I Am A Survivor...These Are My Memories -- Chapter One

Cwi Jakubowicz — Sun, 19 Mar 2006 19:59:00 GMT

For many years after the liberation I could not bring myself to talk about the awful things I witnessed and experienced during the war. These were horrible years. Indescribable.

Sometimes when I met survivors, who were in the same place and shared similar experiences, we would speak among ourselves. I always recalled the people who risked their lives to help me and others. I now know that I could not have survived without help from others; sometimes even complete strangers.

Here I Am Shortly After The War In Prague

Sometimes I was reminded by other survivors who were together with me, of the close-to-death beating that I received. I myself could not talk about it because it makes me think of all the people that were there with me and sometimes helped me but did not survive. It is impossible for anyone to imagine such awful things and some people are not interested now in such things.

There are some more reasons why I did not talk about the holocaust for a long long time. I remember shortly after the liberation, in 1945, I went back to my hometown, Grabow, to see if maybe some of my family survived and had made their way back home. Grabow is a very small Polish town and everybody knew each other. When I came back to Grabow, I was greeted by some of my non-Jewish neighbors with a surprised look, and sometimes with remarks such as, "Why did you come back? We thought all the Jews were dead."

Some of those neighbors took over our houses and our lands. One of my neighbors, his name was Binek, had the only liquor store in town. He had taken over my property. When he saw me, he first offered to buy my property and pay for it. But after a couple of days he changed his mind. Other neighbors who took over other Jewish properties in town told him he could take Jewish properties for free, because the few Jews that survived are afraid to stay here. They will disappear soon.

I left Grabow shortly after my encounter with the neighbors because I was afraid to stay. There were only a few Jewish survivors who came back to Grabow and we all stayed together in one house. After the war it seemed to me that most people wanted to forget what happened to their Jewish neighbors. We, the holocaust survivors, used to meet on occasion, some monuments were erected and we kept up the yearly memorials. Then, in 1981, I went to Israel for a gathering of holocaust survivors. I met survivors from all over the world.

Each day we were taken by bus to different places in Israel. One day, as I got off the bus on my return to the hotel, another bus pulled up. Out from that second bus came a gray-haired man and immediately we recognized each other and we hugged. He even remembered my Jewish name. I didn't remember his name but I knew his face. He was called "the flager" (male nurse). He was the "male nurse" in our barrack in camp 'D' which was a working camp in Birkenau. Birkenau was Aushwitz II. When the Germans needed more space for the prisoners and for the gas chambers, they built a camp on the outskirts of Aushwitz in the village of Birkenau (in Polish it was called The Village of Brezinky) and they called it Aushwitz II.

The Flager helped me and others many times. We were both glad to see each other alive. Then he asked me, "Do you remember when I hid you and your friend in two barrels and covered you up so the SS guard could not find you when they came looking for you?"

Of course I remember, I said, I even have nightmares about it. The Flager asked me about my other friend, who to this day I still don't know whether he survived. The two of us were separated sometime after Birkenau on one of the death marches.

The Flager kept on recalling stories of how he risked his life to hide us. As he was telling his stories other survivors gathered around to listen too. I also remembered other occasions that he saved my life. Among the listeners to the stories were people who knew me from other places, but were not in Birkenau with me.

One of the people asked me, "Harry" -- that is my English name, "why didn't you tell me about these things?" My reply was, "I do not talk about the holocaust to anyone who was not there." It is hard for me to explain, when the "Flager" heard me, he said to me "you have to tell it to everybody. The whole world has to know about it and never forget it."

At that moment, I remembered two other people who told me the same thing.

Chaim Shmidt shouted the same words in 1942 just before he was about to be hung. Chaim was cursing the Germans in Yiddish and Polish, and was screaming to us, "Don't forget what is happening here." Those were his last words.

I also remember what my cousin, Abraham, said to me in 1944 just before one of the death selections in Birkenau. "Please try to survive, and don't forget. If you survive, tell all the people outside what is happening here."

At the time I did not know if I could survive one more day. But I did.

All these memories make me feel now that I should heed all my friends -- dead or alive -- and tell the stories to everybody who wants to listen. I know it will still be hard for me to describe such horrible things, but now when I'm asked, I tell the people as much as they are willing to hear.

Holocaust Memories

I Am A Survivor...These Are My Memories -- Chapter One