Profile of AvNY

In a previous thread: http://www.coh2.org/topic/32750/the-story-of-my-greatgrandfather/page/2#post_id307405

It was asked how anyone escaped.

Here is one famous story (because they were the first to report on Auschwitz):

http://www.remember.org/witness/wit.res.esc.html
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Escapees from Auschwitz

"On April 7, 1944, two Slovakian Jews, twenty-six-year-old Alfred Weczler and twenty-year-old Rudolf Vrba, escaped from Auschwitz. They provided the first eyewitness account of the concentration and extermination camp to the western world, an account that set off the chain of events that led to the Nuremberg trial.
The Weczler-Vrba Report

"On April 7, 1944, two Slovakian Jews, twenty-six-year-old Alfred Weczler and twenty-year-old Rudolf Vrba, escaped from Auschwitz. They provided the first eyewitness account of the concentration and extermination camp to the western world, an account that set off the chain of events that led to the Nuremberg trial. ...

Escape from Auschwitz was made difficult not only by the physical barriers, but by the negative attitude of the general camp population, which suffered after every escape. If an escapee somehow made his way beyond the two electrified barbed-wire fences and watchtowers, blaring sirens alerted the whole countryside. Dogs were put into pursuit, and SS and military personnel began to comb the fields and woods. With his shorn head and prison uniform, an inmate could expect no help from the local populace, for assisting an escapee meant death.

Weczler and Vrba had, however, learned from the failures of others and been able to secrete civilian clothing, money, and food. On April 7, 1944, they slipped through the cordon at Birkenau, and within a week they were in Bratislava, Slovakia.

When, at first, they told their tale to members of the Jewish community remaining in that city, they were greeted with incredulity.

When Hitler dismantled Czechoslovakia in 1939, he had left the Slovaks nominally in charge of their own internal affairs, dependent on good behavior. The Slovaks had copied most of the German anti-Semitic laws, expropriated Jewish businesses, removed the Jews from government and the professions, and left them with little opportunity to earn a living. By the spring of 1942 most of the eighty thousand Jews were unemployed and compressed into a few blocks in two cities, Sered and Novaky.

In March, Adolf Eichmann, the head of the Gestapo's Jewish Section, offered to take seventeen thousand of the unemployed Jews off the Slovakian government's hands for, ostensibly, work in German arms factories. On April 13, Weczler, packed with threescore other men into a small freight car furnished with a single bucket of water, became part of a transport of 640 men destined for Auschwitz."

There are several 'offshoots' now which could be developed in new threads. But this is about the OP's GreatGrandfather. Please let us to stick to that?

We have have been asked to moderate this sub-forum strictly, since there are some posters who may choose to use it as a political platform, rather than discuss issues of an historical nature. Nor do I want posters who post personal reminiscences, to have their threads spread out beyond that.

For that reason, I am have excised some posts which may be valid in this forum, but not in this thread. I have allowed in some stuff, without which this thread will shrink right down, but kindly to try to exercise a self-discipline in this sub-section of the Forum.

@OP : this is your thread - if you want other posts invised, which you think I have missed, please report them.

In fairness to the concept of historical discussion - The more strictly a thread sticks to its origins the less likely it is that discussions stemming from the post can propagate. This also increases the likelihood of any given post languishing in the dustbin after a bit of time has passed and it gets buried under a page or two of newer and unrelated posts.

Aviation production from the caves in Gusen.
Gusen sub-camp, Mathausen concentration camp, Germany (now Austria)



These look like me-262s

My great uncle was liberated from Gusen on May 5th, '45.

This post inspired me to do more research. I have ordered a copy of my great uncles testimony to the Shoah society. I have also found documents online about his history (a lot about Resistance members and holocaust survivors is now documented) even though when I was a kid he did not speak much about it. Many survivors opened up later because, though painful to recount/relive, they feared the stories being lost and the history being erased.

Upon capture he spent several weeks in the Gestpo HQ in Lyons where he was tortured before being deported to Auchwitz from Drancy. He was recued by Americans in Gusen, Austria at the end of the war.

Gusen (Guzen) had many brewery caves that were converted to production facilities and forced labor was used there. Conditions apparently were pretty appalling.

“As a resident of many camps, I can say that Guzen was the worst. This is not to say that the conditions at the other camps were not dreadful. compared to Guzen, however, one might almost say that those camps were paradises. The proof of this might be that Guzen was one of the least known camps. This was not because it was smaller than the others – it might even have been the largest. It was unknown simply because very few of the tens of thousand of prisoners sent there remained alive to tell the story of its horrors.”

(Rabbi RAV YECHEZKEL HARFENES (when back to Auschwitz) in ” BeKaf HaKela” (Slingshot of Hell),
Targum Press, Southfield Michigan, 1988

Your alpine connection reminds me of the story of my great-uncle, in a sort-of way (since my uncle was a Russian Jew who grew up in France).

The Russian side of my family had settled in France after WWI. There were 10 children, my grandfather wasn't even the oldest but he was 16 years older than my great uncle. They all knew how to ski and sometimes vacationed in the French alps. The family survived the war by hiding "out in the open". They all had blue or grey eyes, a Russianish/Ukrainianish surname, and though their names in the family were Jewish names their official names were Russian.

My Great uncle, being in his 20's and unmarried, joined the Resistance. He used his knowledge of the Alps to smuggle Jewish children into Switzerland. When winter would come they had to switch their operations to the south and smuggle them into Spain. There he fell in love with (and later married) a Basque woman he worked with.

He was caught by the Germans and sent to Auschwitz where he was assigned to forced labor. He escaped twice. He was caught both times and sent back to forced labor. Finally he was freed by the Russians and returned to his family in Paris.

The only member of this family to escape France was my Grandfather. My grandmother's brother in the US was able to prove that he could "sponsor" his relatives here (you could not come in unless you had a sponsor who could take care of you) by buying a whole building in the Bronx. My father, then 4, his sister, 9, and the family walked from Paris to Marseille and managed to get on the last boat out of Vichy France for New York. My grandfather tried for years to get visas for his family to follow him and in '43 finally succeeded, and then learned from US personnel in Spain that his family had disappeared and no one knew of their location. Stories and reports of atrocities were already known and my grandfather assumed his whole family was wiped out. He did not find out any survived until August '45. My father's family was a very very lucky one. Both sides survived nearly unharmed.