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יהי זיכרו ברוך My grandfather was on a train to Auschwitz, but managed to avoid it and survive. A childhood friend of his survived in the camp until liberation

יהי זיכרו ברוך My grandfather was on a train to Auschwitz, but managed to avoid it and survive. A childhood friend of his survived in the camp until liberation. They always paid tribute to the liberators along with those who died in the attempt, at a ceremony commemorating their community.

galuggus 5y ago
How did he avoid it?
- thechao 5y ago
  I know everyone has a story, here, but I knew several survivors when I was younger. The "general" answer is that the few that survived were highly exceptional — they Nazi machine wasn't perfect. So, most of them had stories that were really over-the-top & full of coincidence. Everyone who had a normal story was dead before the war ended. One of the survivors I knew was executed twice. He said "it didn't catch".
- dalbasal 5y ago
  A long series of events, 3 years. Initially there was a backlog. Not enough trains to Poland. He went through several camps, work assignments. He never got shipped to Poland. Eventually he was freed by his brother, with the help of the Czech partisans using forged/backdated baptismal records. The Slovak subsidiary of the third reich was church oriented. Most survival stories that I know of personally involved the church, one way or another. The brother who worked tirelessly to save him had been the one on the list. He had a baby on the way, born the following morning. My grandfather volunteered to take his place, while the couple hid. The daughter became a teacher. He survived the rest of the war as a partisan. I don't know the whole story. He rarely spoke of it. Many/most of the Lubaks (local SS) were from the area, and he'd gone to school with some of them. That's part of the story, but I don't know exactly how it fits in.
  - baybal2 5y ago
    > Eventually he was freed by his brother, with the help of the Czech partisans using forged/backdated baptismal records. The Slovak subsidiary of the third reich was church oriented. I want to remind how little people today remember who 3rd reich collaborators were. The myth of "unwilling collaborators," and "forced to work for Germans under a gunpoint" was invented after the war by political forces who got in bed with 3rd reich, and then wanted to save their skin from pitchforks when they lost. Those were often very mainstream, and popular political parties. Some of them exist to this day. Well, there were even Jewish collaborators, in fact, quite plenty of them.
    - dalbasal 5y ago
      I wouldn't even necessarily call the SLS collaborators. They were primaries. Broadly though, yes. When we know a little about a topic, it tends to be clean, black and white stereotypes and cliches. Real history is infinitely complicated. Even (especially) individuals are not one thing or another.
      - baybal2 5y ago
        > we know a little about a topic, it tends to be clean, black and white stereotypes and cliches. Real history is infinitely complicated. The history is simple, in this case. There were bad people, and there are bad people trying to muddy the boundary of a very clear cut difference of who was bad, and who was good. One go kills random innocent people — he is bad.
    - AriaMinaei 5y ago
      > The myth of "unwilling collaborators," and "forced to work for Germans under a gunpoint" was invented after the war by political forces who got in bed with 3rd reich, and then wanted to save their skin from pitchforks when they lost. Not to mention Ordinary Men [0], the dynamic that makes your average citizens with no ideological indoctrination become the murderers of tens of thousands of Jews, to the point they'd shoot at small children with a clear conscience. They'd even have the option not to directly take part in the murders, but still do. Again, these were average, ordinary people. No strong party affiliation, SS membership or anything. The fact that Christopher Browning's book was a revelation when it came out shows how little we've learned from WWII. We might have put the lid on undisguised antisemitism, but we have merely channeled its otherising roots elsewhere. Otherwise, we wouldn't find it so easy to turn a blind eye to the settler colonialism happening right now in Palestine. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Ordinary-Men-Reserve-Battalion-Solution-dp-0062303023/dp/0062303023/ref=dp_ob_title_bk https://www.amazon.com/Ordinary-Men-Reserve-Battalion-Soluti...
gambiting 5y ago
Interesting, my grandfather was also on the train to Auschwitz and also survived - he was in an orphanage in Katowice, after his parents were taken to camps in Germany, but a few months later Nazis decided to clear out the orphanage as well - he was taken along with all the other kids and put in a train carriage destined to Auschwitz, but a nurse who worked at the orphanage managed to sneak into the trainyard and grabbed the first kid that she had a chance to - my grandfather. As far as we know he was the only kid to survive from that orphanage, thanks to the actions of that nurse. He was then placed with the family of Kazimierz Gołba, a Polish poet(who was himself hiding first from Nazis then from the secret police after the war) - and lived with them using a fake name for a while, only going to back to his original name and surname some years after the war. Him and my grandma spent years and years of their lives trying to find any trace of what happend to his parents or any of his other family, but without any luck. Unfortunately, he passed away last year, almost certainly due to covid(I say almost certainly - he passed away due to respiratory problems, and grandma got diagnosed with covid a day later, he was never tested). Him and grandma and myself and the rest of our family have always lived literally 10 minutes away from the former Auschwitz camp as well - in a little town nearby.
- dalbasal 5y ago
  Bless his memory too, and those who saved him. Heroism and tragedy of that era is beyond my comprehension. My Grandmother (wife of the man I spoke about) was from your area, Wadowice. She was 16 on the eve of invasion, and her family survived by fleeing east.. gambling on Stalin over Hitler. Her father almost turned them back, having fought Russians in WW1. They were refugees for 7 years, most of the time in central asia. They returned for a while, but a couple of murders over property disputes convinced most survivors (very few survived from Wadowice) to leave. I have some family members who married out and converted. We're not in touch, unfortunately. The live in Krakov, last I heard. She always maintained ties to her old community, even their most famous member. This is her elbowing past a Prime Minister to say hi and try to get him to do some renovation on an old synagogue. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EcC8xKgplBhF3BthO82AbazxkeMaSg2-/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EcC8xKgplBhF3BthO82AbazxkeM... We might be related.
himinlomax 5y ago
I once met a Polish Jew who had barely escaped being deported to Auschwitz. He had been in the Polish army, escaped to France through Switzerland (a whole movie could be made about that) with his father to fight here, didn't go too well either. They got arrested by the Vichy police. The policemen guarding them told them, "you know, we're not looking wink wink" His father was too sick to run away, he had to leave him behind. He was deported and died in Auschwitz. He managed to join the maquis. He was a distant relative of a friend who told me, "he never told that story, I think he may be dying." And he did, a few weeks later, I learned.
madaxe_again 5y ago
My great uncle died at Bergen-Belsen - he was a doctor in Vienna, and he had been harbouring a Jewish family. His young sister - my grandmother - sold him out for a promotion in the hitlerjugend. From what I gather, he managed to get quite a few people out of there on medical grounds - but not himself. She never spoke of him. I only found out from the posthumous memoir of her surviving brother, who was a conscientious objector who got sent to Stalingrad. Not an easy read, but one that made me acutely aware of just how quickly things can go incredibly bad.
- gattilorenz 5y ago
  I think this is the first time I hear of somebody bringing up the negative past of their family so directly. If I may ask, how did this influence you and/or your relationship with your grandmother?
  - madaxe_again 5y ago
    It didn’t, as I didn’t know about her other brothers while she was alive. I always thought it was just Siegfried and Sigrid, but they had pretty much a whole Ring Cycle of siblings. I think I would have forgiven her, however - I have, now, at any rate. She was born in 1928 - she grew up in Vienna, immersed in an increasingly fascist culture, and joined the Hitler youth because it was simply what everyone did. In the last days of the war, she, in terror for her life, married a German officer who promised to get her out of Vienna before the Russians arrived - which he did, dumping her, pregnant with his child, in Kano Nigeria. At the same time, many of her cousins were also fleeing Europe to escape war crime prosecution, and many remained in subsaharan Africa. She met my grandfather there, a British war and famine profiteer, through a lonely hearts advert. They had many miserable years together. All in all, I feared her as a younger child, pitied her as a young man - she was a cruel and angry woman, who was scornful to me as a child, and bitter to her (fourth) husband. Her brother, Sigrid, who by the time I was around lived with her, his wife long dead, always looked out for her, told us to be kind, that we didn’t and couldn’t understand why she was as she was. And then his death, her death, his memoir, and I understood. I wish now that I had known while she was alive, but then, I was a younger man, and I may not have understood. Now, I see her as a victim as much as any of them - her entire life was a pyre of guilt and shame and self-loathing, always running, and never escaping her past, her actions. As to me, I learned several things I felt were of critical importance: - That cruel people are usually the product of cruelty - that they are cruel because they are ashamed, and wish to hate themselves. - That righteous people, working with what they know to be right and good can carry out acts of atrocious evil. - That you should be aware that your actions, if sufficiently bad, will haunt you til the end of your days.

galuggus 5y ago

How did he avoid it?

thechao 5y ago
I know everyone has a story, here, but I knew several survivors when I was younger. The "general" answer is that the few that survived were highly exceptional — they Nazi machine wasn't perfect. So, most of them had stories that were really over-the-top & full of coincidence. Everyone who had a normal story was dead before the war ended. One of the survivors I knew was executed twice. He said "it didn't catch".
dalbasal 5y ago
A long series of events, 3 years. Initially there was a backlog. Not enough trains to Poland. He went through several camps, work assignments. He never got shipped to Poland. Eventually he was freed by his brother, with the help of the Czech partisans using forged/backdated baptismal records. The Slovak subsidiary of the third reich was church oriented. Most survival stories that I know of personally involved the church, one way or another. The brother who worked tirelessly to save him had been the one on the list. He had a baby on the way, born the following morning. My grandfather volunteered to take his place, while the couple hid. The daughter became a teacher. He survived the rest of the war as a partisan. I don't know the whole story. He rarely spoke of it. Many/most of the Lubaks (local SS) were from the area, and he'd gone to school with some of them. That's part of the story, but I don't know exactly how it fits in.
- baybal2 5y ago
  > Eventually he was freed by his brother, with the help of the Czech partisans using forged/backdated baptismal records. The Slovak subsidiary of the third reich was church oriented. I want to remind how little people today remember who 3rd reich collaborators were. The myth of "unwilling collaborators," and "forced to work for Germans under a gunpoint" was invented after the war by political forces who got in bed with 3rd reich, and then wanted to save their skin from pitchforks when they lost. Those were often very mainstream, and popular political parties. Some of them exist to this day. Well, there were even Jewish collaborators, in fact, quite plenty of them.
  - dalbasal 5y ago
    I wouldn't even necessarily call the SLS collaborators. They were primaries. Broadly though, yes. When we know a little about a topic, it tends to be clean, black and white stereotypes and cliches. Real history is infinitely complicated. Even (especially) individuals are not one thing or another.
    - baybal2 5y ago
      > we know a little about a topic, it tends to be clean, black and white stereotypes and cliches. Real history is infinitely complicated. The history is simple, in this case. There were bad people, and there are bad people trying to muddy the boundary of a very clear cut difference of who was bad, and who was good. One go kills random innocent people — he is bad.
  - AriaMinaei 5y ago
    > The myth of "unwilling collaborators," and "forced to work for Germans under a gunpoint" was invented after the war by political forces who got in bed with 3rd reich, and then wanted to save their skin from pitchforks when they lost. Not to mention Ordinary Men [0], the dynamic that makes your average citizens with no ideological indoctrination become the murderers of tens of thousands of Jews, to the point they'd shoot at small children with a clear conscience. They'd even have the option not to directly take part in the murders, but still do. Again, these were average, ordinary people. No strong party affiliation, SS membership or anything. The fact that Christopher Browning's book was a revelation when it came out shows how little we've learned from WWII. We might have put the lid on undisguised antisemitism, but we have merely channeled its otherising roots elsewhere. Otherwise, we wouldn't find it so easy to turn a blind eye to the settler colonialism happening right now in Palestine. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Ordinary-Men-Reserve-Battalion-Solution-dp-0062303023/dp/0062303023/ref=dp_ob_title_bk https://www.amazon.com/Ordinary-Men-Reserve-Battalion-Soluti...

gambiting 5y ago

Interesting, my grandfather was also on the train to Auschwitz and also survived - he was in an orphanage in Katowice, after his parents were taken to camps in Germany, but a few months later Nazis decided to clear out the orphanage as well - he was taken along with all the other kids and put in a train carriage destined to Auschwitz, but a nurse who worked at the orphanage managed to sneak into the trainyard and grabbed the first kid that she had a chance to - my grandfather. As far as we know he was the only kid to survive from that orphanage, thanks to the actions of that nurse. He was then placed with the family of Kazimierz Gołba, a Polish poet(who was himself hiding first from Nazis then from the secret police after the war) - and lived with them using a fake name for a while, only going to back to his original name and surname some years after the war. Him and my grandma spent years and years of their lives trying to find any trace of what happend to his parents or any of his other family, but without any luck. Unfortunately, he passed away last year, almost certainly due to covid(I say almost certainly - he passed away due to respiratory problems, and grandma got diagnosed with covid a day later, he was never tested). Him and grandma and myself and the rest of our family have always lived literally 10 minutes away from the former Auschwitz camp as well - in a little town nearby.

dalbasal 5y ago
Bless his memory too, and those who saved him. Heroism and tragedy of that era is beyond my comprehension. My Grandmother (wife of the man I spoke about) was from your area, Wadowice. She was 16 on the eve of invasion, and her family survived by fleeing east.. gambling on Stalin over Hitler. Her father almost turned them back, having fought Russians in WW1. They were refugees for 7 years, most of the time in central asia. They returned for a while, but a couple of murders over property disputes convinced most survivors (very few survived from Wadowice) to leave. I have some family members who married out and converted. We're not in touch, unfortunately. The live in Krakov, last I heard. She always maintained ties to her old community, even their most famous member. This is her elbowing past a Prime Minister to say hi and try to get him to do some renovation on an old synagogue. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EcC8xKgplBhF3BthO82AbazxkeMaSg2-/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EcC8xKgplBhF3BthO82AbazxkeM... We might be related.

himinlomax 5y ago

I once met a Polish Jew who had barely escaped being deported to Auschwitz. He had been in the Polish army, escaped to France through Switzerland (a whole movie could be made about that) with his father to fight here, didn't go too well either. They got arrested by the Vichy police. The policemen guarding them told them, "you know, we're not looking wink wink" His father was too sick to run away, he had to leave him behind. He was deported and died in Auschwitz. He managed to join the maquis. He was a distant relative of a friend who told me, "he never told that story, I think he may be dying." And he did, a few weeks later, I learned.

madaxe_again 5y ago

My great uncle died at Bergen-Belsen - he was a doctor in Vienna, and he had been harbouring a Jewish family. His young sister - my grandmother - sold him out for a promotion in the hitlerjugend. From what I gather, he managed to get quite a few people out of there on medical grounds - but not himself. She never spoke of him. I only found out from the posthumous memoir of her surviving brother, who was a conscientious objector who got sent to Stalingrad. Not an easy read, but one that made me acutely aware of just how quickly things can go incredibly bad.

gattilorenz 5y ago
I think this is the first time I hear of somebody bringing up the negative past of their family so directly. If I may ask, how did this influence you and/or your relationship with your grandmother?
- madaxe_again 5y ago
  It didn’t, as I didn’t know about her other brothers while she was alive. I always thought it was just Siegfried and Sigrid, but they had pretty much a whole Ring Cycle of siblings. I think I would have forgiven her, however - I have, now, at any rate. She was born in 1928 - she grew up in Vienna, immersed in an increasingly fascist culture, and joined the Hitler youth because it was simply what everyone did. In the last days of the war, she, in terror for her life, married a German officer who promised to get her out of Vienna before the Russians arrived - which he did, dumping her, pregnant with his child, in Kano Nigeria. At the same time, many of her cousins were also fleeing Europe to escape war crime prosecution, and many remained in subsaharan Africa. She met my grandfather there, a British war and famine profiteer, through a lonely hearts advert. They had many miserable years together. All in all, I feared her as a younger child, pitied her as a young man - she was a cruel and angry woman, who was scornful to me as a child, and bitter to her (fourth) husband. Her brother, Sigrid, who by the time I was around lived with her, his wife long dead, always looked out for her, told us to be kind, that we didn’t and couldn’t understand why she was as she was. And then his death, her death, his memoir, and I understood. I wish now that I had known while she was alive, but then, I was a younger man, and I may not have understood. Now, I see her as a victim as much as any of them - her entire life was a pyre of guilt and shame and self-loathing, always running, and never escaping her past, her actions. As to me, I learned several things I felt were of critical importance: - That cruel people are usually the product of cruelty - that they are cruel because they are ashamed, and wish to hate themselves. - That righteous people, working with what they know to be right and good can carry out acts of atrocious evil. - That you should be aware that your actions, if sufficiently bad, will haunt you til the end of your days.