RETURN FROM THE DEPTHSPart 2

Remembrances of World War II
As Related By Chune Zechariah Folger© Yecheskel Folger 20091

Table of Contents – Part 2
Plashov ................................................................................................................. 3‫ אדר תש"ג –אייר תש"ד‬.............................................................................................. 3
The Agony of our ‫ גלות‬..................................................................................... 4
Our arrival in Plashov .................................................................................... 6
The ‫ רב‬from ‫ שידלאוו‬......................................................................................... 9
Rav Nochum Zaltz ‫ ע"ה‬................................................................................. 11
In the shack of ‫ר' נחום‬.................................................................................... 13‫ פסח‬of ‫( תש"ג‬1943) ............................................................................................ 15‫ מצות‬in the Camp .............................................................................................. 17
A Miracle ......................................................................................................... 19
Physical abuse and shame ............................................................................. 20
Selections ........................................................................................................ 22
Tied together in ‫ אהבה‬........................................................................................ 23‫ ימים נוראים תש"ד‬.................................................................................................. 24
A Change for the Better ................................................................................... 27‫ חורבן אונגארען‬......................................................................................................... 30
The German conquest ..................................................................................... 31
My father ......................................................................................................... 35
The Family Unger ............................................................................................ 38‫ עבודת הקדש‬......................................................................................................... 46‫ מיכל‬.................................................................................................................. 48‫ בפרוע פרעות‬........................................................................................................ 51
In the valley of death .................................................................................... 56
Lippstadt .......................................................................................................... 57‫ יציאת מצרים‬..................................................................................................... 59
Virste Giresdorf – May 1944 ............................................................................... 61
R’ Yakov Vulcan .............................................................................................. 63
A Dangerous Mistake ...................................................................................... 64‫ יום כפור תש"ה‬...................................................................................................... 65
The ‫ תפילין‬of R’ Mendel Brachfeld .................................................................... 66
Flossenberg ........................................................................................................ 71‫ גיהנום‬of Ice ....................................................................................................... 73‫ הצלת נפשות‬......................................................................................................... 75
Loenbeck ............................................................................................................ 76
More Treks .......................................................................................................... 78
Waldorf ............................................................................................................... 80
Air Raid ............................................................................................................... 82
The False Liberation ........................................................................................... 84
Liberation ........................................................................................................ 862

‫‪Plashov‬‬‫אדר תש"ג –אייר תש"ד‬‫‪3‬‬

The Agony of our ‫גלות‬I cry when I remember the terrifying scene of the fearsome final liquidationof the ghetto in Cracow. My eyes drench in tears when I again see the infants
and the young children on the streets. How can I be consoled when again andagain I see the beastly murderer from the SS, when I see him grab the two young
daughters of ‫ ר' שלמה בראננער‬from their father’s hands, throw them up in the air andshoot them.
‫ – שלמה וואדאוויצער‬that’s what they called him in Bobov – was always thehead, the leader, the island of strength – whether it was the grand ‫ חתונות‬in the‫ חצר‬of the ‫קדושת ציון‬, whether it was ‫ פסח‬when he ran the kitchen from where hefed more than 1,000 ‫בחורים‬.
All who were fortunate to spend ‫ פסח‬with ‫ ר' בן ציון‬remember how hundredsof noble ‫ בחורים‬stood in a long line to take a cup of tea from ‫שלמה וואדאוויצער‬. Whilethey stood in line awaiting their turn, the good learners would be ‫ מפלפל‬in ‫סוגיות‬,others would discuss ‫ ספרי חסידים‬while yet others would discuss anecdotes of‫צדיקים‬. Every once in a while the ‫ מנגנים‬would sing pleasant ‫ זמירות‬that the ‫ רבי‬had
composed
At times they would sing a famous creation of ‫ ר' יאסעלע מאנדלבוים‬for which '‫ר‬‫ יחזקאל'י ראטענבערג‬had written "‫"איזהו מקומן‬:Remember ‫ יידן‬the place, and what happened there, in ‫ ארץ ישראל‬in ‫ירושלים‬to which the ‫ בחורים‬waiting for a swallow of tea would add this chorus:‫ אוי אוי אוי‬,‫ שלמה וואדאוויצער טייא‬,‫שלמה וואדאוויצער טייא‬But from the moment when the beasts grabbed his daughters ‫ ר' שלמה‬wasbroken and smashed, his heart was torn to shreds until he too was murdered‫הי"ד‬.
Among the others murdered that ‫ ז' אדר‬were ‫ ר' אלטר'ל האראוויטץ‬the ‫דזיקאווער‬‫רב‬, ‫ ר' אשר אנשיל זעלטענרייך‬the ‫ וואדאוויצער רב‬and ‫ ר' שאול‬the ‫ דיין‬of ‫קראקא‬And woe isme, worst of all, my personal tragedy, the murder of my dear brother ‫יחזקאל‬.
4

Actually, we didn’t have the opportunity to absorb the disaster, because
the later ‫ צרות‬would blot out the earlier ‫צרות‬. Because now we found ourselves ina different world, in the underworld ‫ גיהנום‬called Plashov. Roughly 20,000 Jews
entered the “protection” of the evil, tyrant and master of cruelty, a ‫ גוי‬from Vienna
who was then 33 years old SS Sturmfuhrer Amon Goeth.
This murderer would on a white horse pass through the camp every
morning before breakfast, to find a Jew and to murder him. He wore the green
uniform of the Waffen SS, and a Luger revolver hung loosely in his belt. His
hands were swathed in white cloves lest they become dirtied with Jewish blood.
And when it happened that they were defiled by a drop of blood from someone
he murdered he would pull off the gloves and throw them away in disgust.
His blue eyes would dart this way and that until he found his ‫קרבן‬. First hewould torture him, and then he would kill him in utmost cruelty. When the camp’s
population became sparse because of his constant slaughter, he ordered that
more groups of Jews be brought in from those who remained in surrounding
ghettos.
There aren’t enough words to describe the torment I suffered in the 15 months I
lived in this nightmare. Every moment we had to remember and to concentrate
not to meet the commandant. The moment he met any person, the person lost all
hope of life. This vermin was responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent
Jews.
When the war ended, the conquering Russians arrested Goeth. He wascourt-martialed by the Poles and hanged in Plashov’s central square. Thisavenged us a little. But in truth if he were sentenced to a thousand deaths, thiswould not have been enough to make up for what he had done.

5Our arrival in Plashov
We arrived in Plashov on ‫( ז' אדר תש"ג‬March 12, 1943). We were arranged
into barracks in which there were three levels of wooden bunks. Every prisoner
was given a straw mattress and two covers.
Every prisoner was also permitted to bring along one bundle. In my bundle
I had my ‫תפילין‬, my birth certificate, and $1,100 that I brought from Vishnitze andmany postcards that I had from my father in his elegant handwriting. I had
received these post cards during the times when I stayed in Bobov from the firstday of ‫ סליחות‬until after ‫שמחת תורה‬. These cards were more valuable to me thananything else that I owned. They brought to mind pleasant memories of days ofrest and peace, and were my only remaining connection to my father’s house.
Oh how pleasant were those days in Bobov. Weekdays we sat in the ‫בית‬‫ המדרש‬and learned ‫תורה‬, while on ‫ שבת‬and ‫ יום טוב‬we absorbed ‫ תורה‬and ‫יראת שמים‬from the beautiful ‫ שיחות‬and ‫ הייליגע תפילות‬of our ‫ רבי‬the ‫ קדושת ציון זצ"ל‬and his ‫טיש'ן‬.
His ‫ שמועס'ן‬were full of luster and had the light of truth and charm and ‫חכמה‬. ‫חסידים‬surrounded him and thirstily listened to his every expression, and would dwelland give meaning and ‫ פירושים‬to every ‫קוץ וקוץ‬.
I remember well the first time I travelled to Bobov in the ‫ סליחות‬days with agroup of other boys. We were 12 or 13 years old, and weren’t yet fit to sit in the‫ בית המדרש‬all day. We climbed the mountains around the village and walked andwalked hours long, while we enjoyed the pleasant view and the fresh air.
Once we left for a walk right after ‫ שחרית‬and returned late just before ‫מנחה‬when it was almost night. The ‫ רבי‬noticed us, understood right away how we had
spent the day and didn’t approve. This extraordinary ‫ מחנך‬stretched out his handto me and said only three words:!‫שלום עליכם חנא‬. These words were enough toteach me effective ‫ מוסר‬on not to waste time on things that aren’t important. I’m
still affected by these words today, more than 50 years later.
With elegant and effective approaches like this, our ‫ רבי‬influenced a whole‫ דור‬towards ‫ תורה‬and ‫ יראת שמים‬. Every one of his words, expressions and actions
6

descended deep into the hearts of all the boys and young men who surroundedhim.
When the ‫ רבי‬was in Tchebin, I heard from ‫ ר' מיכלי קאלוואריער‬how heunderstood the ‫ פעולות‬of the ‫רבי‬. This happened on ‫שמחת תורה תרצ"ו‬.
The wealthy and respect ‫ אשר טימבערג‬of Cracow invited ‫ ר' מיכלי‬and ‫ר' משה'לי‬‫סטעמפל‬, who was the Rebbe’s son in law to ‫ קידוש‬in ‫ ר' אשר'ס‬hotel room in Tchebin.
‫ ר' אשר‬knew me and my friend ‫ אשר מאיר וואגנר‬from our ‫ שטיבל‬in Cracow and invitedus too and promised us that we would have an ‫עונג רוחני‬.
‫ ר' מיכלי‬began to talk to us in his fiery way about the great ‫ קדושה‬of our ‫רבי‬and his elevated ‫מדריגות‬. He described the special ‫ זכות‬of our ‫ דור‬to have a ‫מנהיג‬who raised the ‫ דגל‬of ‫תורה וחסידות‬. He continued in this way for quite some time,
until he called out loudly: “They sent us a hand from the heavens! Anyone whowants to take hold of the hand should take hold of it!” He jumped up from hischair and left ‫ בשיר ורקידה‬with tremendous ‫שמחה‬.
***The kapos would wake us every morning at 4 o’clock. The frum Jews
would get up earlier to ‫לייג תפילין‬. We had only enough time for ‫ קרית שמע‬and ‫שמונה‬‫עשרה‬. We davened the other ‫ תפילות‬while we worked.
Several minutes afterwards we were already standing on the Appel placein long rows. Every day, day after day through hot and cold, the Germans would
count the prisoners carefully to be sure that no one had escaped. Then there was
breakfast of black bread and a plate of water that they called soup. Once amonth the prisoners were given a bread-card, and a piece of this card was torn
off on every bread distribution, so that no one got more than a set amount. Theneveryone went to his work place.
I’ve already mentioned that Plashov was built on top of a Jewish ‫בית הקברות‬on Jeruzaleska Street. As soon as we arrived in Plashov, the Germans forced us
to smash ‫ מצבות‬into little bits. This was ‫עבודת פרך‬. The Germans used the stones tomake roads in the camp.
7

Frum Jews ate only the bread they gave us and nothing else. When
workers left the camp to their workplaces, they bought eggs, vegetables and thelike from the Polish peasants.
It happened once that commandant Goeth ‫ ימ"ש‬stood at the gates to thecamp when prisoners were returning after work. He noticed that their pockets
were bulging. After a thorough search he found food and also money, and hisanger exploded. He ordered that every second person in the group be shot todeath. He summoned Ukrainian police to carry out the order.
There happened to be there a high ranking ordnungs dienst – a simple but
good hearted person from Kshanov whose name was ‫משה פיינער‬. When he saw
the bitter and unfortunate fate that awaited the prisoners, he turned to Goeth andsaid “You want them to die so easily? First, they need to be beaten!” He grabbed
his horse whip – all ordnungs diensten carried a horse whip – and started to beatto the right and the left with murderous force.
Goeth very much enjoyed watching one Jew torturing others, and a smile
spread over his filthy lips. ‫ משה פיינער‬continued whipping with strength – and at thesame time he screamed in Yiddish in a voice that wasn’t his: !‫גייטס! אנטלויפטס‬!‫ – צעשפרייטס אייך‬run; go; spread out. He chased after them on all sides until they
had all run for their lives. So did this simple person save 25 men from certain
death.
Several months later Goeth decided that it was time to rid himself from this‫משה‬. One morning we heard that ‫ משה פיינער‬was lying dead near the electrified
barbed wire at the camp’s boundaries, ‫הי"ד‬.

8The ‫ רב‬from ‫שידלאוו‬We celebrated ‫ פורים‬a week after we arrived in Plashov. There was a longcorridor that ran through the barrack. Several hundred persons gathered there tohear the ‫מגילה‬. The ‫ מגילה‬had been brought into the camp in one of the bundles
that we brought with us. Other ‫ חפצי קדושה‬and ‫ ספרי קודש‬had also come into thecamp the same way. So many people gathered in the barrack that day that thefloor broke from the overload.
I think that the ‫ בעל קורא‬was ‫ ר' אלימלך ארי' ראבינאוויטש‬the ‫ רב‬of ‫שידלאוו‬. He was
the son of the ‫ כנסת יחזקאל‬from ‫ רדאמסק‬and the younger brother of ‫ר' שלמה חנוך זצ"ל‬‫ הי"ד‬who was the last ‫ רבי‬of ‫רדאמסק‬.
I had the ‫ זכות‬of being with this very special person throughout my time in
Plashov. He was a sincere person, a ‫ צדיק‬in his behavior and a ‫ פיקח‬with astraight-thinking mind. He was always available for wise advice, and encouraged
us when we needed encouragement. He sat in the barrack ‫ על התורה והעבודה‬allday, as if he were still in his city and the times were normal.
One morning on the Appel, the ‫ רשע‬Goeth decided to select 25 older Jews
– including the ‫ רב‬from ‫שידלאוו‬, and to give them 25 lashes with a whip. Two
Ukrainians took turns to beat him with a leather whip with all their strength andwith great cruelty. Goeth ordered the ‫ רב‬from ‫ שידלאוו‬to count the number oflashes with them aloud.
The ‫ רב‬from ‫ שידלאוו‬was a weak person, besides being diabetic and having
a heart condition. He couldn’t tolerate the pain and cried out. His screams
bothered Goeth, and he said, You’re screaming? Another 25!”
When they were finished the ‫ רב‬couldn’t stand. We had to carry him to thebarrack and lay him on his bunk. So he lay several weeks in agony. He would
groan and murmur to himself "‫"ראה עניי ועמלי ושא לכל חטאתי‬.
The ‫ רב‬had three exceptional sons, especially the two eldest. The
personality of the eldest was similar to the ‫רב‬. He was quiet and pleasant, andwould come and go without fuss. The second son was the opposite: brimming
9

with energy, friendliness and warmth. Both stood out in their own ways. They
were the sort of men who deserved to be our ‫ רבנים‬and leaders. I think that thesons were killed in Auschwitz. The ‫ רב‬from ‫ שידלאוו‬himself was killed in the
Matthausen extermination camp ‫הי"ד‬.

10

Rav Nochum Zaltz ‫ע"ה‬After we finished smashing the ‫מצבות‬, they arranged us in work groups
called work-commandos. When I saw that they were arranging a group of
workers to manufacture brushes under the supervision of ‫ ר' נחום זאלטץ‬of Cracow I
right away placed myself in line, because ‫ ר' נחום‬had davened in our ‫ שטיבל‬and I
knew him to be a decent and good hearted person. I think it’s right to devote
several lines to the memory of this precious man, because his children andgrandchildren all died during the war.
Rav Nochum was born in the city of Yavrov in 1880. After he was married
he settled in Vishnitze and lived there until World War I, where he knew myfather’s family well since my father also lived in Vishnitze until World War I. After
World War I Rav Nochum moved to Cracow where he and his bother ‫ משה‬openeda small brush factory.
The factory stood near the ‫ בית המדרש‬of ‫ ר' ארון‬on the ‫הויכע גאס‬. At noon agroup of ‫ בעלי מדרגה‬would daven, and when they were short of a ‫ מנין‬they’d invite '‫ר‬‫ נחום‬to join them as the tenth. While there, ‫ ר' נחום‬noticed and was drawn to '‫ר‬‫ קלמלי קלאסנער‬who was a very well known ‫ חסידישער יוד‬of a very special kind. ‫ר' נחום‬took it upon himself to supply ‫ ר' קלמלי‬with all of his economic needs. When '‫ר‬‫ קלמלי‬traveled to ‫ באבוב‬he would take along ‫ר' נחום‬. And so it developed that ‫ר' נחום‬became closely attached to our ‫רבי ר' בן ציון זצ"ל‬.
This isn’t the place to talk at length about the qualities of ‫ר' קלמ'לי‬. I’ll justmention one remark that ‫ ר' בן ציון‬made when ‫ ר' קלמ'לי‬died in 1935: the ‫ זכות‬of '‫ר‬‫ קלמלי‬protected all of Cracow.
After ‫ ר' נחום‬became close to ‫ ר' קלמלי‬he began to daven in our ‫ שטיבל‬on the‫הויכע גאס‬.
‫ ר' נחום‬heard one particular comment from ‫ ר' בן ציון‬that made a very strong
impression on him. One time ‫ ר' נחום‬pushed others away so that he could ‫כאפ‬‫שיריים‬. Our ‫ רבי‬called to him and said “why do you push the others away, push11

others forward, and you’ll both have.” The remark entered the depths of his heart,and it affected his behavior for the rest of his life.
All those who knew him realized this. He worried first about others andworried last about himself. When the Jews were expelled from Cracow and wereforced into the ghetto in Podgurz, ‫ר' נחום‬, who by then was supplying brushes to
the Germans, moved his factory to the ghetto. The Germans demanded that only
those who were formally registered for work in the ghetto could remain there. But‫ ר' נחום‬gave protection to all he needed it. He brought in hundreds of employees,
including ‫ רבנים‬and ‫אנשי מעלה‬, even if they didn’t know a thing about brushes. Thisput ‫ ר' נחום‬in mortal danger every day.
In this way he saved hundreds of lives, who later established new families‫בישראל‬. He believed earnestly that in this ‫ זכות‬he too remain alive. After all, the ‫רבי‬
had told him: push others forward, and you’ll both have.
He lost his wife and his children during the war, and wasn’t ‫ זוכה‬afterwards
to establish a family again. This didn’t disturb him from being ‫ עובד ד' בשמחה‬andfrom being ‫משמח אלקים ואנשים‬. He died in New York on ‫ ט' אדר א' תשל"ג‬at the age of
92. He ordered that on his ‫ מצבה‬there not be written any compliments or praises,
only this: “an old man who faithfully served the ‫ חסיד‬and ‫ר' קלונימוס קלמן – פריש‬‫ קלאסנער‬from ‫קראקא‬.

12

In the shack of ‫ר' נחום‬When the Germans liquidated the ghetto, they brought all machinery andequipment to the camp in Plashov, including the factory of ‫ר' נחום‬. About 260
people worked in the factory under his supervision. There were three shifts.
Most of the workers were frum and ‫חסידים‬. I’ll mention several names that I
remember: the ‫ רב‬from ‫ שידלאוו‬and his three sons; ‫ ר' ישעי' זעליג מיללער‬from Cracow;‫ רב ישכר בעריש היילפרין‬the ‫ רב‬from ‫ בייטש‬and his sons ‫ ר' אלעזר‬and ‫ר' חיים ;ר' יחזקאל‬‫ ;קופערמאן‬my cousin ‫ אברהם שמואל פאלגר‬who died after the war in ‫ר' נתן דוד ;ארץ ישראל‬‫ ;ר אלימלך בירנבוים ;זילברשטיין‬and ‫ ר' שמלקא ליפשיץ‬who after the war was a ‫ משפיע‬in the‫ גערער ישיבה‬in ‫תל אביב‬.
Our workplace was also our ‫בית המדרש‬. There were ‫ ספרים‬and ‫ סידורים‬and‫חומשים‬. We davened ‫ בציבור‬while we worked.
We barely had to do any work on ‫שבת‬. We sat at our tables with thebrushes – and also with ‫ סידורים‬and ‫חומשים‬. We davened quietly, and afterwards
everyone did his own: one was ‫מעביר סדרה‬, another was ‫ עוסק בתורה‬or quietly sang‫ זמירות שבת‬or melodies from ‫ צדיקים‬of the past. Those Jews who weren’t ‫שומרי תורה‬‫ ומצוות‬didn’t interfere with us during the davening. They sat in a group by theirown and sang nationalist and other songs and so on.
Our ordnungs dienst was a kapo by the name of Gershtler. A good andquiet middle aged person, who generally didn’t bother us. When a German would
approach on ‫ שבת‬he would alert us, and we’d take our brushes in hand as if wewere very much involved in our work.
Once a terrible thing happened during the work. A son in law of thedaughter of ‫ – ר' נחום‬his first name was ‫ אברמ'לי‬but I don’t remember his family
name, was one of the very special Bobover young men in Cracow. He was a ‫בן‬‫תורה מופלג‬, and noble in his behavior to the highest degree. He would always
remind me of my ‫רבי ר' ברוך'ל קאנענגיסער ע"ה‬.
‫ אברמ'לי‬that day needed to go outside to relieve himself. The rule was that
nobody could leave the shack without permission from the kapo. ‫אברמלי‬13

approached the kapo Gershtler to get permission to step out, but he found thatthe kapo had dozed off and was asleep. The sensitive ‫ אברמ'לי‬didn’t have it within
him to wake the kapo. He decided to leave without permission and to come backquickly.
The moment he stepped out an SS guard confronted and seized him. He
pulled ‫ אברמ'לי‬into the shack to the great alarm of everybody. The noise awoke
Gershtler and he quickly assumed the role of a kapo who was faithfully doing his
job. The German asked him if he had given permission to ‫ אברמ'לי‬to leave.
Gershtler answered “no” because he didn’t know what had happened andbesides he was afraid that they’d arrest him for falling asleep on the job. The
German then took ‫ אברמ'לי‬outside and shot him ‫הי"ד‬14‫ פסח‬of ‫( תש"ג‬1943)‫ פסח‬was approaching and all the ‫ חרדים‬were concerned about what they’deat. To this point none of us had eaten anything that wasn’t ‫כשר‬. We didn’t wantto eat ‫ חמץ‬on ‫ פסח‬unless it was an absolute ‫פיקוח נפש‬.
For this let the name of that good man, ‫( שאול הוטטערער‬later in Antwerp), beremembered ‫לטוב‬. He had the ‫ סייעתא דשמיא‬to supply food that was ‫ כשר לפסח‬toclose to 2,000 Jews.
This is what happened in his own words (later published in his ‫ספר "ימי‬"‫)שאול‬When ‫ פסח‬was approaching I met with the ‫ רב‬from ‫ שידלאוו‬and told him that as of
now there was nothing that we would be able to eat for ‫ פסח‬because the only foodthat we were given that was absolutely ‫ כשר‬without a ‫ שאלה‬was the black breadthey gave us every morning. The ‫ רב‬from ‫ שידלאוו‬then davened that we find some
way to eat ‫ כשר‬food on ‫פסח‬.
Eight days before ‫ פסח‬I noticed a tall man with a white coat who waswalking around the camp. It struck me that this might be a Jew from Katowitz
named Hans whom my father and I met earlier in the war. He had no concept ofwhat it meant to be Jewish. He had worked for the SS when they liquidated oneof the local villages. He then returned to the ghetto in Cracow and was ultimately
expelled to Plashov on ‫ז' אדר‬.
I loudly called towards him “Hans!” He turned towards me. After someconversation he remembered me and mentioned that here he was working forthe head German SS supervisor of food distribution in the camp.
I saw that a ‫ ישועה‬might be developing. I asked him if he had a good
relationship with that German. He said “almost like a ‫חבר‬.”I explained to him our concern about the coming ‫ יום טוב‬and proposed thathe act as a middleman to a business deal between me and the SS chief. I would
give him bread-cards for the 8 days of ‫ – פסח‬which were worth large sum – and15

he would give us potatoes and beets for the eight days and also let us use the
kitchen for those days to cook the potatoes and make borscht with the beets.
I told this to the ‫ רב‬from ‫שידלאוו‬. He said ‫ רבונו של עולם‬maybe we’ll yet be ‫זוכה‬to have a ‫כשר'ע יום טוב‬.
The deal in fact worked out well and we were able to ‫ כשר‬the pots andcook in the kitchen.
The ‫ רבנים‬in the camp were also ‫ מתיר‬to eat ‫ קטניות‬in the camp that ‫פסח‬.
bought a kilo of lima beans for the same ‫פסח‬.
For ‫ פסח‬of the next year (1944) we couldn’t get potatoes. We ate corn
instead.

16‫ מצות‬in the CampIn the darkness of Plashov, where they robbed us of any shred of humandecency, there were many groups of us who baked ‫ מצות‬for ‫ פתח‬secretly. All thiswas done in great danger. The Germans would kill anyone caught, no questions
asked.
Here too my friend ‫ ר' שאול‬played a leading role. Two ‫ גערער בחורים‬who slepton his bunk worked in the camp’s electricity plant. They were nephews of one of
the camp’s chief ordnungs diensten, who was a young man from Lodz named
Finkelstein. Shaul asked them if they could possibly make an electric oven to
bake ‫מצות‬. They got permission from their uncle and created an oven from a large
block of tin, on which they arranged electric wires on both sides. The oven waslarge enough to bake eight ‫ מצות‬at a time.
In exchange for some bread ration cards, a bakery ordnungs dienst
named Leibovitch gave him two sacks of flour. A group then worked on baking‫ מצות‬the whole night of ‫בדיקת חמץ‬. ‫ ר' משה דוד מאנדלבוים‬kneaded the dough. This wasa difficult job for the whole group – after working on ‫ מצות‬on night they had towork “normally” the whole next day.
To cover expenses that included the cost of the flour, the kneading andbaking equipment and the bribes that had to be paid to many people, the group
established a price of 10 zlotys per ‫מצה‬. I paid 40 zlotys for four ‫מצות‬. I used two‫ מצות‬for the first ‫ סדר‬and the other two ‫ מצות‬for the next ‫סדר‬.
On the night of the first ‫סדר‬, when we returned from work, we laid on our
bunks with the ‫ מצות‬and said the ‫ הגדה‬by heart. What a ‫ סדר‬it was! I can’t describe
the feelings that stormed in me. The past and present were roared through myhead in confusion. The happy ‫ סדרים‬in my father’s house together with mybrothers and sisters and their dear children. The brilliant ‫ סדרים‬in ‫ באבוב‬when
1,000 ‫ בחורים‬sat with the ‫קדושת ציון‬. Our present ‫ צרה‬and captivity, deep in the mudof ‫וימררו את חייהם‬.

17

On the first day of ‫ חול המועד פסח‬the ordnungs diensten were ordered toarrest 10 prominent ‫רבנים‬. Late at night the kapos charged into the barracks andseized whomever they found. The ‫ רבנים‬included ‫ ר' שם קלינגברג‬the ‫ רבי‬from
Zalositz and ‫ר' נתן קופרוואסר‬. ‫ ר' שם‬was one of the prominent ‫ אדמורי"ם‬in our city
Cracow, a grandson of the ‫ צדיקים‬of ‫ זיזיטשוב‬and ‫קאמרנא‬, and was considered one
the outstanding ‫ מקובלים‬of the ‫דור‬. His ‫ חידושי תורה‬were printed in the ‫אהלי שם‬.
The 10 ‫ רבנים‬who were selected were taken to the field of killings, andwere arranged in row before a German firing squad, for no reason. We called
those ‫ קדושים‬the ‫עשרה הרוגי מלכות הי"ד‬.
***After ‫ פסח‬my friend ‫ שאול הוטטערער‬did another business deal with Hans.
Hans gave to his SS supervisor all of the ‫ טריפה‬meat that was given to the frum
Jews, and in exchange they gave us oil. The camp’s kitchen gave us 10 largevats of hot “soup” every day. ‫ שאול‬through Hans arranged that two of these vats
be used only for ‫ כשר‬food. Anybody who wanted to could eat from the ‫ כשר‬vats
that were under ‫ פרום‬supervision. I with ‫[ משה ראבי‬who later lived in Williamsburg]
gave out lunch to our friends from the ‫ כשר‬kitchen. Throughout our stay in
Plashov we ate only ‫כשר'ס‬.
There were some young married men and ‫ – בחורים‬for example ‫ר' ישעי' ניימאן‬the ‫ גבאי‬of my ‫ רבי‬the ‫ – קדושת ציון‬who didn’t want to rely on the ‫ כשר‬kitchen
because they were worried that the oil wasn’t ‫למהדרין‬. They arranged their own
food from what Polish peasants brought to them while these young men and‫ בחורים‬were working in the fields outside the camp. They gave the peasants goldand silver ornaments, and the peasants gave them food in exchange.
In Bobov we knew that '‫ ר' ישעי‬was a ‫תלמיד חכם‬. He would have a daily ‫שיעור‬in ‫ מנחת חינוך‬with ‫ ר' יחזקאל ראטענבערג‬the ‫גבאי שני‬. But that he was a ‫ בעל מדרגה‬werealized only in Plashov.
We weren’t in the same Plashov area, but I heard lots about his
outstanding behavior and care for others in those difficult days. He worked in a18

paper factory called “Papier Gemeinschaft.” The Kapos and the management of
the company recognized that he was a distinguished person, and treated him
with respect. They didn’t demand that he work on Shabbos. Several of ourfriends from ‫ באבוב‬sat with him ‫ בזמן שלש סעודות‬on ‫ שבת‬afternoon. He would give
precious talks full of ‫ אמונה‬and ‫בטחון‬. He was murdered on ‫ ט"ו אב תש"ד‬inMatthausen together with his only son ‫ישראל יצחק הי"ד‬.

A Miracle
Although I worked in ‫ ר' נחום'ס‬factory most of my time in Plashov, there
were several times that the Germans needed extra hands for other work and they
drafted men for these jobs. In the beginning of winter in 1943, the Germans
decided to dig trenches around the barracks to see to it that they wouldn’t
become flooded from rain and melting snow. I was also summoned to work on
this job. They ordered us to dig and then load the dirt on wagons. This wasn’t apleasant job. The camp was built on a Jewish ‫בית עולם‬. As we dug we foundbones of people who had been buried there, and we had to load them on thewagons.
There were also times when I had to do forced labor in the fields outside
the camp under the supervision of a Wehrmacht soldier. As we worked, Polishpeasants constantly approached us with bread, butter and other foods that theysold to us for money and precious stones. When the Germans would catch any
prisoner who had done this, they would shoot him for dealing in contraband as
I’ve already mentioned. Still, many of us dared to buy food from the peasants torelive the hunger that dominated the camp. I think that the German who guarded
us had a spark of ‫רחמנות‬, and he looked the other way when we desperatelybought food.
Once when we returned though the gate after work, two SS soldiersannounced that they’re making a search for contraband. We trembled because
this search meant certain death for the whole group, because almost everyone
had hidden under his clothing food or other things he had bought. We froze inplace while we silently davened: "!‫"אנא ד' הושיעה נא‬
19

Suddenly our guard protested with force: “I will not permit this search!
These people do physical labor, and so what if some of them bring in something
light to help them work so faithfully?!
The words were said with such gravity that they made an impression on
the sadists. The allowed us into the camp without a search. This was a rare andexceptional ‫נס‬.

Physical abuse and shame
The number of Jews in the camp declined further and further. Masses diedfrom lack of food, combined with the difficult work they were forced to do. Among
those who expired was my boyhood friend ‫ אברהם מאיר ראטענבערג‬the son of myteacher and ‫ רבי‬the ‫גאון ר' מענדילי‬. He had always been weak and sickly, and in theend he lost all strength and died in the arms of ‫ר' נתן דוד זילברשטיין‬.
In those times one could test the true internal ‫ מדות‬of a person. There were
those who did everything possible to help their ‫חברים‬. But to our pain and regret
there were also those who became cruel like ‫יענים במדבר‬.
The memory of one of these is etched into me. He was from a ‫רבני'שע‬
family, the grandson of one of the prominent ‫רבי'ס‬. His name began with ‫ר‬. His
cruelty was unbelievable. He didn’t hesitate from beating friends mercilessly.
Woe is to my eyes from for having seen many events from him and others likehim. They lost all feelings of ‫ רחמנים ביישנים גומלי חסדים‬that the ‫ חכמים‬said belong toevery Jew, and all for shadow of a doubt that this might save them or give them awhiff of imaginary power.
Many bodies also fell through the murderous behavior of commandant
Goeth whose cruelty knew no bounds. He drew enjoyment from torturing us. Dayafter day he would order a number of men, sometimes 50 and sometimes even
200 or 300, and to whip them 25 times with a horse whip. The soldiers carriedout his orders promptly and happily, and Jewish blood ran like water. Many,
many couldn’t bear the pain and the wounds and died on the spot.

20

Goeth constantly searched hard to find an evil pretext to justify to himself
why to torture his victim. He would throw the victim to the ground, and beat him
furiously, stomping on him with his boots like a wild beast.
It’s fresh in my mind how he butchered without ‫ רחמנות‬two ‫ר' – אברכים קדושים‬‫ צבי זאנענשיין‬and his friend ‫ שלמה שפיעלמן‬from Podgurz. This was on ‫ה' אייר – שבת‬‫תש"ג‬, May 1943, several months after we arrived in the camp.
Early in the morning when the captives gathered to go to work the same
as every other day, the tyrant Goeth appeared suddenly to scan the captives. He
threw his gaze on ‫ ר' הערשיל‬and shouted angrily “Why is your face so angry!” He
struck him with the horse whip with murderous blows, but this wasn’t enough . He
pulled his revolver from his pocket and shot ‫ ר' הערשיל‬in the eye. He died there
writhing in blood streaming like a river from his eye.
His soft-hearted friend ‫ ר' שלמה‬saw all this and new that he had to swallow
and say nothing. But his face became ashen and Goeth noticed! Goeth
approached him and said “Seems to me that you don’t like what I did.” He shot '‫ר‬‫ שלמה‬and killed him.

21Selections
It often happened that mid-day all the prisoners were summoned to theAppel-square, where they selected men to be sent to Auschwitz. How can I
describe the nervous strain of all of us. Men were selected from my right andfrom my left, and the terror that I too would be selected was fearsome. The
Germans understood that there would be those who wouldn’t want to participate
in the selections and would hide in the barracks. For this there was a standingorder: All found in the barracks during the Appel would be shot to death.
Once I simply didn’t have the strength to bear the tension of the selection.
My friend ‫ ר' מילך בירנבוים‬decided to hide in the barracks under the bottom bunkwith our hands and feet stretched out on the ground. We heard a kapo come in tosearch for hiders, but "‫ "הכה בסנורים‬and he didn’t notice us.
As I remember this event, I found it hard to resist a smile. We werehovering there under the bunk at risk of certain death if we were caught. Still, inthat very ‫מצב‬, as we lay there for quite some time spread out under the hard
earth, I went into a solid and very deep sleep with a powerful snore.
I think this shows how used we had become to live day to day with the riskof death, until we could drowse with no problems.
Another time we decided not to go to the selection, but were afraid to hidein the barracks. We found a hidden nook outside and there we hid throughout thewhole selection. But my world darkened when I realized that our hiding place wasin the direct line of sight of the guard-tower, on which a German soldier stoodarmed with rifles to be sure that all was in order. Our blood froze in our veins as
we davened that he not notice us.
Again we were ‫ זוכה‬to ‫סייעתא דשמיא‬, and ‫ ב"ה‬he didn’t notice us. But always
when I re-picture this event I wonder whether maybe the guard noticed us, andthat for some reason he had ‫ רחמנות‬on us and pretended not to see us.

22

Tied together in ‫אהבה‬I will forever remember ‫ שבת‬on ‫כ"א תמוז תש"ג‬. We were sitting at table in thefactory of ‫ר' נחום‬. We had just finished ‫ שחרית‬and ‫ מוסף‬and each of us was doing
his own thing. This one said ‫ תהלים‬that one read a ‫ספר‬, a third sang ‫ זמירות שבת‬tohimself.
Suddenly a German soldier jumped in through the window. He was so
drunk that he didn’t come in through the door as a normal person would. He
grabbed the first four men who were at hand and pulled them outside. One ofthem was ‫ ר' ישעי' זעליג מיללער‬of Cracow, the father of my friend ‫ר' שלמה‬.
‫ ר' ישעי' זעליג‬realized that he and the three others were on their way to be
murdered. He immediately pulled out his ‫ גארטיל‬that only a moment ago he hadtaken off when he finished davening. He planned to put in on by way of preparing
for the ‫ מצוה‬of ‫ קידוש השם‬that was approaching to him.
But in this he wasn’t concerned only for himself. He also wanted to be ‫מזכה‬the three others, that they too should be ‫ זוכה‬to be ‫ מקיים קידוש השם‬while wearing a‫גארטיל‬. In the commotion and tumult he shouted to them to join him together in the‫גארטיל‬. And so all three were shot tied together ‫ באהבה‬while they said ‫ד' אלקינו ד' אחד‬.
Afterwards a group of soldiers broke into the factory and with the help of
two Ukrainians hit each one of us 25 times with a leather strap.
All this by way of having a good time after several drinks in honor of theweek end.

23‫ימים נוראים תש"ד‬‫ אלול‬approached, a full year after my father was murdered. In the barracks
we already heard the melodies of ‫ ימי סליחות‬and ‫ימים נוראים‬. These ‫ תנועות‬reminded
always remind me of the pre-dawn hours of the first day of ‫ סליחות‬in Cracow. The
voice of the ‫ שמש‬of the ‫ אלטער שול‬echoed in the quiet streets as he banged on the
doors of the houses in the ‫ הויכער גאס‬as he sang the ancient call: ‫יודעלעך יודעלעך‬‫טייערע ליעבערע זיסע ברידערלעך שייט'ס אויף שטייט'ס אויף פאר עבודת הבורא‬On ‫ ראש השנה‬more than 200 men davened in ‫ ר' נחום'ס‬barrack, and we were‫ זוכה‬to hear ‫ תקיעות‬quietly. On ‫ יום כפור‬we also davened ‫כל נדרי בצבור‬, and this time
almost all those in the barracks joined, even those who didn’t join in ‫ תפלות‬the restof the year.
Several persons were appointed to stand outside as guards to alert therest. When Germans approached they shouted ‫זעקס‬. This was a code word for“danger” that we had set up in advance. When the word was sounded we put
away our ‫ סידורים‬and ‫מחזורים‬, and we grabbed hair bristles in one hand and theiron needles we used to twist the bristles into brushes with the other hand.
But the sound of our ‫ תפלות‬drifted out to one German who was patrollingoutside. He stormed in with fury, and in a loud voice thundered “Is this aworkplace or a synagogue!” We trembled on the results once news of our doings
were reported to the camp leaders. To our great surprise we later heard nothing
about this crime.
***
There was an “action” on ‫ יום כפור‬morning. This was the German’s ‫ – מנהג‬tomake actions on ‫ ים טוב‬to add to our ‫שמחת יום טוב‬. They broke into our barracks
and grabbed one person to be "‫"קרבן היום‬. As they took him outside, he looked at
us with sad eyes as if saying “Nu, what can we do?” His distraught eyes oppress
me to this day.

24

I then remembered the song "‫ "לידעלע‬that they were then singing in
Galicia. (‫ ר' יחזקאלי ראטענבערג‬used the melody for his famous ‫שבת איז הייליג וואיל “ גראם‬).‫ מזמור שיר ליום השבת‬,‫איז אונזער חלק‬My mother would sing this melody quietly while she was rocking my cradle
when I was very little. The words to the song were added after the anti-Semitic
Drefus affair: "‫ ווייל די ביסט א יידעלע‬,‫"ווייסטו דרייפוס פארוואס דיר דאס קומט‬But this slaughter on the morning of ‫ יום כפור‬didn’t finish the ‫עבודת היום‬.
Commandant Goeth ordered all those who wore eyeglasses to leave the roll callformation and move to the side. Soldiers stood at the ready to make sure that
nobody pulled off his glasses. That day several hundred eyeglass wearers wereshot outside the camp. Among those caught up in this selection was the excellent‫בחור‬, who was ‫חריף ובקי‬, ‫ יעקב אייכנשטיין‬from Limonov. ‫ יעק'ל‬was a ‫ תלמיד‬of the ‫גאון‬from ‫טשעבין‬.
My friends in the barrack told me that ‫ יעקל‬would by heart learn ‫בחברותא‬with ‫ ר' מענדלי הורוויץ‬the ‫ רב הצעיר‬of Zhikov and the son of ‫ר' אלטר'ל‬. Once the“neighbors” heard them reviewing ‫ תוספות‬in ‫ יבמות‬in the middle of the night.
Then I thanked ‫ רבש"ע‬for his many kindnesses. I realized how ‫מעז יצא מתוק‬. I
remembered the powerful beating I got from a Polish policeman on that black dayin ‫אלול‬, when I and my brother in law ‫ אברמ'לי ענגעלשטיין‬were captured in the bunker
we had dug in Bochnia.
In his temper tantrum he honored me with strong slaps on the cheek thatsmashed my glasses into bits. I hadn’t been able to fix them or buy new ones as‫ צרות‬afterwards flowed quickly one after the other, first in Rakowitz, then in theghetto in Cracow, and from there to Plashov. Only now was it clear to me thatthose beatings saved me from certain deaths. How great are the ‫ מעשים‬of ‫הקב"ה‬.
***As ‫ סוכות‬neared we were able with a lot of effort to arrange a ‫ סוכה כשירה‬forourselves. Near our shack there was a work group that made mattresses. Many

25

mattresses were placed outside. We put three of them near the wall of our shack,and places small boards on top for ‫סכך‬.
To be ‫ מקיים‬this ‫ מצוה‬was a dangerous operation, so we acted with speed.
One of us stood watch to make sure that no Germans were approaching while
we all stood in a row to take our turn to go into the ‫סוכה‬. We each crawled in, said
the ‫ ברכה‬of ‫לישב בסוכה‬, made a ‫שהחיינו‬, ate a ‫ כזית‬and left quickly. Given thesituation the ‫ סוכה‬was ‫"גאנץ בא'טעמ'ט‬.

26

A Change for the Better
At the start of winter of ‫ תש"ד‬word spread that the Germans were retreatingon all fronts. We heard that the Allied armies were strengthening their attacks on
the Germans: the Russians were pounding the Germans in the East, had pushedthem out of Russia and were preparing to invade Poland. The Americans had
begin their advance into Italy. American and British planes rained thousands andthousands of bombs on German cities day and night, causing fearful destruction.
These reports breathed life into us, and gave us hope that the end of the war wasapproaching and that we might even survive to leave this ‫ גיהנום‬as free men.
The reports took on more meaning for us when a high ranking generalvisited Plashov in January 1944. Preparations for his arrival were evident inevery corner of the camp. Groups of prisoners were assigned to clean thebarracks where we worked and the barracks where we slept. The chief Kapo, a‫ בליעל‬named Wilhelm Chilowitz ran from one barrack to the other and warned thateveryone had to see to it that the reception of the general succeed with honorand splendor.
The day came and the general arrived with all of his officers and aides,
and he inspects all that was happening in the camp. When he came into ourbrush factory we all stood up in his honor. Our kapo (I think this was theGershtler I already mentioned) approached him with his riding whip andannounced with respect “259 prisoners work in this barrack.” The general asked
him “Please tell me , what is that in your hands?” The kapo answered “This is ariding whip to supervise the workers and to get them used to working properly.”
The general asked him “Are they horses who need riding whips to guide them?”
The kapo dropped the whip.
When Chilowitz heard what the general had said, he right away sent a
special messenger to tell the other kapos not to hold riding whips when thegeneral visited. From that day on the Germans in the camp stopped shooting
Jews for no reason, and eased off on their cruelty.
***27

It pains me to tell you that even after the no-reason shootings stopped, afriend of mine with very special ‫ מדות‬was killed in ‫חנוכה תש"ד‬.
On that cold morning, after they counted us on the Appel-square and we
stood ready to go to our workplaces, they announced an unusual order. We wereto march towards the fields where the boundaries of the camp were marked withbarbed wire. We arranged ourselves into lines of six men each and so 6,000 of
us marched to the field.
A German then said “Alles links kikken” – all look to the left! In front of us
was a pole on which two Jews were hanged, with a sign on top of them that said
this was a punishment for their having tried to escape.
We knew both of them. One was a ‫ באבוב'ער חסיד‬from Amsene. The second
was a ‫ בחור‬who was my friend ‫ מרדכי גרינבערג‬from the ‫ ישיבה עץ חיים ד'באבוב‬in
Podgurz, a ‫תלמיד חכם וירא שמים‬. He was the son of the sister of ‫ ר' ישראל בייגל‬andwas also a nephew of the wife of ‫ שמואל טענדארסקי‬now of Boro Park.
These ‫ קדושים‬were so ‫ נזהר‬in ‫ מאכלות אסורות‬that they would eat nothing fromour ‫ כשר‬kitchen. Every day before dawn they would visit the fields near thebarbed wire. They would dig out potatoes and cook the potatoes themselves.
They would share the potatoes with ‫ר' ישעי' ניימן‬. That morning the two had been
seized and were shot.
I heard a fearful thing from ‫ שאול הוטטערער‬about the murder of our ‫מרדכי‬.
‫ שאול‬told me that on the night of ‫ יום כפור‬he dreamed that he was walking in thecamp with ‫מרדכי‬. An SS soldier shot ‫ מרדכי‬and ordered ‫ שאול‬to bury him. While hewas burying ‫ מרדכי‬he sensed that someone was pulling his leg. ‫ שאול‬woke up fromhis dream and he saw ‫ מרדכי‬in front of him, motioning that it was late and time todaven. ‫ שאול‬was agitated by his dream and mentioned it to the ‫ רב‬from ‫שידלאוו‬.
The ‫ רב‬answered: “We need to daven for him.”‫ מרדכי‬cried to ‫ שאול‬before ‫ חנוכה‬that during the night someone had stolen allof his money. ‫ שאול‬told this to the ‫ רב‬from ‫שידלאוו‬.The ‫ רב‬was happy about thenews, since "‫ "עני חשוב כמת‬and maybe this was the meaning of the nightmare.

28

That ‫ חנוכה‬when we were marched past the hanged bodies, ‫ שאול‬hadn’t yet
recognized who they were. An SS soldier then ordered him and another person
each to take the bodies and to load them on small wagons (“totchkes”) and tobury them on a hill where all murdered persons were buried. ‫ שאול‬picked up one
bodies and was stunned to see that it was his ‫מרדכי‬.
And he added that when he picked up ‫ מרדכי‬pictures of ‫ ר' בן ציון‬the ‫ רבי‬from‫ באבוב‬fell out of ‫ מרדכי'ס‬pockets.
I remained in Plashov until ‫( אייר תש"ד‬May 1944).

29‫חורבן אונגארען‬‫‪30‬‬

In the Spring of 1944 the Germans began to destroy the Jewish presencein Hungary. You might have thought that when the Third Reich was beginning tocollapse, and the Germans were suffering defeats on all fronts, the pace ofdestruction for Jews would slow down. Quite the opposite, with all their energy
and power the Germans continued to sacrifice the Jews. In the space of 48 days,
from April 16 until July 9, thousands of ancient Jewish ‫ קהילות‬were uprooted. Morethan a half million Jews, men, women and children, were sent to the ‫ גיהינום‬ofAuschwitz, where they were killed ‫על קידוש השם‬Among the innocents whose blood was spilled as water were most of thefamily of my father in law ‫רב יחזקאל שרגא הכהן שווארץ ז"ל‬, and with him my mother inlaw, their six daughters, their young son, and their son in law. Only two branches
remain from the entire family – my wife ‫ מחלה‬and her brother ‫ר' יחיאל מיכל הכהן‬.
I want to devote one chapter to explain to you the glory of this very special
family. I also want to mark down at least a small, small part of the waves of ‫צרות‬that overwhelmed them from when they were expelled from their home in Gyor –Raab in German – in Hungary, and their final journey to Auschwitz. The words
that I’ll tell you are those of my wife. She will also mention the ‫ נסים‬about her
escape, so that later generations will know the wonders and kindness of ‫השם‬‫ יתברך‬who saved her from the lions.

The German conquestOn ‫( שבת כ"ג אדר תש"ד‬March 18, 1944) the German army conquered all of
Hungary. German soldiers entered our city the next morning. They took over all
government buildings and offices. They met almost no opposition. The
Americans bombed our city only once – on the morning of the fourth day of ‫חול‬‫המועד פסח‬.
My parents asked that my brother ‫ מיכל‬rush home from ‫ ישיבה‬in the city of
Papa. They wanted our family to be together in these desperate times.
Decrees against Jews flowed rapidly. They separated us from the rest of
the population. Jews were forbidden from doing business or to own stores. All31‫ ישיבות‬and ‫ בתי מדרשים‬were shut. My father could no longer give ‫ שיעורים‬to his‫תלמידים‬. He stayed home and learned himself all day.
After several days we began feeling pangs of huger. There wasn’t enoughfood for the family. The older children gave up their portions for the infants andthe very young. The younger children couldn’t understand what had changed. My
heart aches when I remember how my sister ‫ חנה'לע‬pleaded for bread. My motheralmost went out of her mind from grief ‫ר"ל‬. The older children stood around thechild’s crib while she ate, hoping desperately that ‫ חנה'לע‬would leave something
for them when she finished eating.
In those days the local priests announced that every Jew who changed his
religion would be given a certificate that would protect him from the Germans. To
our dismay many Jews grabbed on to this slender and broken reed, mostly fromthe reform “neologues,” and converted out of a futile hope that their fate would be
different than those of the other Jews.
My father watched all this with disgust and contempt. He said of the‫משומדים‬: “the mice are running.” I don’t have to tell you that these certificatesaccomplished nothing. The Germans thoroughly investigated the ancestry ofeven full-fledged ‫ גוים‬whose grandparents were ‫משומדים‬, and murdered them withother Jews. In truth they never even considered the certificates to be more thanscraps of paper.
My father devoted a lot of time to encourage and strengthen hearts thatwere broken by those difficult days. Morning and night people would visit us in
our cramped apartment to ask his advice and to get his opinion on our bitter
situation. They came to absorb the warmth of his personality, and to arm
themselves with his wisdom. His personality, his penetrating blue eyes, his fulland plentiful beard, and the pleasant smile that always hovered on his lips, allcombined to bring out happiness and a zest for life in all who met him.
I have fresh in my memory the times when ‫ ר' אלעזר אלי' געשטעטנער‬came totalk to my father. Everyone called him “Lali.” He was very rich, a millionaire, andowned a large factory that made bricks. Right after the German conquest, they32

seized his factory and all of its equipment, supplies and inventory. He was afraid
to sit in his house because he suspected that the Germans were searching for
the wealthy Jews. In our house he felt safe because he knew that we weren’t
counted among the wealthy.1
On one of his visits Lali sat at the table and discussed the news with myfather. The children were walking around in torn clothing. We couldn’t send theclothing to seamsters for mending because the seamsters were also forbidden to
do their work.
Lali noticed that one of my sisters was barefoot. She didn’t wear her torn
shoes in the house. Lali looked at her sadly and told my mother “Please, send ofyour daughters to my house and I’ll arrange for a pair of shoes.” My mother was
too proud to accept gifts from others and said with a bitter heart, “It’s all right, wewon’t be needing shoes any more.” When Mr. Gestetner rose to leave, hegroaned “Rab Yecheskel, we’re already in the lion’s mouth, all that’s left is for
him to bite!”
We still spent ‫ שבועות‬in our house. We didn’t know that the end was
drawing near very quickly.
After the war the murderous plan of the Germans was published. They
had divided Hungary into five regions. The first was Carpathia, where Jews wereliquidated from April 4 until June 7. The second was Transylvania that was
liquidated from May 4 until June 7. The third stretched from the northern edge of
Budapest to the German border, which was scheduled for June 6 until June 17.
This area included our city Raab.
The fourth region was to the east of the Duna River, from June 29 until
June 30. The fifth was the area to the west of the Duna River, from June 29 until
July 9. Their plan was next to exterminate the Jews in the capital, Budapest, butwith ‫ רחמי שמים‬most Jews in that city were saved.
1

Another wealthy family, in the textile business, hid many bundles of fabric in our house, where they
didn’t expect the Germans to search. My mother told my sister Yehudis to use some of the fabric to sew
clothing for the children. Later, after we had arrived in Auschwitz, I saw a pile of clothing left over fromthose who had died. Among the clothing, I recognized those that Yehudis had made for my sisters.

33‫ שבועות‬that year fell on May 28 and 29. About two weeks later, on June 11,
the first transport from our city left for Auschwitz. The second transport left onJune 18. On it was our family.

34

My father
My father, the most precious of men, ‫ר' יחזקאל הכהן שווארץ ע"ה‬, was born inthe village of Tissa-Dab in Hungary in March 1899 to his father ‫הרבני החסיד ר' אליעזר‬‫מנחם ע"ה‬. His father named him ‫ יחזקאל שרגא‬after the ‫שינאווער רבי‬, who had died twomonths earlier on ‫ו' טבת תרנ"ט‬.
‫ ר' אליעזר מנחם‬was born in 1849 to his father 2‫ר' דוד שמחה‬. The family namethen was Majerczyk3 When ‫ ר' דוד שמחה‬was 13 years old, he left Zaloshitz out offear that he would be drafted into the Russian army under the Cantonisten
military program. He wandered from place to place until he arrived in Dikla inwest Galicia. After several years he married ‫ לאה בת ר' הערש בער ע"ה‬and worked asa ‫מלמד‬.
‫ מרת לאה‬would say that when she was a little girl six years old and fed thegeese of her father ‫ר' הערש בער‬, she would always ‫ דאווען‬that she should be ‫ זוכה‬tohave sons who were ‫כשרים וצדיקים‬. And in fact she was ‫ זוכה‬to build a proud house‫בישראל‬. Her sons were well-known ‫חסידים‬. One of them, ‫ר' חננאל‬, was a devoted‫ חסיד‬of the ‫דברי יחזקאל‬. They said of him that every year he would be in ‫ שינאווע‬withthe ‫ רבי‬from ‫ ראש חדש אלול‬until after 4!‫חנוכה‬After his grandfather ‫ ר' אליעזר‬died, ‫ ר' דוד שמחה‬returned with his family to
Zaloshitz to claim his share of the ‫ירושה‬. He stayed in Zaloshitz for some time –and that’s when my grandfather ‫ ר' אליעזר מנחם‬was born. In the end ‫ ר' דוד שמחה‬wascheated of his share of the ‫ ירושה‬and got nothing at all, and set down to work in
Zaloshitz as a ‫מלמד‬. But even at this point he had no ‫מנוחה‬. The government
passed a law that demanded changes in how children were to be educated in‫חדרים‬. Since he couldn’t be ‫ מחנך‬his children properly in Zaloshitz , he returned to2‫ ר' שמחה דוד‬was the son of ‫ ר' חננאל‬who in turn was the son of ‫ ר' אליעזר‬who owned a ‫ ווערטץ הויז‬in
Zaloshitz. The parents of ‫ ר' חננאל – ר' דוד‬and his wife – died in an epidemic in the middle of the night when
‫ ר' שמחה דוד‬was only a month old. A gentile neighbor brought the infant to his grandparents that night.
While the neighbor still stood outside the door, his grandmother heard the child’s cry and recognized that
this was the cry of her grandson.
3
My relative, Mrs. Judy Rubinstein from Toronto, maintains that many times she heard it said in the houseof her father ‫ר' אלי' שווארץ‬, who was my father’s older brother, that the original family name was
Rabinowitz, not Majerczyk.
4
Besides ‫ ר' חננאל‬and my grandfather ‫ ר' אליעזר מנחם‬they had three other children: ‫ר' שלמה‬, ‫ ר' יעקב זאב‬and‫מרת פריידא מענדעלאוויטש‬35

Dikla and stayed there for the rest of his life. It was in Dikla that his children
became close to the ‫שינאווער רבי‬My grandfather ‫ ר' אליעזר מנחם‬learned ‫ בהתמדה‬in Dikla with ‫הגאון ר' יחזקאל‬‫וויינבערגער‬. He married 5‫יהודית בת ר' יצחק בצלאל הלוי סעקלער‬, and received a ‫ נדן‬of 400
guilden. He began to deal in nuts and plums, but didn’t succeed and lost most of
his money.
He then decided to cross over into Hungary from Galicia. The cross-overwasn’t legal – in Yiddish he had ‫שווארצט די גרעניץ‬. He in fact changed his name to‫ שווארץ‬and established himself in the village of Tissa-Tab where he studied to bea ‫ שוחט‬and lived 15 years. He then moved to the village of Meza Chatta near
Mishkolz where he lived 20 years.
‫ ר' אליעזר מנחם‬was an '‫ עובד ד‬with all his heart and soul. In 1900 his son ‫שמעון‬died at the age of 17 in an epidemic on ‫ ערב שבת‬late in the afternoon. It was toolate to bury him that day, and they were forced to leave the body in one room
while the rest of the family gathered for ‫ סעודת שבת‬in another room. ‫ר' אליעזר מנחם‬stood with his ‫ שטריימל‬on his head, held my father – who was then a year old – inhis hand, and ‫ בהשתפכות הנפש‬sang ‫ שלום עליכם‬And so he behaved for the whole‫ סעודה‬and sang all the ‫זמירות‬. There was not a sign of pain or grief all ‫שבת‬: he said"'‫"שבת היום לד‬.
In 1907 his wife ‫ יהודית‬became ill with a serious disease. Her father ‫ר' יצחק‬‫ בצלאל‬came from Dikla to examine her. ‫ ר' יצחק בצלאל‬was as an unlicensed doctor
in Dikla –‫ א פעלשער‬. Although he had no formal education, he did have broad
medical knowledge. He examined her and said nothing, but when he left her
room and met her oldest son ‫ חיים צבי‬he burst out crying about her poor condition,and that he could do nothing for her.

5

Their children were ‫( ר' חיים צבי‬died in New York in ‫)תשכ"א‬, ‫( עטל‬the wife of ‫ ר' דוד שטיין‬who was a ‫ שוחט‬inPapa and the father of ‫ ר' יצחק שטיין ע"ה‬of ‫)בני ברק‬, '‫( ר' אלי‬who lived in Serenzh and was the father of ‫מרת‬'‫ יהודית רובינשטיין תי‬of Toronto), ‫( ר' ישכר דוב‬a ‫ מלמד‬in Papa), ‫ר' ישראל יעקב‬, my father ‫ ר' יחזקאל שרגא‬and '‫ר‬‫( שלמה‬the father of ‫ מרת רחל שווימער ע"ה‬and ‫מרת יהודית אבערלענדער‬, both of New York).
Besides their son ‫ שמעון‬who died as a ‫ בחור‬in the epidemic I’m about to mention, they lost two otherchildren in that epidemic: ‫ שרה‬at the age of 12, and ‫ טויבא מלכה‬at the age of four.

36

The family traveled with her to Vienna to see specialists, but to the dismayof the family nothing could be done. She died soon afterwards and was buried in
Mesa Chata. The oldest daughter of ‫ – עטל– ר' אליעזר מנחם‬was then alreadymarried to ‫ר' דוד שטיין‬, a ‫ שוחט‬in Papa. My father, who was then only 8 years old,
went to live in her house in Papa. She treated him well and raised him.
‫ ר' אליעזר מנחם‬remarried a woman who owned a grocery in Mesa Chata.
She took great care on her husband, who spent most of the day learning ‫בהתמדה‬.
My grandfather died at the age of 84 on 6‫י"ג שבט תרצ"ג‬.
This is what is written on the ‫ מצבה‬on the ‫ קבר‬of ‫ ר' אליעזר מנחם‬in Meza
Chato. The ‫ מצבה‬was found ‫ בסייעתא דשמיא‬by a member of our family several years
ago. Most ‫ מציבות‬in the ‫ בית עולם‬were destroyed by the Germans during the war,and more were destroyed by neglect in the decades after the war, including the‫ מצבה‬of my grandmother ‫יהודית‬. But several ‫ מציבות‬survived in a corner reserved for‫כהנים‬, and that’s how we were ‫ זוכה‬to find the ‫ מציבה‬of our grandfather:
Here lies hidden‫ר' אליעזר מנחם‬The son of ‫ר' דוד שמחה הכהן שווארץ‬This silent stone shall advise
All who pass in front of it
And will testify that this ‫ קבר‬hides
The dust of a man who was a ‫ חסיד‬and an ‫עניו‬From his youth until his old age
Most of his time day and nightHe was ‫ מקיים‬the ‫ מצוות‬of Hashem and was ‫עוסק בתורה‬Conducted himself with ‫ חסידות‬and the ‫[ מדות‬of his ‫]רבי‬His portion is ‫גן עדן‬, but woe is to those he left behind
His resting place is honorable among those who are [like him]
6

After the ‫שבעה‬, the sons of ‫ ר' אליעזר מנחם‬divided the ‫ ספרים‬of their father. All the brothers agreed thatsince my father ‫ ר' יחזקאל שרגא‬was the biggest ‫ תלמיד חכם‬among them it was appropriate that he be given
their father’s ‫ש"ס‬. They also allotted to my father several single ‫ספרים‬, including ‫ספר החרדים‬. This is the
only ‫ ספר‬that survived the war with my father’s signature on the ‫שער בלאט‬. He also inherited his father’s‫ טאבאק‬box.

37

He was ‫ נפטר‬with a good name on ‫י"ג שבט‬And he was buried on ‫י"ד שבט התרצ"ג‬‫ת'נ'צ'ב'ה‬***After his ‫ בר מצוה‬my father went to the ‫ ישיבה‬of ‫ ר' עזריאל געשטעטנער‬in Papa,
where he learned with great ‫ התמדה‬and achieved high levels of ‫תורה‬. He was also
special in his ‫ יראת שמים‬and his ‫מדות‬. His face had a special charm that enchanted
all who saw him. Because of the great breadth of his knowledge and his ‫ למדנות‬he
was appointed to be ‫ שואל ומשיב‬in the ‫ ישיבה‬where more than 200 ‫ בחורים‬learned.
At a later time he went to Magandorf to learn with ‫ ר' יהושע בוקסבוים‬who later
became ‫ רב‬in Galanta.
He was superb in languages and in writing. He was talented on the violin
and would play on happy occasions. On his own he studied accounting, passed
all the accounting tests that he would have had to take in a university andreceived a degree. In these efforts he worked together with his friend ‫ר' שמעון‬‫ ישראל פאזען‬who afterwards became ‫ רב‬in ‫שאפראן‬.
But my father never used his degree at all. He decided to devote his life to‫תורה‬. He passed the degree on to another person, who used it to make a
comfortable ‫פרנסה‬In 1924 my father became engaged to my mother ‫מרת שרה זיסל בת ר' חיים‬‫ אונגער‬from Papa.

The Family Unger
The Unger family was one of the most prominent in the Oberland region of
Hungary7. Family members were respected residents of Tzellim for more than

7

For the history of the Unger family we relied a lot on "‫ ספר "מסורת אבות‬that was published by our relative‫רב משה אונגער בן ר' שמואל אפרים זלמן אונגער זצ"ל דומ"ץ שיכון סקווירא‬.

38

eight generations. My grandfather ‫ ר' חיים‬was born in Tzellim to his father ‫ר' יחיאל‬8‫מיכל אונגער‬.
‫ ר' מיכל‬first learned with ‫ ר' שמעון סופר‬who was then ‫ רב‬in Matesdorf before

he later moved to become ‫ רב‬of Krakow. ‫ ר' מיכל‬lost his father while he was a ‫בחור‬and asked his mother’s permission to move to Pressburg for six years to learn inthe ‫ ישיבה‬of the ‫כתב סופר‬. Because of his ‫ התמדה‬in all those years he not once
visited his mother.
He was very young and very short when he arrived in Pressburg. When he
first walked into the ‫ שיעור‬room to hear ‫ תורה‬from the ‫ כתב סופר‬he stood near thewindow where he found a sliver of space. In the middle of the ‫ שיעור‬a heateddiscussion developed among the ‫ תלמידים‬and he too raised his voice and joined in
the loud debate. The boy next to him was irritated that this green little child had
the nerve to participate, and gave him a strong pinch. ‫ ר' מיכל‬cried out in pain. The‫ כתב סופר‬heard the shriek and told the ‫ בחורים‬to send ‫ ר' מיכל‬to him. ‫ר' מיכל‬approached and the ‫ כתב סופר‬comforted him and told him that from this point on
he was to station himself at the side of the ‫כתב סופר‬. And that was where ‫ר' מיכל‬stood all the years he was in Pressburg.
‫ ר' מיכל‬ate ‫טעג‬: on each day of the week he ate at the house of a different
local ‫בעל הבית‬. On ‫ שבת‬it was his lot to eat at the house of a very simple ‫בעל הבית‬who seated him between his two daughters. ‫ ר' מיכל‬left this ‫ בעל הבית‬without telling
anyone, and for some time would eat his meager ‫ שבת‬meal, mainly a piece ofbread, alone among the trees in the woods.
One time the ‫ רביצין‬of the ‫ כתב סופר‬happened to pass nearby, and sheheard a ‫ בחור‬singing ‫ שבת זמירות‬off in the woods. The ‫ כתב סופר‬investigated andfound that the boy was ‫ר' מיכל‬, and he asked ‫ ר' מיכל‬why. At first ‫ ר' מיכל‬wouldn’t
say, but at the insistence of the ‫ כתב סופר‬he described the events at the ‫בעל הבית‬.

8‫ ר' מיכל‬was the son of ‫ ר' אברהם צבי‬of Tzellim, who was the son of ‫ ר' הירצקא חיים‬of Tzellim, who was theson of ‫ ר' שלום‬from Tzellim, who was the son of ‫ ר' גרשון‬from Soin near Tzellim, who was the son of ‫ר' מאיר‬who had a letter that set out his ‫ ייחוס‬back to the ‫אריז"ל‬. The letter was lost during the war of 1848. ‫ר' מיכל‬died on ‫ ח' אדר תרע"א‬and was buried in Tzellim.

39

The ‫ כתב סופר‬ordered that from that point out ‫ ר' מיכל‬was to eat all ‫ סעודות שבת‬at thetable of the ‫ כתב סופר‬himself.
When six years had passed, the ‫ כתב סופר‬told ‫ ר' מיכל‬that it was time for '‫ר‬‫ מיכל‬to go home. He also ordered him to accept the first ‫ שידוך‬that was proposed
to him. Since he didn’t have any money to pay for transportation, ‫ ר' מיכל‬traveledby foot to his mother’s house. Along the way, as he passed by the city of Charna,
he walked into the ‫ בית המדרש‬where he met ‫ ר' יוסף גרינוואלד ז"ל‬from Chechowitz. '‫ר‬‫ יוסף‬began to be ‫ מפלפל‬with ‫ ר' מיכל‬on many points in ‫ש"ס‬, and was very impressedthat this ‫ בחור‬was packed solid with ‫תורה‬. On the spot he proposed a ‫ שידוך‬with ‫מרת‬‫ רחל לאה‬the daughter of his ‫ מחותן‬the respected businessman ‫ר' שלמה געשטעטנער ז"ל‬from Tcharna9. The ‫ שידוך‬was completed ‫בכי טוב‬His relatives the ‫ רבנים‬of the Greenwald family thought of ‫ ר' מיכל‬as a ‫צדיק‬.
The ‫ בעל ערוגות הבושם‬wrote about him “my cousin ‫הרב הצדיק‬,” and his son the ‫ויגד‬‫ יעקב‬once said "‫"דער פעטער ר' מיכל איז געווען א צדיק תמים‬He was a ‫ מגיד שיעור‬in "‫ "חברי ש"ס‬and finished ‫ ש"ס‬may times in public. The
last time he finished ‫ ש"ס‬he had already lost his sight and taught from memory.
When the ‫ גאון בעל קרן לדוד‬was ‫ רב‬in Tzellim, they often discussed ‫תורה‬, and thetable in front of them became full of ‫ספרים‬. It often happened that when the ‫קרן לדוד‬would rise before dawn to go to the ‫ בית המדרש‬he would see ‫ ר' מיכל‬who had beenlearning all night and was still standing at his ‫ שטענדער‬learning ‫בהתמדה‬. Then the‫ קרן לדוד‬would approach the window and say “uncle, it’s already time to rest!”
Persons from Tzellim also say that when ‫ ר' מיכל‬would get up for ‫קריאת שמע‬after learning very late he would was very tired and was afraid that he would
drowse off during ‫קריאת שמע‬. So he said ‫ קריאת שמע‬near the pointed edge of hisdoor opening so that if he fell asleep during ‫ קריאת שמע‬he would hit his headagainst the edge and wake up.
***
9‫ ר' שלמה‬was the son of ‫ ר' יעקב‬who was called ‫לייב געשטעטנער‬, who was the son of ‫ ר' שלמה אייזענשטאט‬the ‫רב‬of Lockenbach, who was the son of the ‫פנים מאירות‬, who was the son of ‫ר' יצחק‬, who was the son in law of
the sister of the ‫ש"ך‬, who was the daughter of ‫ר' מאיר כ"ץ‬, who was the son of ‫ ר' משה כ"ץ‬of the family ‫קאן‬
who at first was ‫ דיין‬in Frankfurt and later became ‫ רב‬in Danhausen near Ansbach in Bavaria Germany.

40

The son of ‫ר' מיכל‬, my grandfather ‫ר' חיים‬, learned in Tzellim with ‫ר' מנחם‬‫( פרוסניץ‬one of the most prominent ‫ תלמידים‬of the ‫)חתם סופר‬. After he married mygrandmother 10‫חנה בת ר' שמואל זלמן בערגער‬, he moved to Pest where my mother wasborn. He made a comfortable living as bookkeeper for the Tauber family, whowere prominent dealers in wine.
He once noticed that one of his children had done something improper,
and realized that life in a big city could damage a child’s upbringing. He decided
to leave the city and to abandon his comfortable ‫פרנסה‬. When his wife ‫ חנה‬asked
him “where are you going and how will you make ‫ ”פרנסה‬he answered that hedidn’t know that but he did know that there was no way he was staying in Pest.
He did leave Pest and moved to Papa, a city that was full of ‫ תלמידי חכמים‬and ‫יראי‬‫שמים‬. He opened a store from which he barely made a living.
After many years, before he died, when he discussed with his children his
move from Pest to Papa, he said:"‫ "א גרויסן קרבן האב איך אוועק געגעבן פאר ענקערט וועגן‬-“I made a big sacrifice for you.”His wife and daughters ran the store, while ‫ ר' חיים‬himself sat in an
adjoining room. He had nothing at all to do with the store and was instead ‫עוסק‬‫ בתורה‬all day. But whenever he noticed a customer leave with anything that was
sold by weight, for example flour or sugar, he would ask the customer to comeback with him to the store to add some more flour or sugar, to be sure that thecustomer had received the promised weight. Every once in a while he would
enter the store and take some pennies from the cash box and drop them into a‫ צדקה‬box.
He was an unassuming ‫צדיק‬. He would enter quietly and leave quietly
without expecting any notice for himself. He never said something without apurpose. Unlike ‫ר' אליעזר מנחם‬, my grandfather on my father’s side, who was
enthusiastic and full of ‫ שמחה‬and energy, ‫ ר' חיים‬was quiet and serious. We almost
never saw him smile. On rare occasions he would take the trouble to travel two
10

My grandmother was the sister of ‫ ר' בנימין בערגער‬of ‫בעלעד‬, who was known to all as ‫ר' בנימין בעלעדער הי"ד‬and was a ‫ תלמיד‬of ‫ ר' שלמה‬from ‫באבוב‬.

41

hours on the train from Papa to visit us in our city. We would stand in his
presence in respectful and awed attention. We would each with ‫ דרך ארץ‬volunteer
to take one of his bags, and we would then stand on the side, as if a
distinguished lord had arrived.
He would daven with great emotion and tearful cries. Once they heard him
plead during his ‫תפלה‬: ‫"רבונו של עולם! פארוואס איז אזוי גרויס דער הסתר פנים! באווייז זיך שוין‬"‫אביסל פאר אונז‬When he would bentch ‫ ברכת המזון‬his place would be drenched with tears.
On ‫ ערב יום כפור‬and ‫ ערב תשעה באב‬in the ‫ סעודה המפסקת‬he could eat only one swallow
and no more because of the tears that would strangle him.
It was his custom to borrow a ‫ ספר חסידות‬from the ‫ויגד יעקב‬, to learn it
thoroughly from beginning to end, and then to return it and borrow another ‫ספר‬.
The ‫ ויגד יעקב‬once said that he could say ‫ עדות‬that ‫ ר' חיים‬knew the "‫ספר "נועם אלימלך‬by heart.
My grandfather was ‫ זוכה‬to build a ‫בית נאמן בישראל‬. His daughters all married
splendid ‫ תלמידי חכמים‬and his two sons were ‫גאונים צדיקים‬. They were ‫ר' שלמה יעקב‬‫ הי"ד‬from Papa and ‫ ר' אברהם צבי הי"ד‬the ‫ רב‬of Kapa-Var.
He was ‫ נפטר‬on Friday ‫( י' חשון תרצ"ט‬1938). In his ‫ הספד‬for my grandfather,the ‫ ויגד יעקב‬said "!‫"הייליגער ר' חיים! די שכינה האט גערוהט אויף דיר‬This is what is written on his ‫ מצבה‬in Papa:
Here lies hidden
The honorable G-d fearing‫ ר' חיים‬the son of ‫ר' יחיאל אונגער‬Who died on ‫ עש"ק פרשת לך‬on ‫י' חשון‬And was brought to rest on Sunday ‫ פרשת וירא‬on ‫י"ב חשון תרצ"ט‬All his days ‫ חיים‬asked only for [the ‫ חיים‬or life that he asked for was only]‫ תורה‬and ‫יראת שמים‬And that he should rejoice only with ‫ מצוות‬that to him were ‫[ חיים‬life]
He was ‫ מצווה‬his sons and household to guard the proper ways of life

42Served Hashem with happiness and without idlenessMerciful Hashem will tie his ‫ נשמה‬into the bundle of life‫ת'נ'צ'ב'ה‬This is what is written on the ‫ מצבה‬of my grandmother ‫מרת חנה‬Here lies hidden
The worthy woman ‫ מרת חנה‬the wife of ‫חיים אונגער נ"י‬She died on Thursday ‫( ט' אלול תרצ"ג‬1933)
Her ‫ הספד‬and ‫ קבורה‬were on Friday afternoon‫[ חנה‬like ‫ חנה‬the mother of ‫ ]שמואל הנביא‬would daven all day and her lips would
murmur“please Hashem le me be ‫ זוכה‬to rear sons for ‫תורה‬who are true and unassuming ‫”יראי השם‬and she davened also for her daughters and was ‫ מצווה‬that they too be honest
and complete“please in the great name of Hashem don’t let any strange or outside ‫ חכמה‬find aplace in you
Great will be your ‫ שכר‬if you heed my words – after all the words of ‫ חכמים‬areguidesMy heart will rejoice if you command the same to your children
to see to it that they too are stable as deeply planted nails
then my pride will rise because my ‫ חלק‬will be with ‫ צדיקים‬and ‫ צדקניות‬in ‫גן עדן‬‫ת'נ'צ'ב'ה‬***
My mother’s older brother ‫ ר' שלמה יעקב אונגער הי"ד‬was very similar inbehavior to my grandfather. During the day he would teach boys who were 12 or
13 years old, and he was also a ‫ מגיד שיעור‬in ‫חברה ש"ס‬. His ‫ תלמידים‬say thatsometimes during his teaching he would pace back and forth with great
concentration, and would then place himself in a corner and support himself
against the wall, without making even the slightest movement. In this way hewould be ‫ מדבק‬himself with ‫ הקב"ה‬for an extended time.

43

He would not sleep in a bed weeknights, and stayed up all night to learn‫בהתמדה‬. Every night he would begin with 18 ‫ פרקים‬of ‫ – משניות‬three ‫ פרקים‬from eachof the six ‫סדרים‬. Afterwards he continued with more ‫ נגלה‬and with ‫נסתר‬.
He never spoke an unnecessary word, never looked outside his ‫ד' אמות‬. Hisseat in the ‫ בית המדרש‬was in the last table on the ‫ מערב‬side.
When ‫ ר' שלמה יעקב‬on ‫ פורים‬once joined the table of the ‫ויגד יעקב‬, who wasthe ‫ רב‬of Papa, the ‫ רב‬was in a high mood, and shouted at ‫ר' שלמה יעקב‬: “ ‫ר' שלמה‬‫יעקב‬, you tell lies! You say every day "‫ "אשמנו‬and that’s an absolute lie. You were
never ever ‫”!חוטא‬‫ ר' שלמה יעקב‬was killed in Auschwitz on ‫( י"ז תמוז תש"ד‬1944). It’s especiallypainful that there is no remnant of him, because all of his children were also killedduring the war.
My mother’s other brother was ‫ ר' אברהם צבי אונגער‬the ‫ רב‬of Kappa-Var, andthe ‫ מחבר‬of ‫ ספר מחנה אברהם‬on 11‫מסכת מקוואות‬. In the beginning of the ‫ספר‬, in a section
called "‫"פתח המחנה‬, ‫ ר' יצחק שלמה‬the son of the ‫ מחבר‬briefly describes his father’salmost super-human efforts and achievements in ‫ תורה‬and ‫עבודה‬.
My father, ‫ ר' אברהם צבי‬and ‫ ר' שמעון פאזען‬the ‫ רב‬of ‫ שאפראן‬were very goodfriends. All were strongly tied to the ‫ מנחת אלעזר‬of Munkacz. I remember the one
time my father traveled to Munkacz. Munkacz wasn’t in Hungary. My father had
to get a passport and was forced to take a picture despite his strong ‫ הקפדה‬neverto have his picture taken. It was like ‫ יום טוב‬in our house while we prepared him
for his trip.
My father shared the ‫ שיטות‬and ‫ השקפות‬of the ‫מנחת אלעזר‬. Whenever we
discussed the parties that were then common in the Jewish street, my father
would say in the words of his ‫רבי‬: ‫ אגודיסטען אלע מיסטען‬,‫ מזרחיסטען‬,‫ציוניסטען‬. When the‫ רבי‬died on ‫( ב' סיון תשצ"ו‬1936) my father grieved bitterly. I was only nine years old,but I sensed in the house that something very bad had happened.

11

The ‫ ספר‬was accepted enthusiastically in the ‫ישיבה‬-world with powerful ‫ הסכמות‬by influential ‫ גדולים‬both
before and after the war.

44

The love of ‫ ר' אברהם צבי‬to my father was very strong. He once told myrelative ‫ יצחק שטיין‬in ‫ בני ברק‬that:‫ אבער ווען מען וואלט זיי‬,‫ חשוב'ע איידעמעס‬,‫מיין פאטער ר' חיים האט גענומן פיינע איידעמעס‬‫ וואלט‬,‫ אין מיין שוואגער ר' יחזקאל אויף דער צוייטער זייט‬,‫געלייגט אויף איין זייט פון א וואגשאל‬"‫ר' יחזקאל זיי איבער גיוואויגען‬“My father had many good sons in law, but my brother in law ‫ר' יחזקאל‬outweighed them all put together.”
The only letter that remains from my father is one he wrote to his brotherin law ‫ר' אברהם צבי‬. He wrote the letter on stationery of the ‫תלמוד תורה‬. My father’s‫ עבודה‬in ‫ ספרי חסידות‬is evident from between the lines. The letter was written shortly
before the war, as you can see from his last words.
‫ב"ה‬To my dear brother in law ‫ר' צבי‬In my haste I am writing only a few words, because my time is so limited. I
am sending you this "‫ ספר "זרע קודש‬only as a loan, because it belongs to ‫ר' יוסף צבי‬‫גרינוואלד נ"י‬. Many thanks to you on your correct advice on learning the ‫ספר "נועם‬"‫אלימלך‬. But give me credit that on my own I already reached the sameconclusion, to learn the ‫ ספר‬every week, if not the full [section on the ‫]סדרה‬, thenat least in part, depending on how much time I have.
I wish you well ‫באהבה‬, and hope for ‫ רחמי שמים‬and ‫ ביאת גואל צדק‬quickly in ourdays ‫אמן‬.
Your faithful brother in law‫יחזקאל שרגא הכהן‬45‫עבודת הקדש‬After my parents wed – my mother was 17-1/2 years old – they first settled
in Shopron where my father had a job as ‫ מגיד שיעור‬to young ‫בחורים‬. My oldest
sister ‫ יהודית‬was born there. After that my father accepted a job as ‫ מגיד שיעור‬inGyor. That is where his other children were born: I and my brother ‫ר' יחיאל מיכל‬and also ‫חוה גיטל‬, ‫רחל לאה‬, ‫נחמה‬, ‫חנה‬, ‫ אליעזר מנחם‬and ‫חי'לע‬. None except I and ‫מיכל‬survived the war. We also had a brother ‫ אפרים זלמן‬who ‫ ר"ל‬died in his crib when
he was less than a year old.
My father was very close to ‫ ר' שבתי שעפטיל ווייס‬the ‫ רב‬of Shimone. ‫ר' שבתי‬‫ שעפטיל‬was famous in the whole region as a ‫גאון‬, a ‫ מקובל‬and a ‫קדוש‬. In his youth
he learned in the ‫ ישיבה‬of Pressburg under the ‫שבט סופר‬. Jews in Oberland
regarded him as a ‫בעל מופת‬. ‫ רוח הקדש‬was obvious in his ‫בית מדרש‬, and many
wondrous stories circulated about him.
My father himself had an out of the ordinary experience with ‫ר' שבתי שעפטיל‬.
The story is printed in the "‫)חלק ב' עמוד רכ"ה( ספר "ראשי גולת אריאל‬, as told by myrelative ‫ ר' יצחק שלמה אונגער‬the ‫ רב‬of ‫ חוג חת"ם סופר‬in ‫ בני ברק‬and the son of my uncle‫ר' אברהם צבי‬.
‫ ר' יצחק שלמה‬once traveled to Budapest by train to visit his father ‫ר' אברהם צבי‬in the hospital there. His train arrived in Gyor on Thursday and he had to wait
three hours to change to a second train to Budapest. ‫ ר' יצחק שלמה‬decided tomake use of the time to visit my father. When he met my father, my father was
holding a post-card he had received that day from ‫ר' שבתי שעפטיל‬. This is what itsaid:‫ עבד‬,‫ וזאת סגולה נגד כאב לב‬.‫להטביל את פרוסת המוציא בליל שבת ביין של הקידוש‬‫ שבתי שעפטיל ווייס‬.'‫לעבדי ה‬
On Friday night dip your ‫ המוציא חלה‬into your ‫ קידוש‬wine. This is a ‫ סגולה‬forheart pains. [Signed: from a] servant to the servants of Hashem. ‫שבתי‬‫שעפטיל ווייס‬46

My father expressed surprise at the postcard. He didn’t know to whom thewords were intended. ‫ ר' יצחק שלמה‬thought that maybe the words referred to hisfather who was in a bed at the hospital and that possibly his father was suffering
heart pains. But when he arrived at Budapest and visited with his father until
Tuesday, it became obvious that the ‫ רב‬from Shimone didn’t mean his father, who
had no heart pains. Oh his way back home after visiting his father in Budapest, '‫ר‬‫ שלמה יצחק‬again traveled through our city and once more he came to visit myfather. And by then the meaning of the postcard had been revealed.
‫ ר' שלמה יצחק‬found my father sick and lying in bed. That Friday night afterthe ‫ סעודה‬my father had suddenly suffered a strong heart attack and, try as hemight, the doctor could do nothing to relieve the pain. He suddenly remembered
the postcard that the ‫ רב‬from Shimone had sent him. On the table there was stillsome ‫ חלה‬left from piece he had used for ‫המוציא‬, and there was also a little wineleft from ‫קידוש‬. My father signaled to my mother that she should dip a piece of the‫ חלה‬into the wine. She did this and gave it to him. As soon as he tasted it he felt
an improvement in his condition. When the doctor came to examine him
afterwards, he was astonished and said that my father was completely healed,that he should lay in bed for several days to rest from the weakness that theattack had caused, but the disease itself was totally cured, and that this was aremarkable event.
As I mentioned, my father gave a ‫ שיעור‬to boys of ‫ בר מצוה‬age. Afterwards
the boys generally left to one of the many ‫ ישיבות‬across Hungary.
From this position, my father drew a spare ‫פרנסה‬. But, although we weren’t
comfortable, we weren’t hungry either. My mother labored to raise her many
children, and worked hard to see to it that the house ran smoothly. Occasionally
she reorganized our old furniture from one part of a room to another to generate
an optimistic feeling of renewal. My father, who by nature was cheerful andhappy, tried with all his abilities to support her and make her happy with words ofstrength and encouragement.

47

He also took pains to constantly educate the children in fundamentals of‫אמונה‬. He liked to repeat the traditional story about the ‫ מהרש"א‬who was so
desperately poor that he couldn’t support his family. Once there was a long
period when his children hadn’t tasted anything, and they were in pain, weak andcrying for bread. ‫ מהרש"א‬let out a groan out of great ‫ רחמנות‬for his little children.
But instantly he regretted that groan and berated himself: “Do you have more‫ רחמנות‬on your children than ‫ רבון כל העולמים‬on whom the ‫ פסוק‬says ‫ורחמיו על כל מעשיו‬– he has ‫ רחמנות‬on all he created?” My father continued that the teeth of ‫מהרש"א‬became black from his many ‫ תעניתים‬for making that groan. In this way, our father
worked to instill in us ‫ אמונה‬in ‫אלקי עולם‬.
At night before he went to sleep he learned ‫זוהר הקדוש‬. My relative ‫זלמן‬‫ האפפמאן‬from ‫ ירושלים‬told me that once his father ‫ ר' אבא חייא האפפמאן‬stayed in myfather’s house overnight. When he woke up in middle of the night he found myfather seated at his table while he delved deeply into ‫סתרי תורה‬.
My father paid enormous attention to ‫ חינוך‬for his children. Every ‫ שבת‬helearned with ‫ "דרך חיים תוכחת מוסר" מיכל‬in ‫של"ה הקדוש‬. When I and my sisters wanted
to play with friends, he generally didn’t agree that we could go to their houses,
saying that it was better that they come to our house. This was his way of getting
to see our friends to decide if they were right for us.
His ‫ תלמידים‬gathered into our house for ‫ שלש סעודות‬every ‫ שבת‬because thecity ‫ בית המדרש‬was ‫ אשכנז‬and didn’t arrange ‫שלש סעודות‬. My father would say ‫דברי‬‫ תורה וחסידות‬and would also tell beautiful stories to influence and instill ‫ אמונה‬and‫יראת שמים‬. They would sing ‫ זמירות‬pleasantly.

12‫מיכל‬
My father decided to send ‫ מיכל‬to learn in Papa when he was only 11

years old because he was the only boy among many sisters. First he learned inthe ‫ ישיבה‬of ‫ר' אברהם דירנפעלד ז"ל‬. Later he had the good fortune to study with the12

Editor’s Note: to our grief, our uncle ‫ ר' יחיאל מיכל הכהן שווארץ ז"ל‬was ‫ נפטר‬on ‫( כ"ה אב תשס"א‬2001), andwe decided to include some details of his history.

48

‫ ויגד יעקב‬who was the ‫ רב‬of Papa, and to become personally close to him. When‫ מיכל‬was just past his ‫ בר מצוה‬the ‫ ויגד יעקב‬once asked him “‫מיכלי‬, you’re a ‫כהן‬, soplease tell me what ‫ כוונות‬you have in mind when you stand on the ‫ דוכן‬for ‫ברכת‬‫ מיכל ”?כהנים‬answered: “I have in mind that the ‫ ברכות‬should be ‫ חל‬according to the‫ כוונות‬of ‫ ”!אנשי כנסת הגדולה‬The ‫ ויגד יעקב‬enjoyed this clever response, and with afatherly smile told him “maybe during your learning, you can also avoid having tounderstand a ‫ גמרא‬by saying the ‫ גמרא‬means what the ‫ אנשי כנסת הגדולה‬say itmeans?!”
After the ‫ פטירה‬of the ‫ויגד יעקב‬, ‫ מיכל‬learned with his son ‫ ר' יוסף גרינוואלד‬the‫ מחבר‬of "‫ "ויחי יוסף‬and his father’s successor as the ‫ רב‬of Papa13. Altogether hespent five years in Papa until the Germans broke into Hungary in ‫ אדר תש"ד‬as I
mentioned earlier.
In ‫( תש"א‬1941), ‫ ר' מאטלי‬the ‫ רבי‬from Vizhnitz Monsey came to learn in the‫ ישיבה‬of the ‫ רב‬of Papa for one year. It happened that he and ‫ מיכל‬slept in thesame room. ‫ מיכל‬would later say that on the night of ‫ל"ג בעומר‬, the ‫ יארצייט‬of ‫ר' שמעון‬‫בן יוחאי‬, the ‫ רבי‬wouldn’t go to sleep but would pace here and there with great
emotion and ‫ דביקות‬all night.
On ‫שבת חנוכה תש"ד‬, several months before the German invasion, ‫מיכל‬traveled to Budapest to be in the presence of ‫ר' אהרן מבעלז‬. He would later often
talk about that ‫ שבת מברכים‬of ‫חדש טבת‬. When the ‫ רבי‬finally lit the ‫ נרות חנוכה‬that ‫מוצאי‬‫ שבת‬dawn had already come, and they closed the shutters of the windows so thatthe daylight not come into the room.
‫ מיכל‬would also describe the scene when he gave a ‫ קוויטל‬to the ‫ רבי‬fromBelz that ‫מוצאי שבת‬. Since the ‫ רבי‬had difficulty reading because of his poor
eyesight, the ‫ גבאים‬decided that they would put all the ‫ קוויטלך‬in a sack and thatthe ‫ רבי‬would read them later one by one, so that all who came with a ‫ קוויטל‬wouldthat night only get to accept ‫ שלום‬from the ‫ רבי‬and a ‫ברכה‬. ‫ מיכל‬stood in line where
everyone in front of him gave the ‫ רבי‬his hand and passed by quickly. When his
13

He was ‫ נפטר‬in New York in ‫( חדש אב תשמ"ד‬1984). ‫ ר' יוסף‬was our relative because my great grandfather‫ ר' יחיאל מיכל אונגער‬and his great grandfather ‫ ר' עמרם גרינוואלד‬were both sons in law of ‫ר' שלמה געשטעטנער‬.

49

turn came, the ‫ רבי‬stopped him and asked him his name. ‫ מיכל‬was seized by agreat fright and was afraid to answer anything. But the ‫גבאי‬, ‫ר' דוד שפירא‬, handled
him properly and screamed at him: “Say already what they call you!” He was thenforced to answer with his name, his father’s name and his city. The ‫ רבי‬seized his
hand and benched him again and again.
‫ מיכל‬would always say that he is certain that the ‫ ברכות‬of the ‫ בעלזער רבי‬werewhat protected him in the terrible years to come, and that in either ‫ זכות‬he wasmany times saved from death to life. Many decades later, on his only trip to ‫ארץ‬‫ישראל‬, he visited the ‫ ציון‬of the ‫ בעלזער רבי‬on ‫הר המנוחות‬. He broke out into an
emotional cry because he said that he knew that to the ‫ רבי‬he owed his whole life,
and the life of his children after him.

50‫בפרוע פרעות‬On Tuesday ‫ איסור חג שבועות‬the Germans announced that all Jews had toleave their homes to a ghetto they had set up in several streets in the Jewish
quarter of the city. This decree was not difficult for us because our house wasinside the ghetto area, and we didn’t have to move.
But it didn’t take long – only a week and a half –until the liquidation of theghetto began. They brought the Jews to a desolate square in the edge of the city,where gypsies had lived in miserable shacks. We were among the first sent there
from our city, but there were already some Jews who had been brought fromsurrounding areas. We found our place in a big building that had been a factory
before the war, together with several thousand other Jews.
When ‫ שבת‬arrived the family in our corner was broken-hearted. Terrifying
thoughts pounded in our minds; we didn’t know what the next day would bring.
But not my father. He approached his place and with much ‫ שמחה‬began to sing‫ שלום עליכם‬the same as on every other ‫ שבת‬with no change at all. He also repeatedwith us ‫ מזמור כ"ג‬in ‫תהלים‬: ‫ מזמור לדוד ד' רועי לא אחסר‬until the end. It was then that welearned another lesson in the ‫ הלכות‬of ‫ אמונה‬and ‫ בטחון‬and ‫שמחה‬, right there in thevalley of sobbing.
Sunday morning ‫פרשת שלח‬, ‫( כ' סיון‬June 11, 1944), only three days after we
had arrived in our “new apartment,” we saw a long line of railroad cars at the
nearby train station, from where they took the first transport to Auschwitz. The
Germans announced that the trains were taking their passengers to a rest areafor families they called “family camp.” Many Jews placed their trust in this story,
but my father wasn’t persuaded. His thoughts were shut into himself, and hisheart within him was torn by this disaster.
On Wednesday ‫( כ"ג סיון‬June 14), we were forced to board the second
transport. There were some who hurried to board the train, because they hoped
soon to arrive to the relaxation of the family camp, and they could no longer
stand the cramped life in the ghetto and the now-filthy factory. Those who kept

51

their heads reproved the optimists: “Where are you hurrying?” There was apervasive great and bitter sadness.
Suddenly a coarse voice began cheerily singing ‫אז ישיר‬. We all turned to
see who was singing. We were stunned that the singer was a very plain Jew andtotal ‫ עם הארץ‬named Schwartz. It was he who had broken into song, and who
urged the others to accept ‫ בשמחה‬whatever had been decreed ‫מן השמים‬.
The "‫ "פינטעלא יוד‬that burns in every Jew was here revealed to all. Herewas one of the plainest (his wife didn’t even cover her hair). Besides, he limped
and had no chance of remaining alive. Still, his emotions had become alive withsimple faith and he was dancing and jumping ‫ אז ישיר‬with his unworldly voice.
The Germans ordered that 70 people enter each wagon. Our family all
boarded the same wagon and we tried to arrange ourselves in one corner. When
the wagons were filled, the Germans shut the doors with a heavy bolt. They
placed barbed wire on the windows. There was also one armed guard for eachwagon who was prepared to shoot anyone who dared to try to escape.
When the train began to move, my father looked through cracks in the wall
to see the direction in which we were traveling. He said, as if he were talking tohimself, that if we were traveling towards the west to Vienna, then it might be truethat we were going to a “family camp,” but if we were going east he didn’t know.
When he realized that we were going east he said nothing more. He didn’t want
to depress us, but we could tell from his face that the situation wasn’t good.
We traveled crammed into the wagons all of Wednesday, Thursday,
Friday and part of ‫שבת‬. The conditions were indescribable. It was ‫ סיון תמוז‬and theweather was already hot. I was dressed in all the clothing that I had, one on topof the other, and so were my sisters. My mother worried that he might not haveenough clothing when we arrived at the family camp. I also held on to a doll I had
received as a little girl. Even though I never played with it, this toy meant a lot tome. My mother bought it for me once when she was in Budapest. This was the
only gift my mother ever gave me.

52

Each wagon had three pails of drinking water and two empty pails to use
as a bathroom. This alone caused tremendous embarrassment andunpleasantness, as you can understand yourself. Filthy straw was spread on thefloor. The stench was fearful. My father told ‫ יהודית‬who was nine months pregnant
to sit near the cracks in the wall so that she could breathe more easily.
In the middle of the trip an old woman went out of her mind ‫ר"ל‬. She was
the head of one of the very prominent families in our city. She screamed andstepped on people who were spread on the floor. Many old and weak persons
couldn’t tolerate the conditions and died on the train, including ‫ ר' בן ציון סנידערס‬the‫ רב‬of our city. It was remarkable that the unfortunate children sat quietly
throughout, without crying.
‫ שבת‬morning, my father put on his ‫ טלית‬and davened ‫ שחרית‬with the feelingof every ounce of his soul. What a ‫ נשמת‬he let us hear! He said every word withtotal concentration and a holy flame. Every utterance is carved into my mind.
It was then June 17, several days before my birthday on June 22. My
father turned to me and said "!‫"זאלסט וויסן אז אין א פאהר טעג וועסטו אלט זיין אכצען יאהר‬Know that in a few days you’ll be 18 years old. I think that he wanted to alert me
to be strong in all the trials that would come my way, and not to move away from‫ דרך ישראל סבא‬-- from the old Jewish ways. Who knows, maybe his heart told himthat I alone would survive from all of his daughters?
We arrived at the gates of Auschwitz-Birkenau on ‫ שבת‬at three in theafternoon. My mother understood that we would be asked our ages. She didn’tknow if we should add or subtract from our age, until she decided that each girlshould say that she was younger than she was.
The wagons stopped. The doors opened and a group of SS soldiers stood
before us with Jewish workers who were called “heftlingen”. The soldiers jumped
onto the wagons and with whistles and shrieks commanded that we go down
immediately “alles arunter”. When we tried to pick up our packages on the floor of
the wagon, where we had more clothing, and where we had also hidden silver

53and other valuables, they pushed us and screamed and cursed: :Out, out, don’ttake anything with you. Accursed Jews, leave everything here!
The Jewish workers removed the dead, including ‫רב סניעדערס‬. One grabbed
him by the hands, the other by his feet. Two SS men looked at the ‫ רב‬and theother dead and said mockingly “Very brave. Very brave.”
The men were separated from the women. They placed us in two separatelines to stand ready for the “selection.” Each line was five abreast, and so wemarched all of us, young and old, for some time. My youngest sister ‫חי' לע‬, who
was then not quite two years old, called out happily “La-le, let’s go for a walk!”
She couldn’t yet pronounce my name ‫ מחלה‬and called me La-le. My heart shrinks
when I realize that this precious child was no longer among the living a short timelater.
Then I saw him, the ‫ מלאך המות‬himself. He was dressed in a handsome
uniform very well arranged. His right hand was covered with a white glove thatwas spotlessly clean. He was the enemy Josef Mengele ‫ימח שמו וזכרו‬. Without any
effort or concern he was pointing with his thumb to his right and to his left. Then
we didn’t know the significance of what he did. It was only later that we realizedthat the right meant life – at least temporarily – and that the left meant prompt
death in the gas chambers.
My father stood together with my brother in law 14‫ ר' שמואל פרענקל‬and with‫ מיכל‬who held the hand of my little brother ‫אליעזר'ל‬. My mother came running tothem, to tell my father happily that she had persuaded a soldier to let her take‫ אליעזר'ל‬to the side of the women. She took ‫ אליעזר'ל‬from ‫ מיכל‬and took him withher. This was the hand of Hashem that saved ‫ מיכל‬from certain death, because it
was the local "‫ "מנהג‬that anyone who held or carried a child was sent to the left,
regardless of his health or physical condition. My father ‫ הי"ד‬was sent to the left.
My brother in law and ‫ מיכל‬were sent to the right.

14

A sterling young man who knew all of ‫ש"ס‬.

54

Our turn came. I and my sister ‫ חוה גיטל‬stood together. We resembled eachother so much that one could say we were twins. Mengele turned to us andasked if we were twins. I said no. When he asked me my age, I said that I was
16, subtracting a year as my mother had directed. I was sent to the right. He thenasked ‫ חוה גיטל‬how old she was. She answered 14 although she was already 15,
and she was sent to the left. With them went my mother and my sister ‫יהודית‬, bothpregnant, ‫רחל לאה‬, ‫נחמה‬, ‫חנה‬, ‫ חי'לע‬and my brother ‫אליעזר'ל‬.
For a long time I faulted myself: why was it that I answered no when heasked if ‫ חוה גיטל‬and I were twins. Maybe it would have been better to say yes,and then maybe ‫ חוה גיטל‬would have been saved. It was only after the war, when
the world learned about the cruel medical experiments that Mengele conducedon each pair of twins who came under his control, that I understood that myanswer was directed ‫ מן השמים‬so that at least one of us would survive.
On that day there arrived in Auschwitz yet another transport from Galanteand surrounding areas. Most were murdered ‫על קידוש השם‬, among them theirrespected ‫רב‬, ‫רב יהושע בוקסבוים‬, who was one of the major ‫ גדולים‬in Hungary andwho had been my father’s ‫ רבי‬in his youth, ‫הי"ד‬.
From the ‫ קינה‬that the ‫ אדמו"ר מבאבוב זצ"ל‬was ‫מחבר‬Cry out heaven and earth on the thousands of cities fortresses of ‫תורה‬The lands of Europe and her ‫ קהילות‬who inherited and carried out our ‫מסורה‬‫צדיקים‬, elders, ‫ חסידים‬with true ‫אמונה‬From when we were expelled from our land, there was no fearfulextermination like this.

55

In the valley of deathI spent seven bitter weeks in Auschwitz Birkenau Camp B.
Every morning, after they gave black coffee to the thousands of girls in thecamp, they ordered us to stand on the Appell plaza all day. When we returned
from the Appell plaza at night they gave us black bread and rotten soup that noteven a dog could eat.
How can I describe to you the pain and grief that we had standing on theAppell so many long hours from morning to night, with the hot summer sun
beating down on our heads, until we thought we would lose our minds. Woe tothe unfortunate girl who lost her strength and sat herself on the ground for a rest.
On the spot she was taken to the side and included in one of the groups thatwere on their way to the gas chambers. Both to my right and to my left there
were the empty spaces of missing girls who were murdered. I thank Hashem forgiving me the strength to bear the suffering of those six weeks.
In these difficult times I was encouraged by memories of my father’shouse. Even the image of my father’s refined face eased my suffering. While I
was still a little girl my father had taught the ‫ פסוק‬in ‫משמועה רעה לא יירא נכון לבי – תהילים‬'‫—בטוח בה‬that like my name ‫ מחלה‬begins with '‫ מ‬and ends in '‫ה‬. As a child I had
gotten into the habit of saying this ‫פסוק‬, not only at the end of ‫שמונה עשרה‬, but also
every night after ‫ קריאת שמע‬before ‫אדון עולם‬. Even ‫ בגיא צלמות‬in the valley of the
shadow of death I continued to recite the ‫ פסוק‬again and again, '‫נכון לבי בטוח בה‬,and this put deep into me a gift of ‫בטחון‬.
Besides the pain of standing at attention on the Appell, there were daily“selections.” SS men passed through the rows of the girls and took out for
murder all those that they didn’t like because of some actual or imagined defect.
To be wearing glasses was enough of a defect.
A member of the SS once addressed us in a crude and loud shout:“Jewish women. Listen and remember. No more Jews will be born!” We listed to56him like mute stones. Who could then think of giving birth to children and toestablish ‫דורות‬.
After the war when I was ‫ זוכה בעזרת השם‬to build a ‫בית נאמן בישראל‬, I
remembered that lecture every once in while, and I would think to myself, “I only
wish that that person could see my dear children and explode in anger andjealousy.”
35 years later my husband and I opened a basement store in our house in
Brooklyn where we sold maternity clothes mainly to Jewish women.. Again I
thought about the speech by that ‫רשע‬, and I said that this new business of ours
served as more revenge to him.
After six weeks I was part of a group of 500 girls, mostly non-frum, whowere put on a train to work camps in Germany. This time the train wasn’t as
packed as we were on the fateful ‫ שבת‬when my family arrived in Auschwitz. Afterseveral days we arrived at a work camp in Lippstadt, near Dusseldorf on theRiver Rhine, in the state of Wstafalen near the border with Holland.

Lippstadt
The major work done in Lippstadt was to make gunpowder. There wasalso a factory where they fixed machines. Most of the workers were German
women who lived in the surrounding towns and were forced to dedicate several
hours a week for the benefit of the “fatherland.” When we arrived there they set
aside several shacks for us and added us to the workforce.
At first the German women were stunned to see us. They couldn’t believe
the strange sight in front of them: hundreds of girls, with their heads completely
shaven, dressed in rags and tatters, with the right sleeve made of different rags
than the left to humiliate us, all topped with a yellow star.
They gave us coffee every morning, and at night a little bread andmargarine, and soup that was black and filthy water. Once in a while when ahorse was killed by an American bomb, we were served a bonus – salami fromthe dead horse was added to our soup.
The work in the factory never stopped. There were three shifts a day, eachfor eight hours. Hashem helped me at every step. I was given an easy task, to57

stamp a seal of quality on every bullet. I never had to work on the night shift. An
extra ‫ חסד‬from Hashem to our whole group -- very rare among the tens of
thousands of Jews in the concentration camps in Germany and Poland – wasthat during our entire stay in the camp we were never infected with lice. I also
want to tell you that throughout the war I never saw a dead body. The Germans
did not kill anyone in Lippstadt. Our entire group survived the war except for one
girl who died of pneumonia.
I was ‫ זוכה‬to other open ‫נסים‬. In the factory there were separate tables forGerman women and separate tables for us. One day, for a reason that I couldsee, the woman in charge ordered that from that point on I would sit with theGerman women.
How can I thank Hashem! This order tremendously eased the burdens onme and many of my friends. I sat myself near a German woman named
Hildegard Shulde, who took a liking to me. Whenever she could she secretly giveme something to eat, sometimes a piece of bread, or onions, or a little milk.
When she learned that I was about to fast on ‫ יום כפור‬she passed me under thetable two pancakes filed with apples to help me prepare for the ‫תענית‬. She offered
to give me bread on ‫ יום כפור‬itself but I refused.
Hildegard gave me the opportunity to ‫ חסד‬to others. I never ate the onions
she gave me. Right after work I visited the hospital and gave the onions to thepatients, because my mother had told me that onions were good for patients,
especially patients with pneumonia.
When I heard after the war that native Germans had no food to eat, I
made a special trip to Lippstadt with bread to give to Hildegard, to repay her alittle for the good things she had done for me. But after a long search I wasdisappointed – I couldn’t get in touch with her. To this day I’d be so happy to talkwith her and thank her for her many favors.
We were in Lippstadt for about eight months, from the middle of ‫אב תש"ד‬until the middle of ‫ניסן תש"ה‬. As ‫ פסח‬neared I exchanged my portions of bread for
potatoes.

58Starting in Spring of ‫ תש"ה‬word began to leak in that the Germans were
suffering major military defeats. In the days before ‫ פסח‬we heard Americanbombs and artillery in the distance. On March 7 the Americans and their allies
captured Cologne near Düsseldorf and they built a bridge over the Rhine rivernear Remagen. We knew that it was only a matter of time before Lippstadt too
would fall to the Americans.

‫יציאת מצרים‬On ‫ערב פסח‬, March 27, I left work and returned to my bunk, burdened withsad thoughts. “Tonight was the first night of ‫ !פסח‬Less than a year ago I was withmy family in our own house and my father led the ‫ סדר‬with his special ‫חן‬. Now,
what had happened to us. I have no idea where my family was. I’m alone incaptivity working for ‫ פרעה‬in ‫מצרים‬.”Suddenly a siren sounded for us to assemble on the appell immediately.
We were ordered to line up in rows of five, and that we were to march out of thecamp on foot. We didn’t have anything valuable to pack, and each of us took only
the woolen blanket we used as a cover at night.15 I couldn’t believe the miracle. It
was the night of ‫ פסח‬and we were being ‫ זוכה‬to ‫ !יציאת מצרים‬But in fact the ‫קץ הגאולה‬hadn’t yet arrived.
We were ordered that throughout the journey two girls would carry a huge
pot of black soup to eat while we were on the road. The pot was very heavy, andwe took turns carrying it.
We walked and walked three full days. Thank G-d that I had good shoesthat they gave us in Auschwitz so that the walking wasn’t hard for me. We walked
all day without stopping, and rested a little at night in any cow barn that we foundthat had straw on the ground. No sooner did we fall into a deep sleep than theGermans woke us up with screams and shouts of “further, further! We couldn’t
stay long in one place because the Americans were approaching quickly. We
heard later that the US First Army and the US Ninth Army had come fromdifferent points and joined in Lippstadt only four days after we left.
15

I kept that blanket until the war ended. Afterwards I used it to sew a suit for my brother ‫ מיכל‬who had noproper clothing.

59

On the fourth day of our march, which was April 1 the second day of ‫חול‬‫המועד פסח‬, we arrived at an open field inside a forest near the city of Koenitz. We
were told to sit in a large circle, so that no girl would be blocking any other girl.
We were surrounded on all sides by SS soldiers. In trembling and in fear wewatched as they set up machine guns and were preparing to shoot us. We sawthat all hope was lost, and that they would cruelly murder us at the last moment
before freedom.
But ‫ תשועת השם‬can come in the blink of an eye. We’re sitting and waiting forthe staccato of the machine guns to end our lives, when we hear American tanks
in the distance. We notice that all our SS captors have disappeared. The German
women who are guarding us are removing their uniforms and putting on everyday clothing. They hurry off and leave us. We sit stunned at what happened.
Here we were waiting to be slaughtered like sheep, and in one instance, thewheel is turning, and we are free!
So we sat trembling until we gathered the strength to leave the open field.
We walked into Koenitz. White flags of surrender to the Americans were flutteringform every roof. I walked on the streets with a woman from my city of Gyor who
was a ‫משומדת‬, together with her two daughters. As we passed one of thechurches, we heard the bells ringing – it was Sunday. She turned to me and herdaughters and said “Come let’s go in to give thanks.”
I left them in their silliness, and walked off with several other girls into a
German house. We found the family sitting at their lunch table. They were
alarmed to be confronted by Jewish girls with their heads shaven. When we said
that we were hungry, they gave us to food to eat and to drink.
Our lips expressed thanks to Hashem for letting us survive to be freed
from the Germans.

60Virste Giresdorf – May
1944
I’m returning now to my own happenings.
We spent four long and bitter days in Gross-Rosen. In the morning we
waited for nightfall and during the day we prayed for the night. On the fifth day wewere ordered onto open trucks near the entrance to the camp. Forty of us were
each crammed into trucks made to carry 20 men. SS men then trampled on us
with their boots to make room for more. Two Wehrmacht soldiers mounted eachtruck to guard against escape attempts. We soon came to realize that
Wehrmacht soldiers were not as evil as the SS. It wasn’t the only desire of thesesoldiers to oppress and torture us.
We traveled an hour and a half about 50 miles to the south until we arrived
at a Gross-Rosen sub camp. This was a small camp in the state of [Silesia]
called Wueste Giersdorf in the town of Ober-Wuestegiersdorf. There was nocamp here before the war, and there were no huts throughout the camp as in
Plashev and Gross-Rosen. There was only one building of several stories. Eachfloor had barracks for about 1,000 persons. There was also no permanentelectrified barbed wire as in Plashev, but instead the barbed wire had been
installed poorly and in haste. We spent nine months in the camp – from May
1944 until February 15, 1945.
My friends Nosson Dovid Silberstein and Meilech Birnbaum were with me
in Vierste. All three of us were together from the beginning of the war, and wewent from one ‫ גלות‬to the next, first to the ghetto in Cracow, then to Plashev andnow to here. One other esteemed person from our ‫ שטיבל‬in Cracow was with us,
Rav Yakov Einhorn16. Also R. Mendel Brachfeld and his brother Moishe, R’

16

He was the son of R. Yeshaya Einhorn ‫ שו"ב‬from Teshin and later from Cracow. R’ Yeshaya had traveledto the ‫ דברי חיים‬in Sanz and then to the ‫רבני באבוב‬. R’ Yakov was the father of the exceptional ‫ ראובן הי"ד‬who
was a ‫ תלמיד‬of ‫ ר' בן ציון‬from Bobov, and the father in law of R’ Hershel Zitronenbaum.

61

Yeshaya Beigel17 and his father, and R. Moishe Ziskind18 from Bobov. But mostof the Jewish prisoners weren’t ‫שומרי תורה ומצוות‬.
There were also many Hungarian Jews who had been forced from theirhomes in 1944. To our dismay, many died soon after they arrived. They couldn’t
bear the forced labor. They couldn’t adjust to the terrible food situation in thecamp, because it was only several weeks ago that they had lived in their
comfortable homes, and their bodies couldn’t stand the abrupt change
Among those who arrived from Hungary were R’ Lipa Lefkowitz from
Gross-Vardine19. We spent a lot of time together. He told me at length and indetail about the liquidations that the Germans had conducted after theyconquered Hungary on ‫כ"ד אדר‬. He himself had been arrested on the train from
Gross Vardine to Budapest. At the last moment he had managed to hide hischildren with his gentile neighbors, and constantly worried about them.
R’ Lipa told me that ‫ מרן ר' שלמה‬and his family had stayed in his house at 6
Vamhas-Utza Street. This information was like refreshing spring water to ourtired souls, because much time had passed before we had heard any news about‫ר' שלמה‬, and we hadn’t known whether he had escaped from the ghetto in
Bochnia to Hungary. R’ Lipa also told us that ‫ ר' שלמה‬and his sisters and theirchildren had later managed to escape from Budapest to Gross Vardine near the
Rumanian border, and were waiting for the right opportunity to cross the border
into Rumania.
***
Working conditions in the camp were both hard and easy depending on‫מזל‬. There were several factories on the grounds of the camp. There was also a
big kitchen, and houses where prisoners prepared large quantities of food for17

Lived in Antwerp after the war.
R’ Moishe was the son of R’ Itzik Leizer Ziskind, and they called him ‫משה ר' איציק לייזער'ס‬. R' Itzik Leizer
and his children before the war owned a hotel opposite the house of ‫ ר' בן ציון‬in Bobov. This hotel was themost respectable in town, and was used by the wealthy persons who could pay the high rates the Ziskinds
charged.
19
After the war he lived in Williamsburgh in Brooklyn. In his old age he moved to Monsey where he diedin 2004 at the age of 90.
1862other camps in the region. Thirty prisoners worked in each of these houses. In
general, all those who worked on the camp grounds didn’t work hard.
Not so was the lot of those who worked outside the camp. Each morning,whether winter or summer, they walked nine kilometers (about five miles) to theirworkplace. They spend the entire day in back-breaking labor together with otherJews from neighboring camps, to make steel train tracks. After working all day
they were marched back to camp, again on foot. This was a daily effort of 15hours, without enough food, and without enough sleep.
The Germans here didn’t beat us as much as we had become used to in
Plashev.

R’ Yakov Vulcan
Let’s talk about the splendid memory of my close friend, the unforgettable
Belzer ‫חסיד‬, ‫ר' יעקב וואלקאן הי"ד‬. By nature R’ Yakov was an ‫ עסקן‬and full of energy.
Besides he had an unusual talent to do “business” with the Germans, eventhough he was their captive. Many unusual benefits came to my group from his
activities.
As soon as we arrived at the camp, I told him about the packet of cash I
had. I gave him some of the money to bribe those in charge to arrange easylabor for us inside the camp.
'‫ בעזרת ד‬he was ‫מצליח‬. For several hundred dollars, he received permission
from the head German to give me and R’ Yakov jobs in the kitchen. The result
was that we were never hungry. R’ Nosson Dovid and Meilech were appointed tojobs in a factory where they made tables and chairs.
Actually R’ Nosson Dovid never did do any work in the factory. He sat
there and learned ‫ תורה‬all day. He used ‫ גמרא'ס‬that men from ‫ קרשאנוב‬and ‫אושפיצין‬had brought with them early in the war, when people were still allowed to takepackages with them to some labor camps. It’s for this reason that in Vierste there
were ‫ גמרא'ס‬and ‫ סידורים‬and ‫ תשמישי קדושה‬such as ‫ תפילין‬and ‫שופרות‬.

63

R’ Nosson Dovid had special ‫סייעתא דשמיא‬. Not once was he forced tobe ‫מחלל שבת‬. R’ Yakov Vulcan took special care to see to it that R’ Nosson Dovid
always had enough to eat. Nor did R’ Nosson Dovid ever have to eat the soup or
the other ‫ טריפה‬foods that were served in the camp, because every day I cooked
potatoes for him in the kitchen.
R’ Yakov also arranged with the chief of the kitchen, for a bribe, to
distribute a tray full of bread every day to the ‫ שומרי תורה ומצוות‬in the camp. To thisday I am thankful and happy that I was ‫ זוכה‬with my money to join in theaccomplishments of R’ Yakov.

A Dangerous Mistake
One of my jobs in the kitchen was to get up at 4 or 5 every morning toprepare 5 huge pots of hot black coffee to give to the workers when they woke
up. Once, I had an idea how I could benefit my group with more food. Every day
there was food left in the kitchen from supper. I put the leftovers in one of thepots, and I placed this pot in a line with the other pots full of coffee, so that myfriends could eat.
But this idea was a total failure. Not only didn’t the plan succeed, but I
almost paid for it with my life. While the chief of the kitchen supervised the givingof the coffee he noticed something strange: steamy vapor was coming out of fourof the pots, but not from the fifth. He looked into the fifth pot and saw that it was
full of food. On the spot, I lost my job and was in great danger. The kitchen chief
could shoot me or torture me. Hashem had ‫ רחמנות‬on me, and the chief’s temper
eased and he didn’t touch me. But I was liable to be sent to hard labor outside
the camp.
Immediately, R’ Yakov worked to get me another easy job. I was
appointed as a worker in one of the food storage houses. In the end, this job waseven better than the one I had in the kitchen. There was lots of food in thestorage house, and I had many opportunities to help persons in trouble. Hereagain I saw ‫ נסים מגולים‬of ‫הקב"ה‬: my dismissal from my kitchen job was a ‫ טובה‬forme and for others.
64There was one event in the food storage house where I endangered mylife because of a foolishness. There were cartons of butter, each of which held 10
small packs. One day I took one of the small packages with me to the barracks.
When I later returned to the storage house, the chief yelled at me. “You
dumbhead. You took one small package of butter! You put both me and you in
danger. What would you have done if there an inspection today? The inspectors
would have found a carton with only nine packages! They would have blamed me
for not supervising you! You should have taken the whole carton, and thennobody would have noticed.” Despite all this, the chief was a man with a heart,and let the matter pass.

‫יום כפור תש"ה‬The memory of this ‫ יום כפור‬is fresh in my mind. More than 300 men walked
up to the top floor to daven together and to hear a ‫ דרשה‬in the German language
from a Rabbiner who had lived in Hungary. He spoke about ‫ קדושת היום‬and added‫ דברי התחזקות‬on ‫ אמונה‬and ‫בטחון‬. These words strengthened the hearts of all who
were there.
Of course, the entire gathering was without permission from the Germans.
Woe to us if the Germans had heard about the ‫אסיפה‬. They would have suspectedthat we were organizing a revolt and without a doubt would have shot us all todeath. But all of us, including many who weren’t ‫שומרי תורה ומצוות‬, were prepared
to endanger our lives, to get ‫ התעוררות‬and ‫ התחזקות‬on ‫יום הקדוש‬. 300 broken andoppressed Jews , burdened with ‫ צרות‬and pain in a country of hunger, death anddarkness, davened ‫ל עליון‬-‫ לא‬to be ‫ זוכה‬to a year of life and liberation. In fact theyear was to be a year of life and liberation, but, unfortunately, not for all of us.
We were ‫ זוכה‬to be ‫ מקיים מצות סוכה‬once more. We arranged boards andmade a ‫ סוכה‬that was small but ‫כשר‬. One person at a time entered to be ‫בירך לישב‬‫ בסוכה‬and ‫ שהחיינו‬and to eat a ‫כזית‬. He then left to make room for another.
That winter they gave us winter coats against the frigid cold. There was noshortage of coats. There were more than enough that were taken from the ‫קדושים‬who had died in Auschwitz. The person in charge of distributing the coats was a65

fine Jewish ‫ בחור‬from Berlin named Morris. Morris was an accountant for theGermans and would often visit my food storage house as part of his accounting
duties. When a bundle of coats arrived from Auschwitz, Morris would distributethem. He gave me a good, warm coat with a fur collar.
When it was the turn of R’ Nosson Dovid to get a coat Morris told him
jokingly, “to you I’ll give a long ‫ חסידיש‬coat that you’ll enjoy.” And in fact he gave
him a long coat. When R’ Nosson Dovid put on the coat he felt something hard in
the lining in a sleeve. When he cut the lining he found a fortune in cash: two $50
bills and 10,000 Czech marks! ‫חבל‬, for sure some Jew had hidden this ‫ אוצר‬there
when he prepared to travel to a place he didn’t know.

The ‫ תפילין‬of R’ Mendel Brachfeld
Although my ‫ תפילין‬were taken from me in Gross-Rosen, all of us were‫ מקיים מצות תפילין‬every day in Vierste with ‫ תפילין‬that were in the camp. All the frum
people in our group awoke every morning a little early, before the others awoke,
and stood in line until their turn came to be ‫מניח תפילין‬. There wasn’t enough time
for us to say ‫ שחרית‬with the ‫תפילין‬. Instead, each of us said only ‫ קריאת שמע‬with the‫ תפילין‬and then passed the ‫ תפילין‬on to the next person in line.
My friend Mendel Brachfeld was one of those who had a pair of ‫תפילין‬. I
already knew R’ Mendel “Mishlinizer” from Bobov in the old days. Mendel, a tall
man with round eyeglasses, stood out as an exceptional ‫ תלמיד חכם‬among thevery many ‫ בחורים‬then in Bobov. The fact that his reputation was known evenamong the ‫ בחורים‬in Cracow emphasizes his ‫גדולתו בתורה‬. There were in ‫באבוב‬hundreds of ‫ בחורים‬from tens of towns, and we generally knew none of them, but
our ‫ משפיעים‬would point to Mendel, and urge and encourage us to be and tobehave like him.
When Mendel and his brother arrived in Gross-Rosen, the Germans took
away their ‫תפילין‬. This affected Mendel very deeply, because there hadn’t been a
day since his ‫ בר מצוה‬when Mendel wasn’t ‫מניח תפילין‬.

66

Although in Gross-Rosen there were tall piles of ‫תפילין‬, no Jew could
approach them. It was forbidden on pain of death even to go to the bathroom
without permission from a Gunman guard.
Mendel contacted a ‫ גוי‬who was a political prisoner and described what
‫ תפילין‬looked like, and asked the ‫ גוי‬to get him a pair. In payment, Mendel, who
was very hungry, gave the ‫ גוי‬the piece of bread that they gave Mendel after hislong trip to Gross-Rosen. Several hours later the ‫ גוי‬gave Mendel a pair of ‫תפילין‬.
All the pain of R’ Mendel’s hunger disappeared. But his ‫ שמחה‬wasn’t complete
when he found to his surprise that both ‫ תפילין‬were ‫של יד‬. Mendel described to the‫ גוי‬carefully what ‫ תפילין של ראש‬looked like, and in exchange Mendel agreed to givethe ‫ גוי‬Mendel’s bread from a second day. The next morning Mendel already had‫תפילין של ראש‬.
When Mendel and his brother ‫ משה‬were to be sent from Gross-Rosen toVierste with 400 other Jews, the Germans ordered that each had to put whatever
they had on a table in front of the Germans. The German officer warned that
there would be a strict inspection, and that anyone found with anything not put on
the table would be shot. Moishe whispered to Mendel that it made sense to handover the ‫תפילין‬. Mendel refused and hid them well under his clothing. He turned to
Moishe and told him: “I doubt that they can do a good search of hundreds ofmen. Besides, what’s the use of living if there isn’t even one pair of ‫ תפילין‬among
400 men.”***
One day a Jew approached Mendel at the instruction of the “lager elster” anon-frum Jew named Lutek. The messenger said that the Yahrzeit of Lutek’s
parents was approaching and he very much wanted to be ‫מקיים מצות תפילין‬. It
wasn’t fitting for him to stand in line with other Jews to be ‫מניח תפילין‬. That’s why
he wanted to borrow the ‫ תפילין‬so that he could be ‫ מניח‬them while his friends
were still asleep. He would return them to Mendel afterwards right away. The
messenger assured Mendel that it wouldn’t hurt him to do a favor for the lager

67

elster. To the contrary, the lager elster would owe Mendel favors that would
make it easier for Mendel to survive.
Mendel answered that many people had already promised him manyfavors to sell or at least lend his ‫ תפילין‬to them. But Mendel realized that noJewish prisoner could make any promises in the camp, because nobody knew
what the next day would bring. Mendel had therefore decided not to lend his‫ תפילין‬no matter what. If Mr. Lutek wanted to be ‫ מניח תפילין‬he was welcome tocome to the barracks early in the morning, and Mendel would then gladly let him
use the ‫תפילין‬.
Lutek didn’t give up. Again and again he sent his messenger to Mendel totell him that every night in his sleep he dreams that his mother demands that hebe ‫מניח תפילין‬. Lutek is prepared to be ‫ מניח תפילין‬but can’t do this in public, so heasks that Mendel have ‫ רחמנות‬to lend the ‫ תפילין‬to him just once to satisfy his
mother’s demands.
Finally, Mendel agreed and loaned the ‫ תפילין‬to Lutek on condition that
Lutek return them the next morning. Mendel and Moishe got up early the nextmorning and stood outside the barrack where Lutek lived, and waited anxiously
for Lutek to open the door and return the ‫תפילין‬. When some time passed and thedoor was still shut, they stood up and shouted “Lutek! Lutek!” Nobody answered.
Our barrack was near Lutek’s barrack. When R’ Yakov Vulcan heard theshouts outside he was alarmed and looked out the window from his bunk andrecognized Mendel and Moishe. He rushed out to see them and they told him thewhole story.
R’ Yakov told them that, knowing Lutek, it was clear that Lutek had tricked
them. He was sure that Lutek had sold the ‫ תפילין‬to Hungarian Jews who were
imprisoned near Vierste. Very many Jews were there without ‫תפילין‬. Some ofthese Jews had managed to bring a lot of hidden money with them, and they had
undoubtedly agreed to pay as much as several hundred dollars for the ‫תפילין‬.

68

As Mendel and Moishe walked off in dismay, Moishe noticed a Jew
walking ahead of them with his back hunched over, obviously holding something
under his clothing. Moishe was suspicious, because the man had the walk of a‫ גנב‬caught in a ‫מחתרת‬. Moishe strode over to him, seized him and demanded “giveme the ‫”תפילין‬. The other was stunned that Moishe knew he was holding the ‫תפילין‬,and out of alarm and fright, took them from under his clothing and gave them to
Moishe.
When Lutek learned that his business deal was upset, he became
poisonously cruel. He implicated Mendel and Moishe to the camp leaders insome made-up crime, and caused them to be sent to Dernhau, a branch ofVierste about three kilometers away. There too, Jews – many of them from
Munkacz – used Mendel’s ‫תפילין‬. Every morning they stood in line, but because of
the greater number of those waiting, each person was ‫ מניח‬only either ‫ של יד‬or ‫של‬‫ראש‬.
When the Americans neared, Mendel and Moishe were sent from Dernhau
to Zaifer-Wassa. Working conditions there were especially hard and bitter. The
German planed to build an underground camp there that could withstandAmerican attacks.
In the middle of the forest they set up carton shacks for 12 persons each.
The cold was fearsome. There were no fresh water pipes, so health conditions
were bad anyway. There was no kitchen in this camp -- food was brought from
Vierste and other neighboring camps. When it happened that pots of food fromneighboring camps overturned, there was no make-up for the lost food, and all
the prisoners were ravenously hungry. Persons died right and left.
R’ Yakov Einhorn was also imprisoned in Zaifer-Wassa. On ‫ יום כפור‬hedavened ‫ שחרית‬before the ‫ עמוד‬with special ‫מתיקות‬, but he didn’t have the strength
to daven ‫מוסף‬. He was taken to the camp infirmary, and on the next day, he andother sick prisoners were sent to Auschwitz where they were killed.

69

Several days before ‫ ר' יעקב‬died, he told others that he had dreamed that
he saw ‫ ר' בן ציון‬from ‫ באבוב‬surrounded by ‫ חסידים‬and ‫אנשי מעשה‬. He complained to‫ ר' בן ציון‬about the tortures, the cruel killings….
‫ ר' בן ציון‬had answered:
Listen to the ‫ פשט‬of this ‫ פסוק‬in ‫קריאת שמע‬"‫"וחרה אף ד' בכם‬Even where there’s ‫ חרון אף‬still ‫ ד' בכם‬in the sense of ‫עמו אנכי בצרה‬These words of ‫ ר' יעקב‬spread like lightning through the camp. They encouraged
all those who were '‫ בצרה ושבי‬that ‫בכל צרתם לו צר ולא מאסתים ולא געלתים לכלותם‬.
Three weeks after ‫ סוכות‬Mendel became sick, and had to be taken to theinfirmary. He was treated by a Jewish doctor from Holland. The doctor told
Moishe that the Germans were planning another “clean-up” of the infirmary thenext morning by sending them in a transport to Auschwitz.
Moishe furiously sought every possible way to get Mendel out of theinfirmary. The doctor suggested that Mendel be taken out of the infirmary thatnight to stay in the regular barracks until after the transport to Auschwitz left. But
Mendel was too weak to stand on his own. Moishe and a Jew named Moishe
Leib grabbed him one from each side to walk him out of the infirmary, but Mendel
was too weak to move even a step.
Moishe proposed to the doctor that they hide Mendel somewhere in theinfirmary when the “action” takes place, but the doctor was afraid. Moishe had noother choice and asked that he stay with Mendel in the infirmary, saying he wasprepared to join Mendel in the transport to Auschwitz. The doctor couldn’t believe
what he heard, and said that in effect Moishe was committing suicide.
Moishe told him: “Listen my friend. It’s now five years since the war brokeout that I’ve been with Mendel. Neither of us has moved even a small step
without the other. We hid together in great danger in an attic when the ghetto in
Cracow was liquidated. We were together in Plashev, in Gross-Rosen, in Vierste,
in Dernhau and now in Zaifer-Wassa. It’s not only once that one of us risked his
70

life for the other. That’s why I don’t intend to leave him now at the last moment.
Wherever Mendel goes that’s where I go.”Moishe in fact remained in the infirmary that night, and the next morning
both were put on the transport. To their great ‫ מזל‬the train didn’t arrive at
Auschwitz, and the Germans returned the entire transport to Dernhau. They
found out later that the tracks to Auschwitz had been cut by American bombers.
But Mendel’s condition wasn’t good at all. His entire body was swollen andhe was in desperate pain.
We heard about Mendel’s condition from captives in Vierste who worked
outside the camp and who had met workers from Nederhau. We were shocked
by the news and were determined to do whatever we could to cure him andstrengthen him.
Every day I and Moishe Roth sent bread through R’ Yakov Vulcan toworkers who worked outside the camp, to pass to workers from Dernhau for
Mendel. After several days we heard that the swelling was slowly subsiding.
More days passed and we heard that Mendel could stand on his own. And so thenews continued to come until we finally heard that Mendel was fully recovered.
Mendel survived through the war, and afterwards established a ‫בית נאמן‬‫בישראל לשם ולתפארת‬. All these years I’m joyous that the pleasant task fell to me to
be a partner in his survival. Mendel on his part always remembered these events
and was ‫מכיר טוב‬. During the wedding of one of his children he sat himself nearme throughout the ‫ חתונה‬and we reminisced together about those days.

Flossenberg
On February 13 and 14, the British air force mounted a sustained attack
against the city of Dresden that is near Gross-Rosen and Vierste. Day and night
they rained down thousands of bombs until the city was aflame. Once the attack
was over, there wasn’t one whole building in the city. The Germans had boasted
about the beauty of Dresden. Now it was totally destroyed.

71

We left Vierste the next morning. From this point until the end of the war
we stayed in no place for more than two or three weeks, because the Germans
were retreating from Russian advances from the east. But so long as theGermans could, they took great care to drag surviving Jews with them, to killthem at a good opportunity.
If I were to describe to you all the ‫ צרות‬and ‫ יסורים‬that passed over ourheads in those two months until we were liberated in April, time would end before
I would end. It’s impossible to lay out even a part of my feelings from the cruelevents that I saw. But my heart tells me that I ought not to be totally silent, andthat it’s not right that later ‫ דורות‬not know at least some isolated details. So I’ll
force myself and gather strength to tell you a little about this time. But know that
I’m mentioning a ‫ טפח‬but keeping silent on two ‫ טפחים‬of the emotions that storm in
my heart on ‫חללי בת עמי‬.
An open wagon without a roof waited for us. The crowding, pain and grief
can’t be described. In this condition we traveled many days without a piece ofbread. Friends died to our right and to our left. There were about 30 bodied ineach wagon of our train when it finally stopped after several days and we got out.
We were then given a piece of bread. A 17-year old ‫ בחור‬named Friedman
approached me and gave me his portion, saying "‫"נעם איך דארף עס שוין נישט האבן‬.
After an hour he was no longer among the living.
There wasn’t much time to rest before we received an order to proceed.
This time we went on foot. We walked and walked without a stop. Anybody who
felt weak and sat down on the roadside was shot. Many persons couldn’t
continue and sat down knowing that they would die. Those who couldn’t continue
said good bye to their friends, sat down and accepted their fate.
We crossed the boundary between Germany and Czechoslovakia into
Sudetenland. This area was a Czech state that the Germans had seized before
the war based on the claim that most residents were ethnic Germans who spoke
German. As soon as we crossed the border we noticed that the structure of thehouses and the way they were painted were different from houses in Germany.
72

Czech people weren’t as evil as the Germans and the Poles. Once when
we walked under a bridge, Czechs used ropes to lower food packages to us. But
we couldn’t enjoy the packages because the German soldiers who guarded us
took the packages for themselves. They also ordered those on the bridge not tolower any more packages.
We passed through Marienbad, where we spent a whole night near the
train station before we continued.
After two weeks, in early March 1945 we arrived at Flossenberg, a large
concentration camp in south central Germany. The camp held several thousand
captives.
They ordered us to remove our clothes and forced from me the good coat
I got in Vierste. We were pushed into a large bath house, saying that they wanted
to remove our lice. I noticed the water faucets in the ceiling, but after several
moments I convinced myself that that they had tricked us, that this was no bathhouse, that this was a gas chamber and that my end had arrived – until I felt astream of hot water raining on our heads.
We walked into shack where the Germans designated for each of us abunk in a barrack. My place was on top near the roof. We were then ordered tothe outside assembly area – the appel platz – and to stand there in straight rows.
One of the officers announced that all car mechanics should step out and standon the side. I stepped out with the other mechanics because I thought that it’sbetter to accept some work, because who knows what will happen to those whohave no work. Actually, they didn’t need my “services.”
During the two weeks we spent in Flossenberg we did hardly any work atall.

‫ גיהנום‬of Ice
But don’t think that we were on vacation. We suffered from the evil
cruelties of those who ran the camp. The nights at the end of winter were
freezing cold. The ground was covered with ice. At three or four o’clock every

73

morning we were awakened and ordered to the appel platz to stand in straightrows. The purpose was to confirm that the number of captives agreed with theirlists and that nobody had escaped.
The Germans were dressed in parkas and warm boots. They acted as if
they were caught up in their jobs of counting us two times and three times. On
this pretext they made us stand in the cold hour after hour.
There were many times we stood this way in the cold until seven in themorning! We wore torn clothing. I’ve already mentioned that they had seized thewarm coats we had received in Vierste. We stood pressed against each other toget some warmth. We almost went out of our minds from the pain. Many bent
over and fell down dead. To this day I don’t know how I managed to stand on
those hard nights.
In the morning we again arranged ourselves on the appel. They also
arranged for counting all those who had died on the appel in the night, as well as
those who had died in the shacks. Accounts had to be balanced with Prussian
accuracy.
There was a small crematorium in the camp to burn corpses. It could
handle no more than two corpses at a time. Since multitudes died that winter,they couldn’t burn all the corpses right away. Instead they arranged the ‫ מתים‬inpiles one on top of the other to the height of a one story building. So theyremained until space became available in the crematorium.
After several nights of this ice, I decided that I could no loner bear this.
After they counted me on the appel, I quietly slipped out of my row and stole into
the barracks, went up to my bunk and let myself fall asleep. But not for long.
Apparently someone reported me to the Germans. Policemen raided thebarracks and searched until they found me, and woke me with shouts andshrieks. They grabbed me and pulled me and tore at me to take me outside andto pass me to the chief. He announced that for this ‫ עבירה‬I was to be whipped 50
times.

74

They tied me to a post. On both my sides stood Ukrainian peasants who
were noted for their viciousness, each with a leather strap in hand. With all theirstrength they whipped me. When one stopped to rest, the other sprang into
action. For the first 10 whips, I still felt the pain, but afterwards I felt nothing at all.

‫הצלת נפשות‬As a bonus to our situation, there was an outbreak of dysentery-diarrhea.
The Germans decided not to give food to anyone who was affected. They also
marked an X on his head as a sign of death, and added him to the other
unfortunates who were marked for death at selections that were done on aregular basis.
The scene was awful. The sick person said goodbye to his friends at night.
Then he would move away and cry and they would move away and cry. Three
persons slept on each bunk, and it wasn’t unusual if in the morning only two
stood up.
To my misfortune, a friend who slept next to me on my bunk came downwith the disease. He weakened so that he couldn’t keep any food in his stomach.
You can imagine that to sleep next to him in these conditions wasn’t easy.
A voice on a bull horn announced that we were to appear on the appel
because a number of workers were needed for a neighboring camp. I don’t
remember if my friend was already marked, but he was obviously sick, and wethought it almost certain that he’d be removed from the appel and be transported
to die.
We decided on a very dangerous step to save him. I stood in one row andhe stood in the row next to me. After the officer counted me in my row andwalked to the front of the second row to count that row, my friend and I changed
places and the officer counted me again in the second row, without ever looking
at my friend. ‫ בע"ה‬the plan worked and we weren’t discovered.
This was only half of a ‫ישועה‬. We now had to worry about curing myfriend’s ‫מחלה‬. A certain cure for diarrhea is toast. But how to get toast in this75‫ ?גיהנום‬In fact there was an oven for warmth in the center of every shack. But it
was absolutely forbidden to fry or grill anything on the oven, and this was under
the supervision of the shturm elster who was a cruel and vicious ‫ גוי‬from the
Ukraine.
I had a sudden idea that I knew as a little dangerous. I gathered up mycourage and approached the ‫גוי‬. I asked him if I could honor him by cleaning hisboots from the puddles, mud and filth of the late winter.
This peasant didn’t know how to react to my strange question, whether tohit me or to kill me. He was silent for some moments, until, to my happiness, heagreed. I told him that I was sure that “his honor” would order that the capos notinterrupt me during my work, and he agreed to this too.
So I succeeded in making toast by drying boots. The ‫ גוי‬liked my work andgave me his boots day by day for almost two weeks until my friend was healthyagain.
We were in Flossenberg until the week before ‫פסח‬

Loenbeck
In March 1945 they brought us in an uncovered train to Loenbeck. In thiscity there were two big underground factories dug into a mountain. They
manufactured Messerschmitt airplanes and needed more workers.
We worked six or seven hours a day. ‫ ברוך השם‬the work wasn’t hard. In
front of us there were big cartons and bags that held thousands of nails andscrews of every size – wide, thin, long and short. It was our job to separate thenails and screws by size and type. They would then use these nails and screws
to attach the plane’s wings to the plane’s body. Actually, despite all our efforts,
not one plane was built. The German war machine had already almost collapsed.
They didn’t have the materials needed to build a plane.
During our work we sang ‫ניגונים‬. We had enough time to sing every last ‫ניגון‬that our ‫ רבי ר' בן ציון‬had been ‫מחבר‬. I then realized the tremendous power andworth of a warm ‫ חסידיש'ע ניגון‬that’s full of feeling and ‫ קדושה‬and ‫שמחה‬. At a time76

when we couldn’t learn ‫ תורה‬we drew strength and ‫ בטחון‬from these ‫ניגונים קדושים‬.
Through them we returned to an earlier world that had disappeared.
I remember how again and again I sang the "‫"רבון כל העולמים אדון כל הנשמות‬that we say ‫ ליל שבת קודש‬after ‫ שלום עליכם‬in the pleasant ‫ נוסח‬of our ‫רבי‬. Here I am
standing on a plain Monday and slowly sorting nails and screws, while I sing tomyself "...‫"מלך הדור מלך ותיק מלך זך מלך חי עולמים‬In those times I sensed again the strong influence of our ‫רבי‬. There rang in
my ears the fiery words that ‫ ר' מיכלי קאלוואריער‬said on ‫ שמחת תורה‬of ‫תרצ"ו‬:The ‫ נגיד ר' אשר טימבערג‬from Cracow had invited ‫ ר' מיכלי‬and ‫– ר' משה סטעמפל‬the son-in-law of our ‫ רבי‬-- for ‫ קידוש‬in his hotel room. Since ‫ ר' אשר‬also knew me
and my friend ‫ אשר מאיר וואגנער‬from the ‫ שטיבל‬in Cracow, he invited us too.
‫ ר' מיכלי‬began to talk with great power and emotion about the holiness ofour ‫ רבי‬and his elevated ‫מדרגות‬. He described the special ‫ זכות‬of our generation tohave a ‫ מנהיג‬who raised high the flag of ‫תורה וחסידות‬.
‫ ר' מיכלי‬continued as if on fire until he announced:!‫מ' האט אונז אראןגעשיקט א האנד פון הימל! דער וואס וויל זיך אנכאפן זאל זיך אנכאפן‬And he sprang up from his seat and left with a ‫ זמר‬and a ‫ רקידה‬in great joy.
***
Although the work in Loenbeck wasn’t hard, the food situation worsened
every day. The Germans themselves had little food because Allied airplanes
bombed important German cities day and night without stop. On most days welived on some soup and the fat from salami made from horses that died in thebombing raids.
I realized that it was no ‫ תכלית‬to go without food, so I arranged with a capo
to arrange bread loaves for me. I paid him $50. Afterwards I was no longer
hungry in Loenbeck. But this deal gave me only four loaves of bread before wetraveled away.

77

There was no food to eat in ‫ פסח‬of ‫תש"ה‬. That was the first time throughout
the war that I needed to eat ‫ חמץ בפסח‬because of ‫פיקוח נפש‬. In every other year I
had managed to arrange potatoes for our group, but now there was nothing that
could last eight days.20

More Treks
The Germans suffered defeat after defeat. On April 1 the Americans
surrounded the German army near the Ruhr River and advanced eastward
towards Berlin and to the south towards our region by way of Frankfurt andNuremberg.
On the morning of April 6 we received an order to arrange ourselves inrows of 6 by 6 because we were traveling away immediately. I then still had one
bread loaf. I gave a sizable portion to ‫ ר' שמואל פיינער‬that gave him the strength tocontinue. The rest I and put it into the lining of my short jacket to save for an
emergency.
They were rushing us to march in the direction of the mountains, where
they had dug caves and long tunnels. I trembled when I heard the order to march
into the mountain. The thought entered my mind that maybe they wanted to finish
us off there, by exploding a tunnel while we were inside, so that no one would
ever know and there’d be no ‫ זכר‬left of us.
The road into the mountain was deep and wide and we marched forward
for half a mile. I breathed more easily when I saw daylight on the other side.
On the road we saw thousands of German citizens who were also fleeing
the American advance, some on wagons and some on foot.
It’s hard to describe the marches in these days. If the march to
Flossenberg was very hard, this march was double and triple hard. We received
no food for several days. It was only once in a while that they threw us something
to eat. There was no place to rest for the night. Instead, in the middle of the night20

I heard afterwards that my friend R’ Nosson Dovid, who at this time was still in Flossenberg, managed to
avoid eating ‫ חמץ‬even in this ‫פסח‬. He exchanged his portion of bread for two measures of sugar and ate only
sugar the entire ‫יום טוב‬.

78

they ordered us to rest several hours in some silo or barn that they found along
the road, and if they found no barn, we slept on the ground ‫כדומן על פני השדה‬. After
rainstorms; we slept in the mud and the filth, wet through and through. At least
then we had enough to drink and they couldn’t rob us of the water. In the morning
we again moved on and on.
It was almost impossible for a person to survive these bitter marches.
Many of our friends who were weak or sick couldn’t continue and sat down on theroadside to rest a little. But the German soldiers who guarded us – they weremainly middle-aged because the younger soldiers were at the front – were underorders not to leave even one Jew behind, but to shoot and kill them. Several
hundred persons died this way. Among those who were killed was my friend R’
Yakov Vulcan who did so many favors to his friends in this ‫צרה‬.
Fixed into my memory is how I trembled when I saw a terrifying scenefrom afar. For a moment I thought it was a caravan of ‫שדים‬. But it was Jewish girls
from Hungary who were weak and hungry and were also being moved forcibly.
They were gaunt and bent, and wore rotten rags around their shaved heads.
Woe to eyes that saw this sight.
This continued until we reached Koeflink which was a branch of the
Dachau extermination camp. There were no shacks here, only rooms dug
underground that we called "‫"דרערד ליגערס‬. We were there for 10-12 days without
doing any work. They gave us a little bread with some spread similar to
margarine. When I got up one morning I saw that someone had stolen from thelining of my jacket the half loaf of bread I had hidden there. Only some crumbs
were left. This caused me great ‫עגמת נפש‬. I ate almost nothing in those last daysof the war.
On April 14 we left Koeflink and walked to Muehldorf, which was also abranch of Dachau, about 50 miles from Munich near the Tural mountains and theborder with Austria and Switzerland.
The German plan was to concentrate all surviving Jews into one place
where they could be prepared for slaughter. In fact, several thousand Jews were79

killed in the Tural mountains at the very last moment. Until all Jews weregathered into one place, the fate of each group of Jews depended on thelieutenant who was in charge of them. The central question was whether theAmericans would liberate us before the final slaughter.
With me in Muehldorf were ‫שלום בירנבוים‬, ‫שמואל פיינער‬, ‫ ר' יהושע בייגעל‬and '‫ר‬‫שמעון יונגווירטה‬. Our job there was to carry bundles of potatos from the train station
to the camp.

Waldorf
Muehldorf was divided into a main camp, that was the central point for all
captives, and Waldorf, a forest-based camp that was about 15 kilometers from avillage called Hemp ping.
Two persons who were later to be my brothers in law were in Waldorf.
They were ‫ ר' מיכל‬who is my wife’s brother, and ‫ ר' שמואל פרענקעל‬who was thehusband of my wife’s sister. The ‫ קלויזענבערגער רבי‬was also in this camp.
Captives in the camp slept in informal winter shacks that were built fromplain wooden boards, mainly underground except that their roofs were at groundlevel and were covered with dirt to project against rain and cold. The walls were
lined with barracks, and only a little space was empty in the center of the shack.
Every bunk held a sack with a little straw that counted as a mattress. One small
window above the entrance let in some light. These shacks were spread all overthe camp. The camp itself was surrounded with electrified barbed wire
The captives were to build an airport and missile launchers from which tofire missiles to London and other big European cities.
Jews worked there 12 hours a day at hard labor. Besides, they had towalk five miles from the shacks to their workplace. They walked on wooden
shoes on narrow paths that twisted though the thick forest. This walk would havebeen difficult in any case, but the walk back, after a full day of work, was almost
impossible for the captives. The SS guards, who were anxious to return to their80

warm and comfortable shacks, liberally used their whips to hurry the captives
along.
My brother in law ‫ ר' שלמה‬couldn’t bear these pressures. His strength gaveout and he was sent to an extermination camp.
‫ מיכל‬saw death closely more than once. One time he and other Jews faced
a firing squad and all the others fell like flies. The bullet that was aimed at ‫מיכל‬flew right in front of his eyes without grazing him. They let him go.
Another time they wanted to impale him with a spit. He sensed that at thelast minutes someone put his hand on his head and pushed him down. He wassaved by this ‫נס‬
Another day he and a friend did something that a German didn’t like. This‫ רשע‬punished them by taking them to a bomb crater that was two stories deep.
He led them down by ladder and then removed the ladder.
The walls of the trench were straight without any finger hold. Somehow‫ מיכל‬and his friend managed to grab at grass growing on the wall and to use thisto climb out. He tells me often that to this day he doesn’t know how he did this.
The next morning the German who put them in the trench asked how they had
escaped. They answered and he let them go.
During these times there rang in his ears the ‫ ברכה‬he received from theBelzer Rebbe in ‫ שבת חנוכה‬in Budapest. He feels that because of this ‫ ברכה‬he was‫ זוכה לסייעתא דשמיא‬at every step.
‫ מיכל‬got to know the ‫ קלויזענבערגער רבי‬well in Waldorf. The ‫ רבי‬often
encouraged him in ways that saved his life. The Germans ordered Jews to carry
50 kilo sacks of cement on their backs and to carry them to the mountain. On one
occasion ‫ מיכל‬and the ‫ רבי‬were charged with standing on a truck to lift the cement
sacks and place them on the shoulders of captives standing below. When ‫מיכל‬81

was about to collapse from this effort, the ‫ רבי‬would encourage him by joking"‫"מיכל'ע איז שוין געווארין פויל‬.21‫ מיכל‬often mentions an event from those days. One day, when the Jews
were at hard labor in the forest, the Germans killed a Jew for no reason at all.
‫ מיכל‬and his friends were broken in spirit by this ‫אכזריות‬.
While the German guards had turned away for a moment, one Jew sat
down on a tree trunk to rest for a moment. He began to sing to himself the wellknown ‫ ניגון‬on the ‫ פסוק‬of "‫"והי' ביום ההוא יתקע בשופר גדול‬. The song restored thespirits of ‫ מיכל‬and the others and their will to live.

Air Raid
On April 16 the Americans entered Nuremberg and continued to advanceto the south. American planes rained down thousands of bombs daily. Since wewere behind the German lines we were also targets of these dangerous attacks.
In fact many died from these bombs and from machine gun fire from the planes.
This was one of the sad facts of this war, which was one big tragedy
altogether. Thousands of Jews who went through ‫ שבעה מדורי גיהנום‬with theGermans through the war were cut down at the very end by American fire.
One day while we were working outside on a road, an air raid siren
warned that American bombers were approaching. The American practice was tofirst send high flying reconnaissance aircraft to select and mark targets with whiteflares. Bombers would then follow to attack the marked sites.
As soon as we heard the siren we wanted to run off the center of the road,because as a rule the Americans sought to bomb highways to destroy them, andeven more so where they saw many persons working on the highway. But theGerman soldier who guarded us insisted that we first arrange ourselves in rows
to count us and be sure that no one had escaped.

21

In this period ‫ מיכל‬constantly accompanied the ‫ רבי‬and was ‫משמשו בנאמנות‬. ‫ מיכל‬was also close to the ‫רבי‬after the war in Feldafink. The ‫ רבי‬was ‫ מחבב מיכל‬to the point that he wanted to adopt him as a son. I’ll
discuss this further in a later ‫פרק‬.

82

To our luck, one person wasn’t present at the count. The guard insisted
that nobody could go to the side of the road until the missing person appeared.
This wait of several moments was to cost us a lot. 10 bombers appeared
and we were one of their targets. They bombed us. This time we no longer
waited for permission but ran to the nearby fields and spread ourselves on the
ground with our faces deep in the tall grass. Suddenly we heard a deafening
noise from a bomb that fell squarely in the middle of the road. The bomb left acrater 20 meters deeps and 10 meters long and wide. Shrapnel from the bomb
flew in all directions, and I felt shrapnel in my neck and back. There wasdarkness from all the big and small stones and dust that flew up and then fell
down.
When that bomb exploded and wounded me, I was certain that this was
the end and with all my strength I said ‫שמע ישראל ד' אלקינו ד' אחד‬.
The attack ended and the airplanes flew away. The silence of death
floated in the field; many were dead. The dust and earth settled and daylightappeared again. I saw that ‫ בס"ד‬I was alive, but I felt strong pain from the back of
my head, my neck and my back. The wounded cried for help.
Those who weren’t wounded stood up to help the wounded. There wasgreat confusion. Some screamed, others cried, and others acted as if they wereout of their minds. ‫ ר' שלום בירנבוים‬lost his hearing for several hours. Shrapnel
entered his head and also wounded a nerve to an eye. ‫ שמואל פיינער‬had half of his
lip torn.
After several hours a truck arrived for the wounded, me included. They
brought us to a field infirmary that had two rooms and was serviced by two
German doctors. The doctor who treated me was honest and good and treatedme properly. He washed the wound with antiseptic to avoid an infection, andplaced a bandage, but the pieces of metal from the shrapnel are still in my neckand back. Once when I took an X-ray, the doctor asked me in surprise “what’swith your back?” I told him that this a memento of an air raid in April 1945.

83

I see in myself an interesting phenomenon. Though throughout thedreadful war we suffered so much physical and mental pain, we didn’t think muchabout them in the first several years after the war. We were still stunned, as if wewere drugged. The things done to us and that we witnessed were so terrifying inquantity and quality that our minds couldn’t absorb the depths of the events.
Even more so during the war itself when we had no time to absorb one event
before we were struck by another. But with the passage of years, as one year
goes by and then another, I again remember those years "‫ "שאין לי בהם חפץ‬and I
find myself more and more understanding the details of what happened.
Now more than 40 years have passed since the air raid in Muehldorf. But
many times at night, when I stand ready to go to sleep and to say ‫קריאת שמע שעל‬‫המטה‬, and the house is quiet and restful, I again see the whole scene. It passes
before me how I’m pressing my head in the grass near the road. Airplanes fly
overhead and drop their deathly cargo. I hear the alarming noises of bomb
explosions, and I see the world suddenly turn dark. I imagine to myself that theseare my last moments on this world and from the depths of my heart I cry out withfeeling "‫"שמע ישראל ד' אלקינו ד' אחד‬The False Liberation
The Germans announced on April 24 that we were to leave Muehldorf.
News arrived that the Russian army had entered Berlin and were engaged inhouse to house fighting, and that the Americans were slowly advancing in our
direction. So the Germans knew they had to move. They didn’t know where togo, but this they knew: they would hold on to the Jews until the end.
When the news came I was in the infirmary together with ‫שלום בירנבוים‬. Still,
I decided that, no matter what, I was leaving and wasn’t going to remain in theinfirmary. I knew the German ‫ מנהג‬to kill sick patients when the Germans left aplace. I announced my intention to the doctor, who again cleaned my wounds
and put on a new bandage. ‫ שלום‬and I then joined the traveling transport.

84

After the liberation I heard that the sick patients who remained in
Muehldorf were liberated before me and the others on the transport. They werecloser to the American lines and the Germans there surrendered before they
could harm the patients.
This to me is another proof that a person can’t plan out foolproof ways of‫הצלה‬. If he is fated ‫ מן השמים‬to stay alive, then even if his every step is dangerous
and not logical, these steps will work and he’ll be saved. On the other hand, if ‫חס‬‫ ושלום‬the opposite is true, then all of his ‫ חכמה‬and all of his energy and activity will
come to nothing and instead might even lead to his doom. I saw this countlesstimes during the war.
We left Muehldorf on an open train on the next morning, April 25. The
Germans distributed some food and gave each of us one raw potato. We
traveled from place to place for two days and finally stopped on the 27 th in thevillage of Poenk near Munich, where we stayed for a while. There were
thousands of Jews on that train. Besides the Jews from Muehldorf there werealso Jews from surrounding camps. My brother in law and other workers from
Waldorf were also on the train.
I hadn’t eaten a thing on the 52-hours of the trip. I didn’t eat the potato in
my pocket, because I was still holding it in reserve. I kept the potato in my pocket
until several days after liberation.
The driver of the train, who wore a uniform and a red hat, suddenly
pointed to several Jews excitedly and said “Do you see! Americans have alreadyadvanced to the main road that’s only two kilometers from here.” Those whoheard him let out a shout of "‫ "קול תרועת שמחה וצהלה‬and announced “Liberation is
here!”On hearing this, all the captives got up and began to race out of the Poenk
train station to Poenk itself which was nearby. The Germans themselves didn’tknow how to react, and didn’t stop anyone from leaving the train. This fact itself
increased the impression that our liberation had come. Many Jews entered85

German houses and demanded to be served food and drink. After all, the war
had ended and the Germans were defeated.
How disappointed we were when after four or five hours armed soldiersarrived and ordered us back to the train station. These were air force officers who
had a base near Poenk and who hadn’t yet received an order to surrender. They
attacked us in hate and anger, and were prepared to shoot anyone who resisted
them. They surrounded us and ordered us to hold our hands up. They hit with
their rifle butts everyone they encountered. One approached me but missed mewhen I fell to the ground.
Their lieutenant announced that anyone who wanted to live had to rerun
immediately to the wagon cards. In sad spirit we returned to the wagons after
having briefly enjoyed the sweet taste of freedom.
My brother in law ‫ מיכל‬tells me that in his part of the transport the Germans
shot blindly at the Jews and killed hundreds if not thousands. A blood bath. Theyordered the survivors to reboard the train.
This almost liberation became notorious forever as the “false liberation.”
Oppressed and broken we found ourselves again on the train. All night thetrain traveled back and forth without any destination, while we worried that theywould take us into some forest to kill us all.
This was a very bitter night for me. The wound in my back became
infected and dripped out moisture. There was crowding and every moment
someone would rub against my back and cause me excruciating pain. My
stomach was famished and screamed for food.

Liberation
They ordered us off the train early on the morning of April 29. Dachau wasliberated that day by the American 7th Army. We noticed that American airplanes
were approaching to attack. This time they dropped no bombs, but when they
saw the train tracks and a long train, and the movement of thousands of people,
they attacked us from nearby with machine gun. ‫ בס"ד‬I managed to run from the86tracks while there was still time, but many standing closer to the train were killed.
This was only one day before liberation.
We again entered the train that night until we arrived at Zeishaubt, near
Feldafink, early the next morning on the 30th.
The train doors opened and we got out. We saw 40 or 50 Germansoldiers. At first we thought that they were to be our guards. But after a few
moments we realized that they weren’t wearing their weapons as if they wereready to shoot, but instead carried the weapons on their backs. We all thoughtthat this might mean that liberation was near, but we didn’t want to put ourselvesin danger again for nothing.
We stood there for about two hours. We whispered to each other the news
that Hitler the ‫ צר הצורר‬had committed suicide that day in his bunker under the
Reichstag in Berlin. We also saw SS officers tearing from their uniforms the black
patch of the SS. They didn’t want to be captured by the Americans as SS officers
who had committed unspeakable crimes against innocents.
A German approached and pointed with his finger to where the Americans
were nearby. This time a group of Jews from Greece, who are by nature brave,
ran off towards Zeishaubt. I turned to ‫ יהושע בייגעל‬who was near me and said"‫ "לאמער לויפן‬and we joined the group from Greece in their run to the city.
A tank with an American star passed us as we were running on the road. It
wasn’t hard for the Americans to recognize that we didn’t belong to the soldiers
they were fighting. Our faces were pale and scrawny and we were dressed in thecolored “uniforms” of German captives. The tank stopped and we climbed in withthe help of the soldiers. We traveled with them two or three miles until their base.
While we were in the tank, they had ‫ רחמנות‬on us and showed us cans of‫ חזיר‬and other foods. Based on our weak and unhealthy state we were certainly‫ מותר‬to eat these foods. But I understood that in my situation, with my stomach
shrunk from not having eaten so long, fat foods were liable to be dangerous, and87

especially so for food that was canned and not fresh. I asked them for somecookies and hot water, which they gave me.22
The remaining Jews in the transport were liberated two hours after we ran
off. Many Jews afterwards entered German houses and asked to be served.
When they received the standard answer “we have nothing,” the Jews forced
their way downstairs into the cellars and found barrels full of marmalade andother good foods.
I walked into an empty German house and found a suit that fit me. I took
off my colored “uniform” that I had been wearing for more than a year, and put on
the suit instead. I then walked outside as a free person for the first time in five
years.
I raised my eyes upward in thanks to ‫ הקב"ה‬for letting me survive throughso many ‫נסים‬, and I spread out my hands in a ‫ תפילה‬for the future. PleaseHashem, give me the ‫ כוח‬I need to be become strong again and to be healed.
May it be your ‫ רצון‬that I can live as a Jew and to be ‫ מקיים‬your ‫ מצוות‬with ‫הרחבת‬‫הדעת‬. Please let it also be your ‫ רצון‬that I be ‫ זוכה‬to build a ‫בית נאמן בישראל‬, to leavea ‫ שם ושארית‬to my destroyed ‫משפחה‬. To my children and their descendants I will tellof all the ‫ חסד‬that you have done to me, that you saved me from the lions and thatyou brought me back from the depths.
***
From the ‫ קינה‬by ‫ ר' שלמה‬from ‫באבוב‬Have ‫ רחמנות‬on the remnants of the ‫ מחנות הקדושים‬who numbered 6 million
Raise up the ‫ בית המקדש‬and be ‫ מנחם‬us
Elevate us and bring us to ‫ ציון‬and ‫ירושלים‬22

Thousands of Jews who survived the war came down with typhus because they couldn’t immediately
digest the foods they were given after liberation. Those under American control were sickened less by thisdisease because American doctors took care to feed those liberated only food that was easily digestible. Not
so in the British sections where soldiers fed those liberated without taking care to follow the advice ofdoctors. Many of those who contracted typhus died after the liberation my wife’s uncle ‫שלמה שווארץ‬. At
least he managed before his ‫ פטירה‬to be reunited with his daughters Mrs. Oberlander and Mrs. Schwimmer,
who afterwards set up ‫בתים נאמנים בישראל‬88

89