Metal identification pendant belonging to a Czech Jewish ghetto-labor camp inmate

Frank (born Frantisek) Sim (1920-2005) was born to Rudolf (1877-1944) and Fredericka (nee Berger, 1897-1944) Sim in Ostrava, Czechoslovakia. He had one sister, Helen (later Krzak, 1913-?), and a brother, Otto, who died as a child during World War I. Rudolf worked as an attorney while Fredericka stayed at home. Ostrava was an industrial town of 250,000, with a large Jewish minority population. While Fredericka went to synagogue regularly, Rudolf was not religious at all, and they only celebrated the major holidays. The family spoke Czech at home, and most of Frank’s friends were not Jewish. He even participated in a scouting program. Frank attended the public primary school and then gymnasium, where he had to study Latin and Greek, as he wanted to be a doctor. He also had studied German and French, and had obligatory religious education.

In the fall of 1938, under the terms of the Munich Pact, Germany annexed the Sudetenland, a border region of Czechoslovakia. By May of 1939, Germany, Hungary, and Poland had partitioned Czechoslovakia and the nation no longer existed. Before the occupation, Frank and his family had never experienced any anti-Semitism, but had learned about the violence against Jews from German Jews who were seeking asylum. Frank’s sister decided to immigrate to England, and in 1939, the German army occupied Ostrava and burned the synagogues down. The family fled the city for Lipník, his mother’s hometown. There, the Jews had to live in one designated street, with two families to an apartment. In Lipník, Frank received training to work as an auto mechanic.

In June 1942, Frank and his parents were ordered to the nearby city of Olomouc, and forcibly placed on transport AAG to Theresienstadt ghetto-labor camp in the northern region of German-occupied Czechoslovakia. There, he was assigned to a work group in the transport department, shoveling coal and unloading supplies that came to the ghetto. Although he had to live separately from his parents, Frank often stole potatoes for them to supplement their meager rations.

On September 28, 1944, Frank was put on a cattle car, with no water or bathroom facilities, for transport to what the prisoners believed was a temporary labor assignment. Instead, they were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau killing center in German-occupied Poland. Upon arrival, Frank was spared during the selection process, but was stripped of all his clothing except for his shoes and issued uniform pants, a jacket, and a shirt. Frank was assigned to a work group destined for Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany, but was not scheduled to leave immediately. For six weeks at Auschwitz, he did not have to work, but volunteered to clean the latrines in order to receive extra rations. When he finally left, he was sent to Meuselwitz, a subcamp of the Buchenwald camp system. The new camp was much cleaner, and he was allowed a bath, a spoon, a plate, and his own bunk. In addition, he received underpants that the Germans had made out of a tallis, the specialized shawl worn by Orthodox Jewish males during morning prayers. Undergarments were not given out at Auschwitz, and the use of tallis for such a purpose was an intentional insult and desecration of a Jewish religious object. Overall, the conditions and treatment Frank received at Meuselwitz were much better than at Auschwitz. He worked at the Hugo Schneider AG (HASAG) armaments factory under a somewhat sympathetic supervisor. Once, he was allowed to step outside the factory alone and stole a box of beets. Although he was caught, he was spared punishment.

In April 1945, American troops were approaching and the Germans liquidated the camp. Frank was put on a transport train, in a cattle car, headed to Kraslice, just over the Czech border, but the train was bombed during the trip, and the prisoners were forced to march instead. There were not enough SS men to guard the whole group, so the first night of the march, Frank escaped. He made his way to Kraslice, where a Czech family took him in for four days and gave him civilian clothes. Frank then walked to Plzeň, Czechoslovakia, encountering a French prisoner of war camp on the way. After the American army liberated Plzeň on May 6, he went by bus to Prague, and then to Theresienstadt to find his parents. While his girlfriend was at Theresienstadt, she told Frank that his parents had been put on a transport to Auschwitz-Birkenau in October, a month after he had, where they were killed. Frank stayed in Theresienstadt with his girlfriend’s family, who has half Jew and half Christian, until the Nazi Germany surrendered to the Allies and Soviets on May 7, and the ghetto was liberated by Soviet forces on May 9.

After liberation, Frank returned to Lipník and then went to Brno, Czechoslovakia, after learning that relatives had survived and were living there. He enrolled at the university there to study chemical engineering. In the spring of 1947, he met Edith Weinstein (b. 1925), the niece of his former boss at Theresienstadt. Edith was originally from Příbor, Czechosolvakia, and was transported to Theresienstadt in September 1942, then deported to the family camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, a work detail in Hamburg, Germany, and Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, which the British forces liberated on April 15, 1945. Frank and Edith married in February 1948, the same day that the Communist Party assumed control of the Czechoslovakian government. They did not want to live under communist control, and applied unsuccessfully for visas to immigrate to the United States. Frank worked as a chemical engineer at a photochemical factory, and served in the Czech army school for reserve officers for five months in 1948. The couple had two daughters, Susan and Pavla. After the 1968 reform movement known as the Prague Spring, the family was allowed to travel, and they went to Vienna, where they were able to stay before immigrating to the United States in 1969. Frank continued to work as a chemical engineer; Edith was unable to get a job at first, but eventually worked for a family friend.