This article originally appeared in the summer 1992 issue of the Where What When. It is as relevant and poignant as ever.
They live down the block or just around the corner. We meet them in the stores they have built, the shuls they have established, and at the simchas they attend. (They especially love a simcha!) They worked hard all their lives and are great grandparents now. They are the Survivors.
They talk and laugh and shop and read. They seem the same as we. But, how could they be? Each one stifles within his or her heart the pain of unjust cruelty and aching memories of another world with other faces in it. How often have we thought, especially we children of Survivors: ” I could not have gone through that. I would not have survived.” Yet they were perhaps not very different from us in their youth. And they survived and endured.
Seventy years after its occurrence, the Holocaust has become the subject of an almost frantic effort to recall and record its horrors from a personal perspective. New autobiographies, remembrances, and oral histories are being published constantly. Each story is individual, and each is precious. Now, before Tisha B’av, the Where What When has also made a small attempt to tell the story of two local survivors.
Mrs. Hadassah Shapiro
Mrs. Hadassah Shapiro came to Baltimore in 1949 with her husband, author Chaim Shapiro, z”l, and one small son. (Their courtship and marriage is described in Chaim Shapiro’s book Go My Son.) Here they raised a fine family of sons and daughters who are all married now and raising religious families of their own – the true nachas of every Jewish mother. Mrs. Shapiro’s sweet face and laughing eyes disguise the strong character that is revealed in the following story.
WWW: Mrs. Shapiro, what happened to you during the war?
HS: Before the war, I was living in a suburb of Sosnowiec, a big town in Poland. I was the oldest of five children. My parents had a small shoe factory. I was very young when the war broke out. In November 1941, we heard a rumor that the Germans would take girls away to work, so I slept for a few nights at the homes of goyishe friends. The night I came back, they raided our home, and I was sent out with the first transport of 250 girls. I never saw my family again.
I was sent to the town of Oberaltstadt in Sudetenland, which was in Czechoslovakia. I was there for three-and-a-half years, working for Firma Etrich, a factory that cleaned flax and spun it into thread. I worked with the big machines that cleaned the flax. The flax was so dusty that I couldn’t see the clock on the wall. In the beginning, this was a forced labor camp guarded by specially trained SS woman. We worked 12 hours a day, wearing big aprons with a yellow star on the front and the back. We lived in barracks and slept on straw-filled bags with only one thin blanket. We received one small loaf of bread for the whole week. Some girls passed out because of hunger. I used to divide the bread and eat some every day, but my friend couldn’t keep herself from eating it all at once. She asked me to keep her bread and give her some each day, which I did. In the beginning, we were able to write and receive letters. I was very hungry, so I wrote to my parents that “everything is very nice here, just like by Aunt Esther Taanis.” (This is the name of the fast day before Purim.) They understood my code and sent me bread, cake, and other things. Later on, when the parents were sent to Auschwitz, some girls didn’t get mail and became frantic. So the camp head stopped the mail service all together.
After a while, our camp was combined with another girls labor camp, and it became a concentration camp with over 2,000 girls. At that point they took away all our personal belongings, like jewelry and clothing. We each received a metal tag with a number on a string. We had appels, when we had to stand while they counted us again and again to make sure that no one was missing. There was a selectzia. We had to undress right in the factory and be scrutinized by the SS men. Dr. Mengele came and participated. If they didn’t need someone or didn’t like her, they would send her away to Auschwitz. This happened to four sisters that were with us. One of them became crazy. She escaped to town. There, she broke things in the church and climbed on the roof. In the morning, she came back singing. They sent her away. Then the other two sisters went crazy. The fourth sister pleaded with the Germans to send her away, too. She didn’t want to be separated from them. So they did. We also got transports of girls from Auschwitz who were sent to work. They were beautiful girls from Hungary and Romania, with shaved heads and striped uniforms.
Some of the Nazis were very mean. The head of the camp took the girls out in freezing weather and made them do pushups in the snow. If someone lifted her face from the snow, he would kick it. The foreman in the factory was not bad, though. He used to look the other way, so that girls could steal the potatoes that were stored there. My parents had sent me some sauerkraut packed in a metal can with a lid. We put the potatoes in the empty can and left them on the heat. At the end of the day we had baked potatoes. This foreman also asked me to weave a net for the top of his bird cage, which was broken. When I finished, he paid me with an apple.
Near the end of the War, we were very frightened when we heard rumors that the Nazis wanted to send us to Auschwitz, but the director of the factory fought for us because he needed our labor. We suffered through air raids. We had to dig deep trenches. Finally, the Russians liberated us on May 8, 1945. Right after the War, we heard that the Nazis had started to mine the barracks to kill us all, but the Czech partisans noticed and chased them away.
WWW: How were you able to stand everything that happened to you?
HS: A lot of times we went to sleep and begged G-d not to let us wake up anymore. But still, we didn’t give up hope. We encouraged each other. Without hope we couldn’t have survived.
WWW: How did you find out about your parents?
HS: I wrote to a Polish neighbor of ours. She wrote back that no one came back. If they had been alive, I would have heard from them, because they knew where I was.
WWW: What was the hardest part of the War for you?
HS: The hardest part was after I was liberated. While I was in the camps, I missed my parents and baby brother, but I didn’t mind working hard, and I never cried. After the War, I was walking around with the tears flowing. I just couldn’t stop crying, because the others had relatives who came to get them, and I had no one. I became very sick from the shock and also from the extra food, and spent three weeks in the hospital.
WWW: Why did you remain frum?
HS: I was frum before the War, and I wanted to be frum again. I prayed to G-d that I should get a nice boy and he should be religious, too. A lot depends on a husband.
WWW: Did you tell your children about your experiences as they were growing up?
HS: We told them. They used to ask why they had no grandparents, uncles, aunts, etc. That was the hardest thing to explain to them, but when they got older, they understood.
WWW: Thank you Mrs. Shapiro for sharing your fascinating story.
Mr. Jacob Boehm
Anyone who has lived in Baltimore for a while remembers the familiar figure of Mr. Jacob Boehm in his white apron, hacking at the lettuces or working the deli in his store, the famous, Jack’s. The store, which the Boehms started not long after their arrival in Baltimore in 1948, was one of the only kosher groceries for a long time, and became a forerunner of Seven Mile Market. It was Mr. Boehm who first brought chalav Yisrael and other kosher products to Baltimore. Mr. Boehm was also very active in community endeavors, especially the establishment of Yeshivas Kochav Yitzchok which was known then as Shearis Hapleita. Here is his personal and very moving story.
WWW: Mr. Boehm, will you tell us a little about your family and what happened at the very beginning of the War?
JB: I’m originally from the lower part of Czechoslovakia, the Carpathian mountain region. I grew up in Voloska in a family of nine children. My father was a shochet, and he was considered a leader of the region, like a rabbi. People used to ask him shailas. When the Hungarians occupied our town in 1938, I was 16. I had about a year of yeshiva education before the yeshiva was closed down because of the War. The chadarim (elementary yeshivas) were also closed, but each village tried to keep a cheder going secretly. I was a teacher in it for a while. When they found out about it, I had to run away to avoid being beaten. In 1940, my father was put under house arrest. Since I was the oldest boy, I started black marketeering to support the family. I made enough to sustain us, but it was very dangerous. The house was searched almost weekly. Luckily I was never caught.
In 1943, I was drafted into the Hungarian army. After basic training, I was put into a labor camp. I spent 14 months doing hard labor, and then I was taken to concentration camp for the rest of the war. We worked 18- to 20-hour days. It was very hard, but the first year food was still available. I was in a group of 250 Jewish boys. About 25 of us decided we wouldn’t eat treife. For nine months I subsisted on bread and water.
WWW: Weren’t you afraid of getting sick?
JB: We were scared about losing our strength, and also we had to hide what we were doing from the authorities. They considered not eating to be sabotage, because they needed our labor. But I decided to go on as long as I could, and I never got caught.
WWW: What did you do about Shabbos and the holidays?
JB: On Shabbos, whatever I didn’t have to do, like carrying things in my pockets, I didn’t do. On Yom Kippur I was on the train, and we davened and fasted there. Succos we had to work. Pesach I received matzos from my parents, and I shared them with the other boys. We made a seder in the dark and recited whatever we remembered from the Haggadah.
Our first Tisha B’Av was very hard. It fell on a Sunday. Usually we got back to our bunks before nightfall on Shabbos. That Shabbos they kept us until 1 a.m., so we had no food before the fast started. On Sunday, they made us work again until l1 p.m. We didn’t eat until Monday morning.
On Rosh Hashanah, our commander, who was a Catholic, allowed us to daven one hour during lunch break. We even blew shofar. I managed to keep my siddur and tefilin with me during the entire War. In winter time, it was very hard at the workplace, because I had to undress to put them on. It was very cold and I had to be careful not to be seen. When we entered the concentration camp, I thought I would lose my tefilin, because they forced everyone to give up their possessions. But I was lucky again. I arranged with a friend of mine to catch my bundle when I threw it over the fence at a moment when the guards weren’t looking. I still use these tefilin today.
WWW: What happened to your family while you were in the labor camp?
JB: After the War, I found out that when the Nazis took everyone to the ghetto after Pesach, they escaped to a forest and hid. Two of my brothers would sneak into the village at night, and a friend of mine, a goy whom I had helped establish in business, gave them food. After Shavuos they were caught, betrayed by the local goyim. They were taken to Munkatch and from there to Auschwitz. None of them survived. Two weeks later, the Partisans came looking for them, but they were gone.
WWW: How did you end up in concentration camp?
JB: The hardest part of the War for me started in 1944. We were on the front, and we started retreating to the Austrian border. We dug trenches for the military, repaired railroads, all kinds of work. We handed ammunition to the German soldiers, and we lost a lot of boys. There was a period of about six weeks when we were on a mountain. It was very, very cold. They housed us in round cardboard tents with 10 people in each. The snow blew in constantly. We built a fire in the middle and slept with our feet to the fire. Our feet were warm, but we used to wake up with our hair frozen to the ground. Many times we slept outside on branches that we laid on the snow. Many boys froze.
Finally, the Hungarians were finished with us. Then the Germans took over and started marching us to the concentration camp, Mauthausen, in Austria. There was no food, and we literally lived on grass. Even that was hard to find. Once we had to march through a town, and the Nazis alerted the townspeople that we were vicious criminals so that they would stay away from us. When we got to the other end of the town, we camped there, and the local gendarmes asked us who we were. We told them we were just Jews going wherever they took us. They must have been kindly people, because in the middle of the night they brought two wagonloads of bread. They were afraid to awaken all of us and cause a lot of noise and excitement, so they woke up a row at a time and gave each person a half a loaf. They even apologized for not having more to give. That was the first time we ate in three weeks.
I was in Mauthausen and then in another camp in Austria. I was liberated on May 8, 1945. The SS guards had told us that they were planning to burn up the camp and the 12,000 prisoners in it that night. But, the camp commander informed the Americans to come quickly. He was not an SS man, and he probably wanted to save himself. A column of 15 American tanks came in that Friday evening. We left on Shabbos morning. I was in very bad shape from starvation. I had lost most of my sight and memory, but I knew enough to tie my tefilin to my body so I wouldn’t lose them. I walked a short way and then collapsed at the side of the road. My friends thought I was dead. Fortunately, an American truck came along and threw me on the back. They gave me immediate medical attention and I began to recover.
WWW: Mr. Boehm, what sustained you through all the suffering?
JB: Only the religion kept us going. We though Mashiach was coming and that was why we had to suffer. Those who had learned a little refused to be broken spiritually. Even the non-religious Jews did not want to deny their Jewishness. Once some missionaries came into our company and tried to get us to convert. They promised that those who converted would not have to leave Hungary. Out of 250 boys, only seven went forward to convert. All of them were from mixed marriages.
WWW: Did you ever have doubts about religion?
JB: After the war, I returned to my village and found out that my family was gone. Only seven or eight Jews from that village were left. That’s when I started having doubts.
WWW: Did you feel bitter?
JB: I was disappointed, but I was not bitter. I did not turn away from keeping the mitzvos.
WWW: Why do you think so many people did stop keeping the mitzvos?
JB: It went both ways. Some people, when they saw what was happening, gave up right away. Others didn’t keep anything at home and became very religious after the War. I think they figured that if they survived, there must be something there.
WWW: Do you still have doubts?
JB: I don’t say I have doubts, but it is hard to explain some things. For example, in the Haggadah, it says that many people have tried to destroy us, but G-d always saved us from their hands. Of course we believed that G-d saved us; there is no question. But, it is hard to understand.
WWW: To what do you attribute your survival?
JB: It was just a miracle. I also think my parents had something to do with it, where they were. They did not want the entire family to be wiped out.
WWW: Thank you Mr. Boehm, for sharing your experiences and thoughts with our readers. Your story will inspire people in Baltimore and beyond.
