I was born on May 5, 1924, in Będzin, Poland. By the time I was five or six years old we moved to Sosnowiec, which was a bigger city and where our family had a business. I came from a family of shoe manufacturers. They produced shoes in my family for generations before my parents. The whole family was involved in the shoe business, and retail, in one way or another.

      My father, Joel, died in 1935 at the age of 42. He went to Vienna on business where he had a kidney attack. They operated on him, but he developed pneumonia and died. My mother, Sophie, was left with four children. They were my sister Regina, my younger brother Joseph, my older brother Moses, and me. Moses later died in a concentration camp. My mother ran the business the best way she could. The manufacturing business shrank to a great extent, but retailing continued.

      The Germans occupied Poland in 1939. One day my mother sent me to the center of the country, where I was arrested by Germans. I thought they would shoot me. I was only 15 years old and I didn’t care. A couple days later they let me go – I don’t know why. I came back home and was given an identification card with a big “J” for Jew. We also had to wear a yellow star so we could be easily identified.

      We were taken into the ghetto in the Środula district of Sosnowiec.[1] Three families were crowded into a small, cramped room. We worked as slave labor in factories that made children’s furniture for Germans. We were starving there. One time soldiers took my neighbor out of work. In the middle of the entire camp, with everyone called to watch, they hung him.

      I was then sent to the Annaberg German labor camp.^[2] There I did the hardest work of my life. I was a strong kid. They used to take us out into a small forest. They cut down the trees and we had to dig up the roots. We had to do it with the shovel. If we were lucky we might have a two-by-four plank of wood so we could wedge the stump up. That was hard work. At Annaberg, although we were working and we were hungry, we still felt like human beings. Why? Because we had our own clothes and everything was neat. We worked hard there and we kept our clothes as neat as we could.

      After about a year or so they sent us to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. First they stripped us naked. There was a bunch of officers and the infamous Dr. Mengele. With the flip of his fingers he decided who would live or who would die. People he directed to the right side were sent to the gas chamber. Those who he directed to the left side stayed alive. My brothers and I were sent to the left side. My younger brother survived because he was tall; they never thought he was as young as he was. They showered us and spayed us with some kind of chemicals, shaved all our hair, and tattooed us. We lost our names: our names were numbers. They gave us rags. From then on we stopped looking like human beings. We were just bundles of rags.

      My mother and my sister were sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp and we three brothers were sent to the Landsberg-Kaufering concentration camp.^[3] It was near Dachau. This was the worst. It was a death camp. They didn’t gas you and they didn’t shoot you: you just died. Death came from hunger or disease. Out of 3,000 men, within a few months there were only several hundred left. And they kept resupplying the camp with more slaves.

      We were housed in a ditch about 30 or 40 feet long and about three feet deep and three feet across. On top of that ditch there was an A-shaped roof. That was our lodging. We didn’t get much food, just a little piece of bread made with sawdust. They also gave us a cup of so-called coffee. It was not coffee. It was some chemical. It didn’t taste like coffee. It was purple. We were starving, not hungry. We were way beyond hungry. We stopped being human to them, and we stopped feeling like human beings. My oldest brother died in that camp. I had no feelings – I  was just numb. I didn’t care if I lived or I died. It took a long time to start feeling again.

      During the winter it was so cold. We had nothing to cover ourselves with but rags. I was lucky. I worked with cement. The cement bags were made of paper. I used to tear out the inner layer of paper because it was the cleanest. I covered my body as much as I could under my clothes. Why under my clothes? Because if a German guard had seen me, I would have been shot. “You’re stealing government property!”

      At the end of the war (we didn’t know that it was the end of the war) the Germans told us that they were taking us for a walk. They actually marched us. We thought they would kill us all. People were trying to run away, but they were killed. My younger brother, a six-foot-two fellow, was so skinny that every bone in his body was visible. We were marching in the middle of the road and I looked for him next to me but he wasn’t there. I went back in the column and saw him sitting in the road. I said, “Joe, for G-d’s sake, they’re going to shoot you!” He said, “I can’t walk. I can’t walk.” How did he manage? After the column went by, he was able to catch up because he had long legs. Then he sat down again. That’s how he made it.

            I don’t know where they marched us. We stopped overnight in another camp, but I don’t know where it was. We were laying there in the morning and a couple of guys yelled that the guards were gone. An hour or so later two American soldiers came. We were crawling up to kiss their boots. How these guys weren’t scared to see these bundles of rags crawling at them I’ll never know. That’s all we were: bodies covered up in the few rags we had. My body was just barely holding up.

[1] The Germans created at least 1,000 Jewish ghettoes in occupied countries where Jews were forced to live. The largest such ghetto was in Warsaw, Poland.

^[2] The German work camp Annaberg in the original Polish village Góra Świętej Anny (St. Anna’s Mountain) was one of the 16 forced labor camps in the Upper Silesia region.

^[3] Ravensbrück was a German concentration camp exclusively for women. Kaufering concentration camps were a network of subsidiary camps of the Dachau concentration camp.