My family escaped death during the Holocaust. We must hear survivors’ stories.
Our family had lived peacefully in Warsaw for generations when the Nazis brutally invaded Poland in 1939.
In the 1930s, my grandfather, Duvid Gingold, delivered seltzer bottles. My grandmother, Leah, worked in a neighborhood bakery. When my father, Sam, was 7 years old, he played stones against a courtyard wall with his friends and went to services with his father. They worked, prayed, relished family time and kept to themselves, aware of the antisemitism that surrounded them. On Fridays, Sam smiled at the carp swimming in the apartment’s bathtub. The weekly Shabbat dinner would have fresh fish and shards of bakery leftovers. It was that simple and beautiful.
When the Germans bombed Warsaw on Sept. 20, 1939, life was shattered, erased. The Gingolds’ building was shelled, blowing out the facade and guts of the apartments onto the population bolting in the streets. In an instant, my family joined the new refugees who instantly abandoned their lives, scrambling to exit the leveled city. A delay meant death, as Warsaw and its life was razed. However, there was one complication to my family’s effort to flee.
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On the day the Germans bombed the city, my grandmother went into labor with her second child. He was born in collapsing hospital, overwhelmed by injured Polish civilians and soldiers. Leah and Duvid understood that their parents and siblings died during the shelling. Their small family with a newborn was forced into the Warsaw Ghetto.
At its height, 460,000 Jews were imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto with an area of less than 1.3 square miles. Try to imagine it. Those Jews who didn’t die in the bombing were confined to starve and were beaten into slave labor for the Nazi war machine. For a few, escaping through hand-dug tunnels was the only hope.
Despite being hunted by Gestapo, my family escaped and survived
Jews in the ghetto died from starvation, disease or were eventually forced on trains that took them to the Treblinka death camp, where they were all murdered.
Along with 250,000 Warsaw Jews, Romani and an additional 875,000 Jews from Nazi occupied territories were murdered at Treblinka. All of them.
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Unlike the fate of most Jews, my family survived and escaped the Warsaw Ghetto only to be hunted by the Gestapo (the Nazi Party’s secret police) through the woods and across war-torn farmlands of Eastern Europe. Their perilous journey defied Luftwaffe strafing, violent antisemitism and SS death squads that unceremoniously executed Jews. (The SS was an elite organization within the Nazi party that included police units and special forces that carried out mass killings of civilians and oversaw German concentration camps.)
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As a second-generation survivor of the Holocaust, I’m keenly aware of my family’s fortitude and blessed objective to live to the next day. I’m fortunate to be here and I know it. Unfortunately, the world has not learned much about avoiding wars and genocides. Just watch the nightly news or check the newspaper.
As a young adult in the 1980s, I pressed my father and grandmother to detail their survival and share the family lessons of faith and determination that brought them beyond the Holocaust. After three years of interviews, meeting three times a week, they shared the bitter truth of their survival.
When my grandmother looked directly in my eyes and told me, “Hitler took everything away from us,” I felt our family’s legacy passed to me and beyond.
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My father passed in 2018, but my mind still hears him asking simple requests of future generations:
Tell people that as Jews in Warsaw, we were a large part of a vibrant community living with peaceful and religious traditions. Share with them how the Nazis tortured and liquidated our families while taking deliberate and extraordinary actions to spread their hate, massacring those who were merely different. Remind them that the Nazis’ savage extermination of Jews and many others were filmed, documented and witnessed.
The evidence and eye-witness testimonies are overwhelming. Even the perpetrators didn’t deny the scope of the Holocaust, claiming that it wasn’t their fault and that they were just following orders.
Jeffrey N. Gingold
Despite the devastation of the Holocaust, I embrace three truths learned from the survivors I have met:
- Fundamentally, I still believe that there’s more good than evil in people, but we must remember it, preserve it and never take it for granted.
- Every family has a story of survival that should be told and recorded, because somehow you are here.
- Encourage people to live with hope and run to help others.
May your family legacy be strong and meaningful. Before it is too late, start asking and share it.
Jeffrey N. Gingold is the internationally acclaimed and award-winning author of “Tunnel, Smuggle, Collect: A Holocaust Boy.” This column originally appeared in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
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This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: My family escaped death during the Holocaust. We must hear survivors’ stories.