I built a part in the plane what they call the short fender.
- It was a small, round piece.
- You know, we had to weld it, you know, electric welding.
- And I had to make nice three holes.
- Exactly, it had to be the three holes, because every time it
- was checked out to the 10th of a millimeter.
- And so the three holes, the three wires went back.
- But the pilot used to control the flaps in the back,
- slow it down, and everything.
- But we in the underground are say they're not
- going to get away with nothing.
- I was pretty fast to mix up things.
- The plane went up.
- The plane came down.
- They didn't know what happened.
- They thought it's something wrong with the aluminum.
- They used to come and try to test the aluminum.
- That's what they used to do until the last minute,
- till May the 5th, 1945.
- Well, what were you doing?
- I moved a little bit the little hole.
- When the wire went down, it caught.
- You could not control fast.
- You know, it slow them down, maybe
- they're getting to the thing.
- You know, it was a thing made that he could not control,
- the back flaps.
- And they made once a film called The Devil's General.
- And I swear that I told the story, exactly the same thing.
- I used to tell the story and true story.
- You know, maybe the guy heard about it.
- Don't have to be on the thing.
- But that's what I did in Gusen, too, exactly, no difference.
- My friends, when I got to Israel, or they're in Europe,
- or someplace in the United States, were with me in camp,
- they don't call me Mike.
- They call me partisan.
- They call me partisan.
- Everybody will call me partisaner.
- See, they're calling [INAUDIBLE] because they know.
- My friends [INAUDIBLE] know that what I was doing, you know.
- May the 5th, 1945, looking out through the window,
- sleeping on my stomach, because it
- was very hard to sleep on the back
- because the shoulder blades was sticking out
- too far on the wooden thing.
- And I saw things come in with a white star.
- And I say to my friends, you see the Germans did?
- They change from a swastika to a white star.
- I don't know what a white star means.
- I don't know what the Americans or anybody else has.
- And I'm looking out, again, from the window.
- I saw some more things coming.
- But on the side on the roads are marching German soldiers
- without their weapons.
- And my friend say, Mike, why don't you go out and find out?
- I said, why me?
- I say you never afraid, do you?
- I say OK.
- I'll go out.
- I go out and I waved to the tank.
- A guy come out from the turret.
- And I'm scared, you know?
- Comes out from the turret.
- And he throw in a small little bar.
- And I picked up.
- It was a bar of chocolate.
- I grabbed it.
- I went into the barrack.
- And I said take a look!
- Can you imagine they named this little chocolate Herschel?
- [LAUGHTER]
- I couldn't spell the name Hershey.
- I said Hershel, OK?
- It was delicious.
- It was delicious.
- And I looked out, again, to the window.
- Now we have a guy, a civilian with a Red Cross
- band with a soldier with a machine gun.
- And he waves.
- And everybody is scared to go to the fence.
- I said OK, I'm going to go.
- I went to the fence.
- The guy tells me, in German, that you are free now.
- The Americans are over here.
- And stay in this camp.
- Wait over here.
- We're going to take you back to the main camp of Mauthausen.
- We're going to give you food and clothing, and so far.
- Now this soldier is talking to me.
- He said what languages do you speak?
- I say I speak German, I speak Polish,
- I speak Yiddish, some Hebrew.
- I say what I can remember in Russian
- and some other few languages what I can converse.
- And he says he speaks Polish and German, too.
- At the moment he said it, I bet you I turn white like the wall.
- And I start to move back.
- And he say come on back.
- Don't be afraid.
- I want to talk to you.
- I was afraid.
- When he said you speak German and Polish,
- that he's a Volksdeutsche born in Poland.
- You see, any German what was born in Poland,
- we call him a Volksdeutsche.
- He said come on back.
- Don't be afraid.
- He says he's an American.
- He was born in Chicago.
- His mother is German.
- His father is Polish.
- And they spoke in that home this kind of language.
- And he spoke the same languages.
- OK, I came back.
- I told my friends.
- I say, you know, we're now free.
- The Americans are over here.
- Let's not worry about it.
- They say they're going to come.
- They're going to take us to Mauthausen.
- And they're going to give us clothes.
- We are free people.
- I'm sitting over there.
- And we organize a little bit food.
- We're sitting around.
- We're cooking over there and cooking.
- Of course, it wasn't kosher.
- But we killed a pig.
- And I brought it in.
- We had a big jar.
- We're cooking and cooking.
- We had a loaf of bread already and it smells good.
- Were the guards gone?
- Oh, yeah.
- I'm glad you told me.
- When the Allies came closer, the main SS people left.
- They brought in the militia, the 60,
- 65-year-old, 70-year-old militia with the commandant left over.
- I'm glad you asked me about it.
- When I talk about the Holocaust, you know,
- sometimes I leave out him because I
- want to not stay too long.
- Sorry.
- We had a factory in the mountains
- what was not ready yet.
- And we were told that two keg of dynamite are put over there.
- And we said to ourselves, if we have to march over there,
- we're not going to go.
- That's some arguments.
- The militia commandant and the SS commander
- had some arguments over there.
- While they were arguing, the Allies, the Americans came in.
- OK, yes, the most of them, 99.9% are
- left because they didn't want to be caught over there.
- If they got caught, they're prisoners of the Americans,
- you know.
- And they know what's going to happen to them.
- And I was sitting there like today,
- cooking and cooking over there.
- I say to the German, you know, in a day or two,
- I'm going to leave camp.
- I'm not going to go to the main camp.
- Everybody says, Mike, you're crazy.
- And everybody-- smells so good.
- I'm telling you, it smells good.
- Get the loaf of bread.
- Everybody, a small slice of bread I gave everybody.
- And they say, Mike, can we dip?
- I say not yet.
- It's not ready.
- At the moment I looked in in the pot,
- and I saw this meat is very dark,
- I took out a piece of meat, I put a piece of paper,
- and I took the whole top, and I turned over in the ground.
- And I sit on it.
- And I was thinking I'm going to burn my butt, you know.
- They said what are you doing?
- You could see their eyes.
- If the eyes could kill you, they would kill.
- And I gave everybody a small slice of meat.
- Say why, Mike?
- I say I tell you later.
- Here comes another friend of mine, smiling and laughing.
- He says, oh, you don't know how that taste.
- I say what happened?
- I asked him.
- And he says you caught a chicken.
- He killed a chicken.
- He didn't eat the meat.
- But guess what?
- He drunk the fat, a whole glassful.
- And I said to my friend, I say, I'm not a doctor.
- He's not going to walk to the main camp next day.
- We went next day over there.
- And I said let's go see where he is.
- You couldn't come close to his bed.
- He got the diarrhea.
- Killed him.
- See that's the reason I didn't want you to dip in the fat.
- And that's the reason I made it dark, the meat.
- You would thank me about it.
- I said, oh, yes.
- And we go into the barrack.
- We left a good friend of mine.
- Went together to cheder, the Hebrew school,
- to school, to the ghetto, to the camp.
- And he comes in, [PERSONAL NAME],, he
- comes to me smiling and laughing.
- Mike, we are free.
- We can go home.
- I say yes, we are free.
- Home, I don't know.
- And he says, Mike, I don't feel good.
- He fall on my hand.
- I picked him up.
- You know, like a chicken dies?
- Throws the head over?
- He passed out.
- He died.
- Put him in, back in bed and left him over there.
- I don't know what happened to him.
- The parents were liberated, were in Russia.
- They live in Canada.
- And I told them what happened to him.
- OK?
- I was 19 and a half years old.
- I weighed 70 pound, weighed by the Red Cross, 70 pound.
- And I said to my friends, we are leaving tomorrow.
- They say Mike, we are not.
- I say fine, you don't.
- I ask my friend what lives now in New Jersey,
- are you going with me.
- He says, Mike, yes.
- I went.
- We're through.
- And I saved his life.
- Went through.
- I'm going with you.
- And I say how about you, three people?
- We are sleeping five people in the same bunk.
- We were eight, but three persons died.
- I says no might in the world can keep me in this camp anymore.
- They told me I'm free.
- I was waiting for 5 and 1/2 years
- to hear this beautiful song, the beautiful melody that I'm free.
- I'm walking out from this camp.
- No camps for me anymore.
- Finally, next day, we walked out from this camp.
- As I walked out, on the other side of the barbed wire
- I stopped.
- And I looked.
- Nobody is waiting for me.
- Nobody's welcome me.
- Where do I go?
- I have no home to go home.
- And at this time I said to myself,
- Mike, don't you ever look back.
- Think positive and keep going.
- I kept going.
- Went into Linz.
- And that's when I was liberated by the Americans, May
- the 5th, 1945.
- And I was made an honorary member.
- Now I'm a full-fledged member from the from the 11th Army
- Division, sorry, the 11th Army Division.
- Was liberated concentration camp.
- I was invited a few months ago to Hot Springs, Arkansas,
- to be the main speaker of the banquet
- because I was always talking about them.
- And they say they feel one thing they feel sorry,
- the guy what I talk to, the guy what liberated me,
- and the people what liberated me was 20 of them, passed away.
- They remember this episode, what I used to talk about.
- That's what they found out about me, about the boxcar,
- and so forth.
- That's they found out about me.
- And I always said to myself in camp
- that one day I'm going to be free.
- And the time will come.
- I will try to build a center, not
- a memorial stone, but a center that people can come,
- learn from the past to look into the future.
- This should never happen again.
- As children, young, or old can come to the center
- and touch it and feel it and walk out and see what one
- human could do to the other.
- My speaking to you over here or sharing my experience,
- it's not for me.
- I went through.
- It's for the future generations that they can listen and look
- at it, look at a living survivor.
- Because I'm not going to be over here all the time.
- Someday I will have to go.
- They can say yes.
- That's a survivor.
- He's telling the story, what one human could do to the other.
- Should never let them happen again.
- That's my children and my grandchildren,
- my grand-grandchildren should not go through the horrors
- and should be left to see what their parents
- or their grandparents should go through, as they should not
- go out from this memorial center for Holocaust
- Studies in Dallas.
- That's why you are responsible partially
- for helping The Holocaust Center be built here in Dallas.
- That's correct.
- I was partially responsible and also I
- was partially responsible to organize in 1977
- the Holocaust survivors in Dallas
- and the second generation in Dallas.
- Because I believe that Holocaust survivors should
- come out from the woodworks and tell the story,
- not hold inside.
- If they do hold inside, they do a disservice
- not to themselves, but to their loved ones, what they died.
- Innocent people died.
- They don't want to tell the story.
- How did you get to Dallas?
- I applied to go to the United States.
- And when I got the papers to the United States,
- to come to the United States, to go to New York,
- most of the Jewish people went to New York.
- When I went through the last DP person,
- display person, last office what the guy puts the stamp on it,
- when he looked over my papers-- and I was very active.
- I was active from the first day I was liberated
- from concentration camp.
- I start to organizing people.
- I was the first guy to go into Linz, the main city,
- and put a little sign.
- Anybody what was born in Poland sign in.
- And people came in.
- We don't want the sign.
- We don't want, again, people know where we are.
- I say it's not the purpose.
- The purpose is because if you signed in over here,
- and somebody other comes in and signs in and sees your name,
- maybe it can be your father or your brother.
- Because you don't know.
- I got a cousin.
- I was with a cousin in Mauthausen.
- And I didn't know he was in Mauthausen.
- Can you imagine?
- I did not know because it was different camps,
- different barracks.
- Mhm.
- As we signed in, and lots of people find themselves.
- Cousins or friends find themselves.
- Right away to organize the things over there, organized--
- when--
- how I come to the United States, OK.
- And he looked at the papers when I was organizing sport clubs.
- I went back to school and I got my physical education papers.
- And I was the youngest member of the [PERSONAL NAME]
- Jewish display persons in Munich on the physical education
- association.
- And they sent me around from city to city, from camp to camp
- to organize sports clubs, to develop back the bodies
- and tell them how important it is to have the exercise
- and to build up the body again.
- And he looked at it.
- He says you're not going to go to New York.
- I said, oh, my God.
- He's going to take me off the transport, you know.
- He says when you go to New York, you're
- going to come into a forest of trees.
- You're being single, not knowing nobody,
- you're going to get lost.
- You never will come out.
- I didn't understand what he meant.
- That you're going to come into a lot of,
- millions of people, and you're not going to know nobody.
- You're going to get lost.
- I'm going to send you to the biggest country in the United
- States, Texas.
- Country?
- Is there a country in the United States?
- And he started to laugh.
- He said the biggest state in the United States.
- You're going?
- I said what's the difference, OK?
- He called in there a Jewish lady, what
- she was in charge of the case.
- She was a caseworker.
- He says I want to change his papers for Texas.
- She said we cannot do it.
- They said oh, yes, you can.
- You need more favors from me, he says, than I need from you.
- OK, I went back and I say nothing.
- Two weeks later, I get my papers, Dallas, Texas.
- And everybody were laughing.
- Mike, you're going to Texas?
- You're crazy.
- You see?
- They have no streets over there.
- Everything is dirt.
- The cowboys, they're killing each other.
- And
- And I have the joke.
- Well, I'll say I'll be a cowboy, too, you know?
- I'll buy me a horse.
- And I'll go on the horse with guns and do the same thing.
- I came to the Jewish families, the Jewish federation.
- See, every city had to take in so many people, so many singles
- and so many married people.
- And I'm sure they had an opening over here in Dallas.
- And they sent me to Dallas.
- Thank you, Mr. Taylor.
- They didn't send me to New York.
- They sent me to Dallas.
- Because when I came into Dallas, I finally realized it.
- When I looked at people working, wearing the big hats,
- that he was a Texan.
- I know the name was Taylor.
- I say-- now I say where are you, Mr. Taylor?
- Thank you.
- He sent me to Texas.
- And I'm glad he did send me to Dallas, Texas.
- That's when I came to Dallas, Texas,
- to the Jewish federation, auspices, you know,
- Dallas, Texas.
- But you didn't know what had happened to your own family?
- No, I never-- I didn't know what had happened.
- I only find out later on they went to Treblinka.
- I never knew about it.
- And I tell you only one thing I remember,
- I was sleeping on the [INAUDIBLE]..
- And I found out that my brother was still with me.
- And this was one night I couldn't stop crying.
- I knew I would never see him.
- I never cried since.
- I was asked, and this would be important to you,
- I was always asked do I have dreams.
- Yes, I had dreams.
- I had dreams fighting the SS.
- But when I woke up, I never came out a loser, always a winner.
- And I think that's the reason, one of the reasons
- that I can speak very freely, not to hesitate, not
- to go through to relive my experience.
- And also, I had a very, very close family
- at home, very, very strong family togetherness.
- And my family now is built the same way.
- Very close?
- Very close.
- I want to ask you one more question.
- I know that we're--
- Go ahead.
- --running out of time.
- You have a scar on the left side of your face.
- The scar, I was beaten.
- I was hit.
- Can you tell me about that?
- Yeah, it was a guy, an SS man.
- He spoke better Yiddish than I spoke.
- He was a Volksdeutsche from Lodz, Litzmannstadt.
- He was a dorozka driver.
- This mean he was a kutscher.
- This mean he was driving a little thing taking people
- to the railroad station.
- What do you call it in English?
- He had a--
- Taxi?
- Like a taxi, but a horse wagon.
- Oh, yeah.
- OK.
- He used to take it, no?
- And lots of organizing was going on in Auschwitz,
- dealing and wheeling with the gold and other things.
- And I saw him walk.
- You know, I could feel he's walking behind me.
- And I went on the engine.
- I figured when I come to [INAUDIBLE],, I woke up.
- He can do nothing to me.
- As I put my step, my foot on the steps, here
- goes [WHISTLES] the whip.
- And didn't say another word.
- I went to engine to start.
- And here is the air force person, too, over there.
- I didn't say a word.
- I look back.
- I want to see everything is free.
- I say, hey, take a look what happened.
- What's happened?
- And I guess I was smarter than he was.
- I say I slipped and I hit my face.
- I think if I would have say he did it,
- I wouldn't be over here to tell you the story.
- The first thing what I did I moved away my blood
- from my eye.
- I closed this eye.
- And I looked at it.
- And I say oh, I got my eye.
- Everything is OK.
- But walking in with open wounds to camp is dangerous.
- Because every night you walk in from work,
- the orchestra was playing.
- The SS man was staying in front of the gate.
- Look at you, they put the point, you
- know, the same number you had on your hand you had on your coat
- or on your shirt.
- And they put up the number, you went to camp.
- And at night, they call your number, you never returned.
- I'm bleeding.
- I have to stop my bleeding.
- I start to get you know, [INAUDIBLE]..
- Is that what do you call it?
- Mhm.
- OK.
- Clotted?
- Yeah, clotted, yeah.
- And I went to a friend of mine.
- I said look, you have to do something.
- He was a feldsher.
- You know what a feldsher means?
- No.
- A feldsher means he could, in Poland, you could go
- and he was an apothecary.
- A pharmacist?
- A pharmacist.
- But he could prescribe some medicine.
- I said why can't you do something?
- He said Mike, I cannot.
- I said I'll tell you something.
- I got aluminum over here.
- I'm going to make six clamps.
- I made me six clamps.
- You can see the little holes over here,
- three over here, three over there, with sharp points.
- And I said go ahead and do it.
- I said Mike, you cannot.
- Say at least show me what it is.
- He was showing me.
- And I was clamping.
- And at this time, I said to my friends, all my friends,
- this is my last walk.
- I know.
- Because every day you went in to camp, the most every day,
- the most every day they had selections.
- But somebody upstairs had to look over me.
- Was no selection tonight when I walked in.
- I say it's going to be tomorrow.
- Was no selection tomorrow, the day after tomorrow.
- Because the crematoriums were burning so busy,
- they didn't select any more of us over there.
- And that's why I'm over here.
- That's where I got the scar.
- I got quite a few.
- I got the scar over here, too, were beaten.
- I was beaten.
- But I never gave up.
- Why are we going to end?
- Maybe you're going to incorporate later on.
- I'm sure that it's going to be edited.
- I used to work different works, different jobs.
- I can remember like today I was working on the road
- to take big rocks and make small rocks.
- I took the hammer.
- We were breaking it.
- We had no gloves for bleeding.
- And you had to make a pile of rocks so big that's-- what you
- call it a--
- Gravel?
- Huh?
- Gravel?
- No, we made the rocks.
- But you had to put a big pile.
- You had to measure.
- And they had to put every day.
- And you had friends all sitting over here breaking rocks.
- I build roads.
- I build railroads, everything.
- And here the SS man was up down, or he had a bad night,
- or he had a bad day.
- I don't know.
- And I can see people getting whipped with a bullwhip.
- You know you got two kinds.
- We used to call it spaghetti whip
- and used to call it bullwhip.
- You know, the spaghetti whip we saw over there
- at the memorial center.
- You see what I brought back.
- He gets beaten.
- Boy, I could hear.
- He passed me by.
- And he gets beaten.
- And I'm waiting that I will get the whip, get the whip.
- And I don't know what happened.
- Next day, the same guy, I don't know.
- Now he's not.
- He's shooting people.
- I can see it right now.
- See, I'm bending down, like I would be over there.
- This guy, my friend got shot, falls over.
- Looks with the eyes at me, dead, open eyes.
- I'm waiting to get the bullet.
- He passed me by.
- He gets the bullet.
- And I'm waiting.
- Till today, I cannot figure out why he didn't shoot me.
- Till today, I can say only one thing.
- Somebody upstairs had to look over me all the times.
- God wanted me to be alive and tell the story.
- Because as I walked out from this camp, May the 5th--
- when I was liberated, I guess May the 8th I walked out--
- at this time I said to myself I will never
- stop talking, if people want to listen to me
- or Not I have told people if they listen for five minutes,
- they walk away, I accomplished five minutes.
- And I never stopped.
- Because it's very close to me.
- Again, there's people should know about it.
- This generation and generations to come.
- It should never happen again.
- I don't want the people here in the United States, what
- they say was no Holocaust, hundreds of books
- are written about there was no Holocaust.
- The Holocaust is a hoax.
- Auschwitz is a myth.
- Was never Auschwitz.
- Those people what they come out and tell this story
- or write about the Holocaust was no Holocaust was a hoax,
- those are the most dangerous people
- walking in this United States.
- Because those people want you and the future generation
- to believe that was not happening.
- That it was not true.
- And again, these people be caught off guard.
- God forbid if those people get the power.
- They would do exactly the same thing, maybe worst.
- We must know.
- We must remember.
- We must not forget.
- We must always say in our mind it can happen again.
- We must not be indifferent.
- I don't care.
- That's the biggest thing what Hitler could go on.
- Because 69% of the German people were indifferent.
- 21% were uncertain.
- Only 5% of Hitler, his Nazi machinery,
- and their collaborators were for atrocities and genocide.
- And 5% were against it.
- The 69% that were indifferent give the power
- to do what he wants to do.
- And I don't want to stop you from telling your story,
- but we're going to have to stop the interview because we've--
- OK.
- Go ahead.
- --exceeded our time probably already.
- And I'm glad that you are here to tell the story
- and that you shared this with us today.
- I'm very glad to be over here.
- And I hope, again, there's more the Holocaust survivors,
- the Holocaust survivors, the children, second generation,
- third generation could come up and tell the story of where
- they came from and exactly what happened in their own words.
- They should never break the chain,
- the past with the future.
- We must keep it together.
- I agree with you.
- And that's a good place to stop for today.
- Thank you.
- Thank you.
- Thank you very much.
- Thank you.
Overview
- Interviewee
- Mike Jacobs
- Interviewer
- James Pennebaker
Alan Griffin - Date
-
interview:
1985 October 26
Physical Details
- Language
- English
- Extent
-
2 videocassettes (VHS) : sound, color ; 1/2 in..
Rights & Restrictions
- Conditions on Access
- There are no known restrictions on access to this material.
- Conditions on Use
- No restrictions on use
Keywords & Subjects
- Topical Term
- Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)--Personal narratives.
- Personal Name
- Jacobs, Mike, 1925-
Administrative Notes
- Holder of Originals
-
Dallas Holocaust Museum, Center for Education and Tolerance
- Legal Status
- Permanent Collection
- Provenance
- James Pennebaker and Alan Griffin of the Dallas Memorial Center for Holocaust Studies conducted the interview with Mike Jacobs on October 26, 1985. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Oral History branch received the tapes of the interview from the Dallas Memorial Center for Holocaust Studies on January 8, 1991. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives received the interview by transfer from the Oral History branch in February 1995.
- Special Collection
-
The Jeff and Toby Herr Oral History Archive
- Record last modified:
- 2023-11-16 08:09:02
- This page:
- https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn506602
Additional Resources
Transcripts (2)
Download & Licensing
- Request Copy
- See Rights and Restrictions
- Terms of Use
- This record is digitized but cannot be downloaded online.
In-Person Research
- Available for Research
- Plan a Research Visit
Contact Us
Also in Oral history interviews of the Dallas Memorial Center for Holocaust Studies
Contains interviews with 31 Holocaust survivors in the Dallas, TX area
Date: 1985-1992
Oral history interview with Helen Biderman
Oral History
Helen Biderman (née Prengler), born April 21, 1928 in Luków, Poland, describes her four brothers; her parents; growing up in Poland; the chaos of the beginning of the war; the roundup of Jews by the German Army on October 5 and the subsequent execution near a church; the deportations from Luków; going with her family to a nearby town; being forced to live with several families; the winter of 1940; her parents hiding while she stayed with an aunt; being moved to a ghetto with the other Jews; hiding with her family in an underground space during the deportations; being discovered by a Polish fireman hiding in various places; staying for seven to eight weeks in her grandfather's underground bunker with 17 members of her family; hiding with a German woman who owned a brick factory; being found by the Germans and the death of her younger brother; life in the ghetto from the end of 1942 to May 2, 1943; the attempt by some Jews to form a resistance group; falling ill with typhus; being attacked by a German Shepherd; hiding outside the ghetto; her parents reopening their business and staying until April 1945; moving to Katowice, Poland for a year then going to Munich, Germany for three years; her family getting papers to move to the United States; getting married and living in New Orleans, LA; how the Holocaust brought her family closer together; and her feelings about Germans.
Oral history interview with Max Biderman
Oral History
Max Biderman, born February 11, 1917 in Luków, Poland, describes his family; growing up in Poland; the beginning of the war; his family hiding during the roundups; the execution of Jews by the German Army; being caught with two of his brothers and forced to walk to Siedlce, Poland, where they were put in jail; being marched to a town 20 kilometers away and escaping with one of his brothers; returning home and hearing of the deportations to Treblinka; the creation of a ghetto in 1942 during the New Year; hiding during a deportation and the death of one of his brothers; living in the ghetto; working in a German factory; avoiding another deportation by hiding in the woods; contracting typhoid; witnessing the shooting of one of his brothers; being hidden by a Polish couple; hiding with several other Jewish boys; being hidden by a Polish farmer named Bronkevitch; defending themselves against a group of 40 armed men (possibly the Armia Krajowa); hiding in the forest; his group taking revenge on a farmer who denounced hidden Jews; reading newspapers; the arrival of the Russian Army; returning to Luków; finding the Prengler family (he later married Helen Prengler, RG-50.045*0001); going to Brest-Litovsk (Brześć Litewski), Poland after the war; going to Katowice, Poland then Munich, Germany; immigrating to the United States in September 1949; his children and grandchildren; not sharing his story with his children until recently; visiting Poland in 1984 and showing his children where he hid; the importance and danger of having a gun during the occupation; and testifying against a war criminal.
Oral history interview with Ala Danziger
Oral History
Oral history interview with Martin Donald
Oral History
Oral history interview with Bela Einhorn
Oral History
Oral history interview with Marie Fauss
Oral History
Marie Fauss (née Lucet Marie Selek), born August 25, 1925 at Pont-à-Mousson, France, describes her Catholic mother and Jewish father; visiting the synagogue with her father when she was four years old; her education; beginning college when she was 12 years old; her father reading Mein Kampf and warning her of Hitler’s intentions; her family’s Jewish and Catholic friends; her father deciding she should attend Catholic church; the invasion of Poland; the scarcity of coal; being out of college in July 1940; being warned by an Italian of the impending invasion; her fear of the Germans; fleeing with an Italian family south on minor roads; seeing an exodus of people moving south as they arrive in Nancy, France; being in Nancy during a bombardment; the German restrictions during the occupation; the taking of a census; the round ups and deportations; rumors about concentration camps; taking in other refugees; collaborators; becoming silent and withdrawn; being required to take German at school; being interrogated six times and having their house searched by the Germans; being beaten by interrogators; her belief that the mayor betrayed her to the Germans; being told to report to the town square to be sent to a work camp; being taken to a farm that produced food for a concentration camp in Lorraine; being taken out of the camp after three months with the help of her father; contracting tuberculosis; the arrival of American troops in September 1944; the Germans burning the college and hospital; how the war affected her; and getting married in 1945.
Oral history interview with Max Glauben
Oral History
Oral history interview with Bela Goldberg
Oral History
Oral history interview with Henry Goldberg
Oral History
Oral history interview with Alli Itzkowitz
Oral History
Oral history interview with Miriam Joseph
Oral History
Oral history interview with Abram Kozolchyk
Oral History
Oral history interview with Leo Laufer
Oral History
Oral history interview with Helen Neuberg
Oral History
Helen Neuberg (née Chaja Miemacher), born December 12, 1926 in Ostrowice, Poland (possibly Ostrowiec in powiat sokołowski), describes her Orthodox family; growing up Jewish and her interactions with Gentiles; the German invasion; the restrictions placed on Jews; people being killed for breaking the curfew; her experiences in the ghetto; hiding during the deportation of her family, all of whom perished in Treblinka; witnessing acts of brutality and cruelty; obtaining false papers; moving to Warsaw, Poland; finding work as a waitress in Stuttgart, Germany, where she lived in fear of discovery; being aided by a Jewish American solider after the war, who assisted her in finding relatives in North America; meeting her husband, who was a survivor of concentration camps, in a displaced persons camp; and immigrating to the United States with her child and husband.
Oral history interview with Jack Oran
Oral History
Oral history interview with Sol Prengler
Oral History
Oral history interview with Lori Price
Oral History
Oral history interview with Ann Salfield
Oral History
Oral history interview with Rosalie Schiff
Oral History
Oral history interview with William Schiff
Oral History
Oral history interview with Jack Stein
Oral History
Oral history interview with Erica Stein
Oral History
Oral history interview with Manya Wozobski
Oral History
Oral history interview with Greta Zetley
Oral History
Oral history interview with Leon Zetley
Oral History
Oral history interview with James Hirsch
Oral History
Oral history interview with Alegre Tevet
Oral History
Oral history interview with Zohn Milam
Oral History
Oral history interview with Eva Nanasi
Oral History
Oral history interview with William Schiff
Oral History