I am Sidney Sevek Finkel, and I am a Holocaust Survivor. My story began when the Germans invaded Poland in 1939. Our home town was Piotrków Trybunalski, where my father had a timber yard and worked as a timber merchant. My father’s name was Lieb and my mother’s name was Faiga. I was the youngest of five children, two boys: Isaac and myself, and three girls: Rayna, Lola, and Fanya. Life was pretty good for us. However, by the end of the war, only one brother and I had survived as far as I knew. I would later find out that my sister Lola survived as well.

      Almost immediately after the Germans invaded Poland, we had to leave our home and move into an area called the ghetto, where we lived for almost two-and-a-half years. Conditions in the ghetto were pretty bad, with food and housing shortages, but living there was the best part of my journey because even though we were in the ghetto, we could live together as a family. We observed the Jewish holidays and traditions even as our lives got worse and worse.

      In October 1942, the Germans decided to eliminate all the Jews. They brought trains to the ghetto to deport us. Ninety percent of the Jewish people in the ghetto were put on these trains, including my mother and my sister Fanya, and were taken to Treblinka. All of them were gassed once they arrived.

      My sister Rayna was like another mother to me. She was married and she was pregnant. It was against the law to be pregnant in the ghetto, so a nice group of Polish people came together to try to help her. They snuck her out of the ghetto and put her into a Polish Catholic hospital under an assumed name where she could give birth. Unfortunately, someone at the hospital went to the German Security Police and told them there was a Jew there pretending to be Polish. The police came to the hospital just after Rayna gave birth. The Germans took the infant and threw him out of the window. They took my sister to a cemetery where she was shot. This was in 1941 or 1942.

      It was an absolute miracle that I was able to stay behind. I did so only because my father and brother hid me in the factory where they worked. They escaped the deportation as well. Afterwards, the ghetto we lived in was almost completely empty. They had taken away all of my friends and relatives. Everyone was gone; all of them killed with gas in the extermination camp at Treblinka.

      Soon after this, they took us to be used as slave laborers in a wood-working factory at Bugaj, outside of Piotrkow. We were there for about a year-and-a-half and we were just slave laborers. The war was coming to an end. Germany was losing the war and the German army was retreating through Poland. We were very hopeful that we would be left and liberated in Poland and could begin our life over again. But the Nazis had a different idea. Even though there were only 2,000 Jews left after the big deportation, they took us and marched us to a railroad station where there were trains waiting for us. This was my first sight of a freight car and I didn’t want to go in there. I was frightened, but I was pushed in. It was November, so it was really cold and crowded inside. It smelled awful as it was just jam-packed with people. Sometime during the night, the train took off. It was a journey of about three days to get to Germany.

      We finally got to a German concentration camp called Buchenwald. They put us through an inspection house, where they made us undress. They shaved off all of my hair from my head and my body. They took us to the showers and we were scared because we heard that they had used a pretext of a shower to gas people. To our amazement, water came down. Clean, warm water came down. It felt fabulous to be clean because I was covered completely with louse. From one end to the other, lice were crawling in my hair, in my clothes. I was finally clean and it felt really wonderful.

      We were put into barracks. It was a little camp in Buchenwald. The conditions there were really terrible. There was no running water, the toilets were outside, of course, and it was just so filthy you couldn’t imagine. It was totally, absolutely disgusting. People got diseases and died. There were bodies piled up outside; they would stack them like lumber.

      There was also an organization in Buchenwald that made it their business to care for children. They took me and the other kids into a special barrack made for children. The conditions there were much better. We sang songs and we were hopeful that we would survive. We also worked. I worked on a machine chopping wood to make plywood.

      We were in this Buchenwald camp for six months. The war was coming to an end in 1945 and we could hear the American guns firing. We knew we were going to be liberated any day, but the Nazis decided they were going to evacuate the camp. Nobody wanted to be evacuated so we hid in the barracks. When we got tired of hiding, my friend Henry and I just marched out. The gate of Buchenwald opened up and we marched to the outside. We went on what they called a “death march.” It was not that far, only ten miles to Weimer. Many people couldn’t make the ten miles, they were just in such terrible physical condition, especially the Hungarian Jews who had just come into the war. Us Polish Jews were all veterans. A lot of people got shot on the way. I remember a father and a son, and the father couldn’t walk anymore so the son was begging his father not to leave the column. The father couldn’t keep up so he just pulled himself away and fell into the ditch on the side of the road. The guard was right there with a rifle and shot him. We carried on.

      We went on a trip that lasted three weeks on a train. We left on the train one day before the Americans liberated Buchenwald. It was a trip to nowhere because they didn’t know where to take us. Their army was being overrun by the American and Russian armies. The train would go one direction and then would change. We didn’t get any food. I tried to eat grass, but it just wouldn’t stay down, I kept throwing it up. I was determined to have something in my stomach before I died and I made myself eat the grass.

      We saw some horrible things, but we were together as a group. The youngsters were together and helped each other. I would like to emphasize that you couldn’t survive on your own. You had to have friends and people that wanted to help you. The kids were together and they helped each other. Of the approximately 3,000 people on the train, about 1,500 died. We finally ended up at Tersenstadt Concentration Camp, in Czech Republic. We arrived there on the day that the place was liberated by the Russians. The Nazis went back and the Red Cross took over. We were free. The wonderful day that we had been waiting for, for six years, had finally arrived.

      I got typhus because I was covered with lice. The lice carried disease. I laid on a cot with a very high fever, and I thought I was going to die. I thought I heard my father and my mother come towards me, and they told me that I had to survive the war. I finally opened my eyes, and my fever dropped. I was going to be okay. They took me into a special place where they gave me food very slowly. I rebuilt my physical strength.

      One day I heard someone shouting my name on the street. I ran to the window and saw my big brother. He was walking the streets and calling out my name because he heard that there were a bunch of kids that came from Buchenwald. I was reunited with my brother and it was so nice because now I didn’t have to make any decisions; he made all the decisions for me. Shortly after my brother found me, we found out that my sister Lola had survived and we found out where she was through a news organization that took survivors names around camps.

      We were lucky enough to be able to go to England in a transport with about one thousand other kids. My brother was older so he came with us as a counselor. We were like one big, extended family. I went to a very fine boarding school. Not only did I not know any English, but I didn’t know the alphabet, how to count, or how to tell the time on the clock. This school was absolutely fantastic and so were the teachers. I was slowly able to understand, speak and read English. I was in love with reading.

            My uncle lived in Chicago and he sent for me in 1951. That year, I came to the United States. I became a successful salesman and manager at an appliance store. I got married and had an extended family of five children. I was married to my wife Jean for almost fifty years. Unfortunately, she died in April of 2014. I moved to Tucson to reconnect with my sister Lola and to help her take care of her son. Lola struggled after the war and became extremely paranoid and untrusting of everyone.[1]

[1] You can read Sidney Finkel’s full story in his book, Sevek and the Holocaust: The Boy Who Refused to Die.