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[Page 99]

After existing for hundreds of years, the Jewish community of Gombin was destroyed by the German Nazis. As everywhere else in Poland and Europe, the murderers were methodical in the consummation of their crime: anti-Jewish decrees, spreading of terror, vicious beatings, people forced to work as slaves, plundered, individually murdered, until they were finally confined in a ghetto as a prelude for their deportation to death camps and total annihilation.

Very few survived. Only individual crumbs of entire Gombin families were spared the destruction. This section of the memorial book includes the testimonies of Jews from Gombin who outlasted the catastrophe.

The memories of Ben Guyer, Jack Frenkel, Abraham Zeideman, and the Greenbaum brother and sister exemplify the ways in which some Jews managed to stay alive in dreadful conditions.

Ben Guyer and the Frenkel brothers were dragged by the Nazis to forced labor camps and eventually to Auschwitz. Very few outlived that death factory. Four million people were killed, most of them Jews.

Abraham Zeideman illustrates another path to survival, followed by thousands of Jews from Nazi-occupied Poland who escaped to the Soviet Union, where they endured appalling conditions and investigations.

The Greenbaum brother and sister tell the dramatic story of how they survived in the so-called “Aryan side”. Albert Greenbaum was hidden by a farmer. His sister Rose succeeded in “passing” as an Aryan woman. They separately describe the emotional moment in which they were finally able to get together again.

Concentration camps, “Aryan side”, Soviet exile… That was how a small remnant of the Polish Jews got through the Holocaust. But the descriptive accounts of Guyer, Frenkel, Zeideman, and the Greenbaums have another value. In addition to illustrating the cases of Jewish survival, they give us some details about the war days in Gombin and the terrible fate of the town's Jews in the hands of the Nazis.

[Pages 100-101]

All the roads led to death, all the roads. All the winds breathed betrayal, all the winds. At all the doorways angry dogs barked, at all the doorways. All the waters laughed at us, all the waters. All the nights fed on our dread, all the nights. And the heavens were bare and empty, all the heavens. God hid his face.

Dedicated to the 3030 martyrs from my town Gombin who were murdered in the gas chambers at Chelmno, Poland, April 1942.   A. I want to walk here once more on the grass and weep to the sky and to the wind that howls in my face. I want once again to measure the calamity that befell this piece of ground where once was my home. The door is gone and my mother--- she will not come home any more covered with snow, with a blue pitcher of milk in her hand-- and with the blue light of dawn in her eyes. The windows are gone, the sun will no longer wander from wall to wall, from corner to corner, and conjure up for me a green cat on a chair. Only the willows at the river are here-- my tear falls into the waters and for a while disturbs their calm. B. Yellow leaves fall, fall. A tale wanders around on the roads, a tale about people herded together on a field-- a spring rain was falling. Three thousand Jews without water, without bread, four long spring days. Little children were crying under the stars-- they wanted to eat. The surrounding forest did not grow darker from the children's crying. Here they are, the green forests, the forests of Gombin. The deep blue sky did not send fire down from the heights. Cows are grazing in the fields, a shepherd roasts potatoes in the smoke... For what am I still searching in the village? I encounter the pock-marked Stasha she lives, she strolls around with soldiers, she is drunk and unwashed. C. Who calls me here in the meadow? Who still knows my name? A thorn bush burns in the field-- a child cries from the flames. I take off my shoes and approach the little son of my neighbor; his little hands are charcoal, but his eyes are open still. I am leaving you, shtetl, your roads are blue as before. You will celebrate autumns and fairs, and the river will flow on through the valley.

[Page 102]

Many youngsters were active in revolutionary organizations, organizing strikes and demonstrations. Some of them spent time in the prison of the nearby city Plock and a few were sent to Bereza Kartuska, which was the main Polish detention camp for political opponents during the 1930s.

Gombin was mentioned in the Yiddish literature. In his stories, Shalom Ash described the beautiful surrounding landscape and the typical characters of the shtetl. Itzhak Leibush Peretz wrote about the “kaneh” that was still chained to a wall in the entrance hall of the synagogue (a traditional punishment device that was clamped around the neck of sinners).

The synagogue of Gombin was one of the grandest wooden synagogues in Poland. It had been built in the 18th century and was considered a national Polish architectural landmark. Visitors from Poland and abroad would come to the town to admire the engravings of its eastern wall and the building's striking beauty.

The Nazis destroyed the Jewish life in Gombin. Immediately upon the occupation, all the Jews were assembled in the new market square. The Germans beat the rabbi of the community and, while the Jews were being abused and forced to perform humiliating “gymnastic” exercises in the square, they set on fire the synagogue and the Beit Midrash. When the fire extended to the nearby buuidings, the Germans pushed the Jews towards the fire, forcing them to remove doors, windows and other property from the burning houses with their bare hands. All this while the amused Nazis were taking photographs of the horrible scenes.

Nazis humiliating the Gombin Jews

Out of those 600 Jews, only 18 would survive the camps.

The Nazis ordered the Jews to remove all the tombstones from the Jewish cemetery, forcing them to dig out corpses and take the remains to the nearby Christian cemetery.

In retaliation to the killing of a German, the Nazis staged a public execution of ten local Poles. They executed another ten Poles in the nearby town of Gostynin.

Some Jews from Zychlin and Gostynin escaped to Gombin. They informed about the crimes of the Germans. They also reported that near the city of Kolo, in Chelmno, the Jews were being gassed to death and burned. When people began to talk about running away and hide in the woods, the head of the Judenrat “calmed” them, saying that they should offer more bribes and appease the Germans with valuables and money.

The day of the final tragedy arrived in the summer of 1942. The German murderers assembled all the Jews in the field of the fire brigade They were surrounded by armed ethnic German, Ukrainian and Lithuanian fascists who kept them for three days and nights under the open sky, with a barrel of dirty water and without any food. When the wife of Naftali Spiewak begged for more water, an ethnic German from Gombin, Maas, shot her on the spot (after the war he was sentenced to death by the Polish authorities).

On the fourth day the trucks of the Gestapo arrived. With murderous blows, the doomed Jews were pushed onto the trucks and taken to their deaths at Chelmno extermination camp.

A short time later, the Jews of the nearby small towns of Osmolin and Sanniki were liquidated in the same fashion.

Ben Guyer

My Warsaw Regiment was sent on foot in the direction of Mlawa, near the Prussian border. As soon as we reached our destination, war broke out. From that moment we did not have a moment of respite. The Germans poured fire on us - from their planes, tanks, artillery and armored cars. Armed with primitive weapons, we were unable to withstand the pressure of their fiery onslaught. We began retreating from the start, not stopping even once to take positions and engage in battle. Their fire pursued us by day and by night as we retreated, in terror, towards Jab³onna and Warsaw, where we regrouped behind the so-called “Miedszin Line.”

There we remained until the day that Warsaw, surrounded by the Nazi armies, blazing from the enemy's serial bombardment, without food or water, surrendered. The Polish regiments defending the capital put down their arms and become prisoners of war.

The Germans packed us into trains and sent us in a westerly direction. But when the train arrived in Kutno, I jumped out and headed to Gombin, my home.

I returned to Gombin during the days of Succoth. The weather had turned cold and the town was unrecognizable. Many homes had been destroyed by the Nazi bombardments and the Jewish population was in the grip of German terror. My brother, who before the war had been a cashier at the People's Bank, was now appointed letter carrier by the Jewish community. Thanks to his job, he was one of the few Jewish men in Gombin whom the Germans did not press into a labor gang.

A half-mad local ethnic German, whose name was Shumacher, was put in charge of the bloody game. It was his task to seize the Jews and press them into labor gangs. Aided by several others, he carried out the task in a barbaric fashion. The Jews were grabbed in the streets and put to clean the debris around the market square and other streets. They were rewarded with insults and murderous beatings. In addition, the Jews were forced to serve the Germans who went hunting in the surrounding forests. There, too, the reward consisted of humiliation and blows. Several times I was seized on the streets, put to work, and felt on my body the blows of the whips and sticks of the Nazis..

One day, four weeks after my return to Gombin, the Germans issued an order directing all former soldiers to report to the magistrate. My brother, fearful of the Nazis' dark designs, said that I should not report. Instead, I should go hide in Warsaw. We hired a Pole who agreed to take me to Warsaw in his horse-and-buggy. Arriving in Warsaw, I went to see the Friedman family on 9 Pavia St. They were a family of weavers from Gombin. Their son had served in the Polish army with me.

In Warsaw, the situation of the Jews was the same as in the other cities and towns throughout Poland. There, too, the Jews were seized, forced to work, and subjected to terror, pain and hunger.

I managed, because of my “Christian” appearance, to avoid being seized to work.

My brother, concerned about my fate, eventually came to Warsaw and took me back with him to Gombin. My intention, in those days, was to follow the example of thousands of Jews who went east, to the part of Poland occupied by the Soviets. We made plans to go with a friend of mine from Zychlin, but I was too attached to my brother and family. In the end, I decided to stay with them and face the dangers together.

In the meantime, the Germans had instituted the Jewish badge, a six-point Star of David that all the Jews of Gombin had to wear on their clothes.

I began working as a tailor and lived with my brother's family untill March 1942. I will not go into the details of the Jewish suffering and pain during those long bloody months. Our life was cheap, worthless. We were in the hands of thugs and murderers dressed in SS and Wehrmacht uniforms. Day after day we were systematically robbed, beaten, humiliated and tortured.

At the beginning, we lived in our old dwelling on 2 Garbarska St. The house belonged to the German owner of the brewery Pivo Okocimskie before the war. Driven out of there, we lived for a while in another place until they evicted us again. Finally, we found a room in a house owned by a Pole. There were eight of us in that room: my brother, his wife and child, her brother Hershl Santsky with his wife and child, Hershl's father-in-law Shloime Frankel, and myself.

One day of the Rosh Hashanah holiday, when we were voluntarily replacing the religious Jews at work, I committed a “sin”. The mayor saw me talking with a Polish acquaintance. He fell upon me with whip and stick and beat me murderously, forcing me to count each lash. In the process, he knocked off several of my teeth.

Gombin ghetto, main gate

Gombin belonged to the part of Poland that was directly annexed to the German Reich. Jewish life was a constant hell, but the Poles were also in anguish. A large number of them were driven from Gombin and “tossed” into the territory of the so called Polish General Government. Their homes were turned over to ethnic Germans from the area or “imported” from further east. However, Polish suffering was nothing compared to ours. Besides, the Poles continued to display hostility and hatred toward their Jewish neighbors, regardless of the difficult conditions of both groups.

Women and children in the Gombin ghetto

Around Purim time, the Germans began rounding up Jews in Gombin in order to send them to labor camps. I was among the first to be taken to the firehouse, which was the assembly point. When my brother found out, he came voluntarily with his father-in-law and surrendered to the Germans. Guarding the door of the firehouse, was a local ethnic German, Braun, with whom I had been friendly as a boy. He was now keeping us under surveillance with a cocked revolver.

When the number of Jews who had been rounded up reached about one thousand, a civilian SS man arrived. Armed with a revolver and a club, he did not stop beating us. He made a point of being particularly vicious with those who were well-dressed, whom he called “criminals.” But he singled out “Big Moishe” for the worst beating of all. A giant of a man, Moishe aroused the hatred of the SS like no one else in the crowd. He was beaten so long and so mercilessly that he died. Four people who pleaded illness, were taken behind the firehouse and shot to death.

After a night in the firehouse, the Germans released the older men. The rest of us, surrounded by local ethnic German policemen, were loaded on trucks. That was when I got separated from my brother. I found out later that the Judenrat managed to convince the Germans to release him, on the grounds that he was needed as Gombin's Jewish letter carrier.

The trucks took us to the Konin forced labor camp, where we met with Jews from Sanniki, Gostynin and a few who had managed to escape the Zychlin massacre.

I spent a year in the Konin camp, until the spring of 1943. More than a work camp, it was a real hell. We slept on wooded boards, without straw. The prisoners died like flies from starvation, unbearable work and constant beatings. The camp was located about twenty kilometers from the extermination center at Chelmno. The sick inmates were shipped to Chelmno, and when anyone caught a contagious disease, all the occupants of his barrack were sent with him to Chelmno and death. We were hungry, surrounded by dirt, and forced to work so hard that many collapsed at work. You knew that, if you suffered any injury, your path led to Chelmno. And yet, the number of Jews did not diminish. New victims were brought from the surrounding towns or other camps to replace the dead.

One day, in the middle of the 1942-43 winter, ten Jews were caught near the railroad tracks trying to steal potatoes from one of the cars. All the Jewish inmates were assembled in an open place to witness their execution. But that was not enough for the murderers. The German commander of the camp summoned a Jewish “elder”, Abraham Zeif, who lived in Danzig and had a son-in-law in Gostynin. Zeif was a very refined, educated person, a Talmudist. The commander of the camp had chosen him as his assistant. But now, the commander ordered the Jewish “elder” to select twenty additional Jews to be executed along with the ten. Zeif declined to do it. He stood alongside the ten and declared: “If you are going to kill another twenty, let me be the first of them. You can pick the others yourself.” The unexpected response astonished the commander. In the end, he decided to be “reasonable” and “only” execute the ten “criminals.”

At that time I was in a tailors' work team. Our situation was a little better than among the people who did physical labor.

In the Konin camp there was a young rabbi from Sanniki, Jehoshua Moshe Aaronson, who was another very refined, cultivated person. We saved his life by “making” a cobbler out of him. The rabbi kept a diary which unfortunately was lost.^*

We had secretly formed a self-defense group in the camp. We collected knives and were determined to be ready if the Germans decided to close the camp. If that day arrived, we would defend ourselves and try to prevent our extermination.

Among the people in the camp's administration, there was a German socialist who treated us like humans. He would give us information, always in deep secrecy, about what was going on in the outside world. One day he told us that the Jews of Warsaw had risen against the Germans, had fought with guns, and had killed Nazis in that unequal struggle. The news filled us with courage. We were determined to strike at the German murderers before we died.

And that day did in fact arrive. One morning our contact, before leaving for work, informed us that a deportation was imminent. When later in the day the Germans announced that there would be a “delousing,” we knew that our contact had told us the truth and the end was coming.

At that time, there were about sixty of us left in the camp. All the others had either been sent to be gassed at Chelmno or had died of starvation, diseases, blows, or the gallows. Soon after the Germans announced the “delousing,” two Jewish camp policemen set fire to the bathhouse and hanged themselves. One of them was Feiwish Kamlazh from Gombin, the other Getzel Kleinot from Sanniki. Philip Kranz, the “Juden-Eltster,”, also hanged himself. The already mentioned Abraham Zeif poisoned himself. Two others died of poison: an elderly Gombin Jew by the name of Abraham Najdorf, and Dr. Klappe, a German-Jewish physician who had served as an officer in the German Army in the First World War. My good friend Abraham Aaron Tabacznik from Gostynin committed suicide by letting the flames that were consuming the camp burn him to death.

While all this was taking place in the camp, we were away attending to our various tasks. In the middle of the day, we were suddenly surrounded by German policemen who took us back to the camp. All the buildings were on fire. The ground was strewn with the dead Jews. They assembled the forty-nine survivors in one place and held us there.

We fully expected to be sent to Chelmno on the following morning. But the Germans kept us in the camp for several weeks more. They just left us alone without forcing us to work. One morning, as we came out of the barracks, we were surrounded by SS men who ordered us to leave everything and take along only a slice of bread. They led us towards waiting trucks and forced us to get inside. We were sure that our destination was Chelmno. Inside the truck, we recited kaddish with a rabbi. Several German soldiers sat in the truck, rifles in hand. Knowing that we were going to die, I thought that it would made no difference if I asked one of the soldiers for a cigarette. To my astonishment, he took out a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and gave me one. I took a deep draw and passed it around to the others. Seeing that the soldier was not such a villain, I asked him: “Where are you taking us?” “You are going to a punitive camp - Hohensaltz (Inowroclaw)”, he replied. And so it was.

At Hohensaltz, we understood from the start the meaning of a punitive camp. There were “sinners” of many nationalities - Poles, Russians, Germans, but chiefly it was crowded with the remnants of Pomeranian Jewry who were in transit to the death camps. One of the most notorious features of the camp was the “Black Wall” where people were brought to be shot for the smallest transgression. The camp's inmates were not permitted to walk, only to run.

The day we arrived in the camp, they brought a Jewish couple who had been hiding on the “Aryan” side. The young man's name was David Moskowitz. He had been “superintendent” in another camp and the SS themselves had helped him to obtain false “Aryan” identification papers. But now, two SS men began to hit him with heavy clubs as soon as he arrived. They beat him so long and hard that they got tired and had to be replaced by another pair. And yet, the young man withstood all the blows.

It was around Tisha B'Av and the following morning was chilly. They assembled some of us, including the young “Aryan” couple, for “evacuation.” We were permitted to take along a slice of bread. Once again we thought that our end had come. They flung us inside a freight train. Every car was guarded by SS men armed with machine-guns. The car was so crowded that there was barely any room to stand. We rode that way for several days. I cannot remember the exact number of days we traveled. Then, in the middle of one night, the train was suddenly brought to a halt. The doors were flung open and we heard a loud barking of dogs and wild shouts: “get out!” We emerged from the cars to be confronted by SS men carrying machine-guns and clubs. We had come to Auschwitz.

Everything happened with lightning speed. Driven by the SS men, we passed a man who pointed with his finger towards the right or towards the left. Women, children, elderly people, the infirm, were directed to the left. The men, the young, those capable of work, were motioned to the right. I was directed to the right and chased, with the others, toward waiting trucks. I climbed into a truck with two other men from Gombin, Mechl Behr and Mendel Wruble. We did not know whether they were taking us to work or to our deaths. Wruble, who had a slice of bread, said: “Let's eat it, at least we'll die sated.” After a half hour's ride, the truck stopped. We got off and saw people wearing striped clothes. I mused: Our chevra kadisha...

But it immediately became apparent that we were not fated for a quick death. They took us into a large hall and told us to undress, leaving on only our belts. The place looked like an ordinary bathhouse, with pipes running across the ceiling. We were certain that it was a gas chamber. The door suddenly opened and two SS camp-leaders entered, wearing black uniforms with red stripes across the back of their shoulders. We held our breaths, but they said that we were there “only” for the purpose of washing ourselves.

After the washing, we were taken to inmates who cut all our hair. Not a word passed between us. Our bodies anointed with salve, each one of us received a striped garment and a pair of wooden shoes. All that took a whole night. In the morning we were driven out early to a square where a band played music. Lining up on the square, we gazed at groups of inmates who were being taken to work. After a while our names were called out alphabetically and we had numbers tattooed on our arms. Mine turned out to be 144-212. It was the fall of 1943 and I was the 144 thousandth, 212th “work-capable” person in Auschwitz.

At noon, one of the SS camp-leaders sent two of us to bring our food. We were then broken up into smaller units that were assigned to tents. I was placed in tent 4.

Slowly we began to take stock of our surroundings. The Auschwitz complex consisted of three parts: Birkenau, Buna, and Auschwitz proper. We were in Buna, which did not have gas chambers and crematoria. That, however, did not spare anyone, since the Buna inmates who were marked to die were taken to Birkenau for gassing and cremation.

Those of us who were from Gombin, tried in every possible way to stay together. In tent 4, I was with Mechl Behr, Yankl Altman, Hersh Zeideman, Hershel Blawat and Shmuel Frenkel. Mendel Wrubel had been sent to another camp to work in the coal mines. In Buna, which was a center of factory-building activity, we were assigned the arduous task of loading coal.

In addition to Jews there were inmates of other nationalities: Poles, Dutchmen, French, Italian, Greeks, Germans and Hungarians. The non-Jews were for the most part criminal types that had been brought from maximum-security prisons. There were also political prisoners who had engaged in anti Nazi activities.

There was not much difference in the types of work assigned and performed by those groups. The only difference was that the Jews wore a six-point star of David made of two triangles: one red and one blue. The others wore one triangle: red for the political prisoners and green for the criminals. Another difference was that, every couple of weeks, the Jews underwent a selection. A “doctor” came to have a look at the inmates. Those who were sick or looked too emaciated, were forced to surrender their cards and dispatched to Birkenau for disposal by gas. Later, the Poles and Germans were sent elsewhere.

After working for six weeks on the coal pile, a kapo sent me away to work in a punitive-commando carrying stones. The work was so dreadfully heavy that the inmates dropped like flies. At the end of every workday, there were scores of dead among the rocks. On the rock pile I saw that Hershel Blawat had broken his leg carrying stones. If the Germans discovered it, they would have immediately sent him to Birkenau. We, the Gombiner group, took Blawat to our tent and succeeded in saving him.

I was fortunate that in the end they put me to work as a tailor. Conditions were better and the food rations larger. I convinced my block leader, a Pole called Vitek, to take in Blawat, whose leg was not healing properly. For this favor I sewed clothes for the Pole Vitek.

A year passed. Nearby, the death factory called Auschwitz, worked ceaselessly. Every day trains bearing Jewish victims arrived to the camp. The infirm, the elderly, the women and children were taken directly to the gas chambers. The ovens were active day and night. During the night, when the wind blew in our direction, the thick smoke from the chimneys filled our nostrils with the stench of burnt human flesh.

Elsewhere in the Auschwitz empire, there was a different kind of hell. Tens of thousands of Jewish inmates performed bone-crushing labor while hooligans were mercilessly beating them. The food we received was calculated to reduce us to cadavers within a period of three months. Every couple of weeks there was a selection and the “unfit” were led away to Birkenau and death. Their places were taken by new victims delivered by the incoming freight trains. Those who ruled over us, from the lowliest kapo to the camp's top commandant, were bloody thugs, cruel barbarians who could do with us as they pleased. Whips, clubs, revolvers, rifle butts and gallows were the symbols of their power. They took pleasure in giving their victims the most gruesome and painful death, inflicting as much suffering as possible.

Many months passed in this fashion. The millstones of Auschwitz did not cease to grind. Each one of us was exposed to the peril of death on a daily basis. In the middle of 1944, young Leizer Bocian arrived in Auschwitz. A native of Gombin, he was only a boy when they took him to the Konin labor camp, where I had taken care of him as if he were a younger brother. Now, he had been told that I was in Auschwitz and he sought me out. Our meeting was a moment of happiness for both of us. I could not have him assigned to our block, but I made arrangements to supply him with some extra food. I also did everything I could to prevent his selection for the Birkenau crematoria.

We suffered and endured until we heard the distant rumble of the heavy guns of the Russian armies. Now and then, a shell would fall inside the camp. Then, on the first of January 1945, we heard that the camp was going to be evacuated. We did not know at the time whether it would be better for us to be evacuated or hide somewhere to wait for the Russians' arrival. But the SS men did not give us much time to think about the matter. They herded us with whips, forced us to line up, and ordered us to start marching. It was a time of numbing frosts and lots of snow. Leaving Auschwitz behind, they made us walk in the middle of the road, flanked on both sides by SS men who killed anyone lagging behind. We spent the night in a brick factory and continued at dawn, walking over frozen ground and wading through deep snows. Our march lasted several days. Hundreds fell by the wayside and were left to die in the snow. Finally, we arrived to Gleiwitz concentration camp, whose inmates had been evacuated earlier.

At Gleiwitz, we were divided into two groups. One group was to continue marching on foot. The other group, including me and the other Gombiners, was loaded into open railroad cars. At that point, our Gombiner group included Abraham Mastboim, Leizer Bocian, Shmuel Frenkel, Mechl Behr and myself. We rode on the open cars for two weeks. Scores died from starvation and cold. Each time the train halted, the dead were flung into the last car. During that entire period we did not receive food even once. We ate snow and sucked ice.

As we were passing through Czechoslovakia, some people tossed bread at us, but this happened seldom. We crossed into Austria and stopped briefly in Vienna. Everywhere people gaped at us, living skeletons, with a shudder.

The train stopped at Camp Dora, situated in a forest. A large detachment of Schutzpolizei, German policemen, greeted our arrival with savage blows. Camp Dora had underground workshops for the manufacture of the V1 and V2 rockets. We spent all our time in the underground tunnels. The number of dead was huge, the corpses were piled up in front of the barracks like planks of wood.

On March 15th, we were given bread and a can of conserves. Then, they took us to open railroad cars with tarpaulin covers. Inside, it was so crowded that we had difficulty breathing. Realizing that we were going to choke to death, I got the idea of hanging a woolen blanket in the manner of a hammock, for Bocian and myself. Others followed my example. In addition, we cut little “windows” in the tarpaulin.

On the way, we were subjected to aerial bombardment. When that happened, the SS men who escorted us jumped out of the train to take cover. Two weeks later we arrived in Bergen-Belsen. Again the Gombin group managed to stay together. We moved into the attic of a house that had been occupied by the camp's officers. Our group included the brothers Shmuel and Mendl Laski, Shmuel Frenkel, Abraham Mastboim, Leizer Bocian and myself. At Bergen-Belsen we were not expected to work. By then, it was just a camp where thousands and thousands of inmates slowly expired from starvation and disease.

On April 15th, the advancing British Army reached Bergen Belsen. Breaking down the gates and entering the camp, the allied soldiers were transfixed by what they saw. There were mounds of corpses, and those who were about to die moved among them like shadows. The British immediately ordered the captured SS men to carry away the cadavers to a proper burial site. When the inmates saw that their former masters obeyed the British with displays of meekness and submission, they were seized by an uncontrollable anger. They pounced on the Nazi assassins and beat them to death. The British tried to stop the inmates, but the criminals who had spilled so much Jewish blood did not escape their proper fate.

Later, Germans living in the vicinity of Bergen-Belsen, were brought to the camp to bury the thousands of dead. When no tools were available, they were made to dig the graves with spoons and bare hands, to make them experience, if only for an instant, the meaning of the hell that Nazi Germany had inflicted on human beings. But for the vast majority of inmates, liberation did not translate into feelings of joy or a desire for vengeance. Weak and reduced to disease-ridden skeletons, we wandered aimlessly around the camp, prisoners of our own nightmares.

* Most of Rabbi Aaronson's diary was found and eventually published by his family as part of a book printed in Hebrew: Jehoshua Moshe Aaronson, Alei Merorot (Pages of Bitterness), Bnei Brak, Israel, 1996 Return

One evening, as we sat at home behind locked doors in fear that the Germans would hear our voices, we heard someone on our stairs. Then, there were knocks on the door.

Some Polish youngsters were looking at us. They said that they needed to install a radio in our balcony.

They were there until late at night. When they left, we heard the heavy footsteps of the German gendarmes on the streets.

Early next morning the German commander ordered all Jewish men to gather at the new market square (the pig market), saying that they would be assigned to various jobs.

Soon, lines of Jews began to form as the Germans gave orders. Machine guns were emplaced in front of the Jews. There was a dead silence.

Suddenly we saw fiery flames coming from the synagogue. We heard frightened screams. The Germans had set fire to the synagogue.

Making fun of the Jews, they sent them to save their holy place.

Then those beasts chased the Jews like a flock of sheep, beating them with sticks, clubs and whips.

The shouts and screams reached the heavens.

The Nazis pushed the Jews into the flames telling them to extinguish the fire with their bare hands. They kept prodding them with whips and bayonets.

It did not take long for the holy synagogue, the pride of Gombin, to collapse into a pile of ash. The beautiful building was quickly consumed by the fire and the towers came down.

The wind carried the sparks and flames to the surrounding houses and an entire portion of the Jewish quarter burned with the synagogue.

A few hours later there were just small smoldering fires amidst the black debris. The place where the jewel of Jewish Gombin had stood for hundreds of years was covered with embers and soot.

This was the beginning of the destruction. After the loss of the synagogue came the loss of the people who once prayed there…

My childhood name in Gombin was Yankl Frenkel. I was ten years old when the war broke out in 1939. My brother Chaim was twelve and my brother Shmuel was fifteen. Today, their names in America are Henry and Sam. Our father was a cap maker in Gombin. There were seven children in the family, all boys. Only the three of us survived. This is the story of how we managed to stay alive throughout the war, a period fraught with peril for all Jews, without exception, and children in particular.

I clearly remember the Germans' arrival in Gombin. During the first few days the soldiers drafted some young men for work. After a few days, the Gestapo arrived and everything changed. They chased all the Jews out of their homes and assembled them in the market square under heavy vigilance. Then they poured gasoline on the houses near the synagogue (one of the oldest in Poland, artists came before the war from all over Europe to paint our synagogue), and started the fire. The Jews, surrounded by soldiers, watched as their homes and synagogue burned down, and could not do a thing. By the end of the day they ordered the Jews back to the houses that were still standing.

Soon after that, the Jews were forced to leave their homes and move into a ghetto area from where the Poles had been removed. The Jewish elders assigned rooms to each family according to their needs, as best as they could. Whenever the Germans wanted something they notified the Jewish elders, and there was a Jewish police force that rounded up the young men who were sent to the labor camps. Every now and then they called for 200-300 men to be sent to the camps. On March 9 1942 the Germans took the first step leading to the total annihilation of the Gombin Jews. On that day the Germans rounded up all the adult Jews capable of work, concentrated them in the firemen's building, and sent them away to labor camps. The rest of the Jews were slated for deportation and extermination.

Two weeks earlier an unexpected guest had arrived at the Frenkel home, a cousin of our mother, a Jew from Gostynin. He had escaped from the Nazi camp Anze, and now he was telling us things that filled us with horror and disbelief. In attendance were my parents, six brothers and myself. Vy the light of a flickering candle our cousin told us that he had witnessed with his own eyes the mass burning of Jews. When our youngest brother Michael heard it, he ran over to our mother and asked whether they would burn us too. We all started to cry. There had been rumors of mass murders before, but the Jews of Gombin refused to believe the horrible stories. Now, a live witness confirmed the unbelievable, but the Jewish elders told our cousin to stop spreading rumors and leave town.

From that day on, it was clear that the Jews of Gombin would share the bitter fate of the rest of Poland's Jewry. Thus, on March 9 1942, when the armed Germans surrounded the ghetto and began rounding up men and youngsters for work, the Jews of Gombin knew that death awaited them. The first act of the drama was now being played out. Soon, the second act would lead to the destruction of another small-town Jewish community in Poland.

By then, I was twelve years old. Since I was always out trying to bring customers for my father, I was among the first to notice that something was going on. I saw local ethnic Germans armed and a truck with soldiers at the ghetto entrance, and then I saw another truck on a side street. I ran home with the bad news, which soon spread to the whole neighborhood. In no time at all, the Germans raided one Jewish home after another, seizing all the males between the ages of eighteen and forty five. My oldest brother Beniek, determined not to be taken, hid in the attic. The Germans took my father and my brother Chaim who at fourteen was the third oldest, but looked more mature. I was twelve, but I followed the men as they were assembled in the street. A Jewish policeman pulled me out and tried to send me home, but I ran into a different line, and they led us away to the hall of the firemen's building, which was very large. A German in civilian clothes, a stranger in town who most likely had come to Gombin for the occasion, shouted that we should all sit motionless on the floor folding our hands. He then went around among the rows beating people murderously on the heads with a heavy club. He noticed a Jew who was one of the strongest men in town, and he told him to stand up. He asked him who he was and, when he received the response “A Jew”, he hit him on the head and face. Next he ordered a man called Moishe to stand up against the wall. Moishe was a wood chopper, another strong man. When asked, Moishe gave the same answer, “A Jew”, and the man kept hitting and hitting him regardless of what Moishe was trying to say. We could all see the blood pouring on Moishe's face, until they took him into another room and we heard a shot. We all knew right then and there what had happened. Next they took a young man named Eighel and also shot him. Later, the civilian was replaced by a local ethnic German named Braun, who warned the Jews that they would be shot for the slightest movement. He did not wait long to fulfill his threat. Hershl Kerber, an elderly man, could not stay still. When he stirred a little, Braun pulled his revolver and shot him on the spot.

A friend of mine, Hershl Schwartz, was sent home because of his age. I walked over to the policeman Braun, who knew us personally because he was a customer of my father and I used to deliver his caps. I asked him if I could also go home, he said “No, you are better off here”.

At dawn the trucks arrived with armed German guards. Earlier, the ethnic Germans from Gombin had removed several Jews from the hall saying that their services would be needed in the town. My father, considered “useful” as a cap maker, was one of those who were sent home. My brothers and I were ordered into the trucks with all the others.

Thus began our ordeal. My brother Shmuel was 17 years old. Chaim and I were still virtually children: I was twelve and Chaim fourteen. We were not just sentenced to death as Jews; we were also vulnerable as children, a fact that from then on we would try desperately to conceal by standing on the tips of our toes, performing work meant for adults, and generally trying to behave ourselves as grownups. Jewish children served no useful purpose for the German murderers: they were shot or gassed or clubbed to death with the butt of a rifle.

The five hundred Gombiner Jews seized in the raid were taken to Gostynin, put on freight trains filled with Jews from other communities, and transported to the forced labor camp in Konin. We were assigned to a barrack with triple metal bunks, one on top of the other. It was already evening and they gave us a portion of bread for the next day. Chaim and I ate one portion and saved the other for the following day. That evening we saw our father's partner, who promised that he would look after us. In the morning when they woke us up for work, we discovered that the bread was gone. Our brother Shmuel was in a different barrack. When we told him about the stolen bread he talked with the camp's elder and they transferred us to Shmuel's barrack. Later on, we found out that our bread had been stolen by my father's partner.

Shmuel Frenkel

About two hundred Jews from Konin Camp were taken by train to the Guttenbrunn camp in the Poznan region. My two brothers and I were among them. We had taken a vow that we would be one for all and all for one. Wherever possible the three of us would stay together and share the last morsel of food.

Arriving in camp, we were treated to a spectacle prepared by the Nazis for the new “residents”. In the middle of an open area they had built four gallows. Four Jewish boys aged ten or eleven were standing by them. The Nazis lined us up and said that the four “criminals” had been caught smuggling food, a crime for which they were about to pay with their lives. The noose was placed around the little neck of each child and German “justice” was carried out: four helpless Jewish children swinging in the gallows. That was the picture that greeted us when we arrived to the hell known as Guttenbrunn.

Once a day we were fed a watery substance called soup. The work consisted of loading heavy sacks of cement on freight cars. After the cars had been loaded, we were ordered to unload them, then load them again and again. Scores of prisoners fell dead while performing the work. Some died as they rose in the morning, others died in their sleep from starvation. From Guttenbrunn we were sent with other people to the Stadium camp in the Poznan area. Most of the inmates in that camp were Jews from Lodz and Ozorkov. Stadium was another camp where Jews perished from blows, hunger and inhuman labor. At that point, we were well aware that while we were being tortured and starved in the slave labor camps, our father, mother, four brothers and the rest of the Jews of Gombin had been sent to Chelmno, which was the first camp where the Germans applied “scientific” methods for exterminating the Jews — gas chambers. But we stayed together and miraculously survived.

A number of Jews from the Stadium Camp, including the three of us, were assigned to a work detail that was fairly good. They took us to the village of Zbaszyn to perform irrigation work. We slept under Nazi vigilance, but the work in the field was bearable. Most important of all, we were given enough to eat.

Unfortunately that paradise did not last very long. One day in September or October 1943, we were deported to Auschwitz. By then, I was thirteen years old, Chaim was fifteen and Shmuel “fully grown” at eighteen.

In Auschwitz, there were selections when the train transports arrived. Women, children, and the elderly were sent to the ovens. Only strong young men were spared. Since we were coming from a work camp, we did not go through selection. They put us on trucks and sent us directly to the slave workers' section. In the morning they assembled all the new arrivals. A kapo with a striped uniform, accompanied by a SS guard, yelled that all the children and elderly had to assemble on the left, and the rest on the right. Chaim and I were told to go to the left with other children. As we were standing, I talked with an inmate who was sweeping the pavement. He pointed to the chimney, saying that tomorrow there would be smoke going up. Chaim and I realized that “left,” where we now stood, meant death. The inmate said that our best chance was getting numbers tattooed on our arms. Our brother Shmuel was already on line to get a number. I said to Chaim: “Let's go to the toilets”. Luckily, they were not watching too closely, so we were able to sneak away and hitch on different lines to get a number. I stood on my toes to look taller. We were then “transformed” into inmates. We got the number tattoos, our hair was shorn and we were given a stripped garment as clothing.

After being in Auschwitz for a couple of weeks they began to assign men for work detail in neighboring camps, like coal mines. Shmuel was picked, but Chaim and I were left behind. At that point we were separated for the first time in our lives, and we would not see Shmuel again until the end of the war.

Chaim and I were in quarantine for a while. Finally they picked us for brick laying, building stables for horses. Every so often they had selections, where Dr. Mengele stood and looked at you. In one of those selections a young boy who was my same age but skinnier was asked how old he was. Next thing you know Dr. Mengele pointed to the left, and that was his death sentence. That boy had been with me in the other camps.

Staying alive as children in Auschwitz was an endless struggle. For a whole year our children's bodies and faces were death sentences worn like signs. During the selections, we tried to stand next to inmates that were short, we rose on tip toes when walking past the Nazi guards, and during work we tried to outdo the others. We had to deceive the enemy, conceal the fact that we were children. To be a child meant the gas chamber.

The road we travelled was long and arduous. It led from Auschwitz to Glayvitz, to Gross-Rosen, to Dachau, and to the Charnitz river where a desperate band of SS men assembled the skeletal remnant of Jewish inmates to execute us before the Russian armies, whose heavy guns rumbled in the distance, arrived on the scene.

We had arrived in Dachau in early January of 1945, coming from Gross-Rrosen. In addition to Jews there were people of various nationalities from all over Europe (Belgians, French, Polish, Germans, Greeks, etc.). Most were assigned to workshops where they made German uniforms. Chaim and I were taught to make button holes.

After being there for a few months, we began to hear bombings in neighboring towns. There were rumors that the war might be over soon. But that did not stop the fulfillment of Hitler's final solution to annihilate the Jews. One day the Jews were ordered to assemble in front of the barracks. We were told that we were being transferred. The trucks came and took us to the train station. They gave us packages from the Red Cross, we thought we were in heaven. The train took us to the Tyrol mountains where we got off and were told to start walking. After a few miles we reached a river. The SS men ordered us to sit down as machine guns were being set up around us. We knew that they were going to shoot us. After a while, however, it got dark. Chaim and I were in a group with four other friends. We put blankets over our heads and waited. But when we saw that nothing was happening, we began to slowly move away from all the others. We decided to hit the road. It was dark and we did not know where we were going, but we kept on walking.

We spent the night in a barn. In the morning a farm women found us. We told her that we were on our way home after being dismissed from the farm where we worked. She invited us to come in and have breakfast. After all the years in the camp, we felt that we had never had a better breakfast. In Dachau we had been given regular clothing, not striped uniforms. But there was an X on the backs of our jackets. When the woman noticed it, she immediately told us to leave.

Back on the road, we saw a check-point and soldiers. We had no alternative but to proceed. Luckily they did not care what we were doing, so we kept marching. There were loads of soldiers running up and down, also lots of civilians driving. In the next village we found another barn. At dusk I went out to try to get some food. A women gave me something to eat. I saw German soldiers changing into civilian clothing. We stayed in the barn for a few days. Nobody bothered us.

One morning a women came to the barn yelling in German: “The Americans are here, the Americans are here”. We immediately ran to the entrance of the village, saw a soldier on a tank, and then more soldiers coming in. There was still a lot of sniping going on. When we told them who we were, the American soldiers told the farmers that they had to feed and house us in their farms, in groups of two or three. For a couple of weeks we thought we were in paradise. Then the Americans went around the village assembling all the concentration camp inmates. They took us to a displaced persons camp where there were people of all nationalities.

The DP camp was in a former German military compound. Like everybody else, Chaim and I were interviewed. They asked us if we wanted to go back to our country, but we told them that we had no desire to go back to Poland. We knew that nobody from our Gombin family had survived, but we were not sure about Shmuel, our oldest brother, who had been sent to the coal mines in Auschwitz. Then we had a meeting with Jewish soldiers from the Palestinian Brigade stationed in Italy. They explained that they could help us go to Palestine. They would take us by truck to Innsbruck, Austria, were we would be able to get on one of the trains of Italian prisoners of war who were going back to Italy. When the train arrived in Verona we had to get off and go to town were we would see army trucks marked with a Mogen David. Sure enough, that was exactly the way it was. The trucks took us to the Jewish Brigade's base, where we stayed for a few days. They gave us clothing and fed us well. Then they sent us to Bologna, and later to camps in Santa Maria and Santa Cesaria, so that we would be closer to the port of Bari.

Brothers Yankl and Chaim Frankl after liberation

I have shared these brief and unadorned notes to account for our survival as three Jewish children from Gombin. Perhaps it is better that the notes are brief and “unadorned.” A more explicit account of the ordeal suffered by Jewish children in the German death camps would make the reading too gruesome an experience.

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