This coming January 27, will mark the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops. As some of you know, my father was deported three times to Auschwitz. The first time, on June 22, 1943, he was on a transport from his hometown of Bedzin with his first wife – the widow of a close friend of his whom he had married after his friend had died – and her daughter. This particular transport was taken on regular train wagons rather than cattle cars, and my father, a superb swimmer, managed to escape by diving out through a window as the train crossed a bridge over the Vistula River. Hit by three German bullets, my father managed to return to the Bedzin Ghetto where he was reunited with his father.
Less than six weeks later, during the liquidation of the Bedzin Ghetto, my father avoided deportation to Auschwitz once more by escaping to the nearby town of Zawiercie. In late August 1943, however, he arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau as part of a transport from Zawiercie. In late December 1943 or early January 1944, he was transferred to a labor camp near Bedzin, Lagisha, from which he escaped shortly thereafter. He was hidden for over six weeks by a Polish friend in Bedzin, but was recaptured by the Germans sometime in April 1944 as he was on his way to get forged identity papers that he hoped would enable him to reach Hungary. Returned to Auschwitz, he was imprisoned for more than six months in the notorious Block 11, the so-called Death Block, where the Germans attempted in vain to get him to rebeal the identity of the firend who had hidden him. In November 1944, he was sent from Auschwitz to Langensalza, a sub-camp of Buchenwald in Thuringia; from there to Dora-Mittelbau; and from there in early April 1945 to Bergen-Belsen where he was liberated by British troops on April 15.
I always knew that my father had been in Block 11 for a few days shortly after his first arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau, but I never knew the circumstances of that episode until early this year when I received the biography of a fellow Auschwitz inmate of my father’s that had been published in Israel. The article below, “The Miracle of Block 11,” by Daniel Kessel, based on a January 2014 New York Jewish Week article of mine, was published in the October/November 2014 issue of Mysterious Ways. I thought it might interest you.
Please feel free to pass it on as you deem appropriate.
Best regards,
Menachem Rosensaft
Editor, God, Faith & Identity from the Ashes: Reflections of Children and Grandchildren of Holocaust Survivors (Jewish Lights Publishing), available December 2014