Interviewing 100 Year Old Auschwitz Survivor Abram Goldberg

Keeping memory alive

Back in July I was honoured to sit down and record a podcast in Melbourne with 100 year old Auschwitz survivor Abram Goldberg. This was a conversation I will remember for the rest of my life - it is something I will hopefully tell my kids about one day. I highly recommend all listeners and readers obtain a copy of Abram’s memoir ‘‘The Strength of Hope.’’

If you would like to support me in producing more podcasts and videos like this, please consider subscribing to my Substack or Patreon.

Interview With Abram Goldberg

Melbourne, July 9, 2024.

DREW: Firstly, thank you so much Abram, for agreeing to talk about your experiences. You're turning a hundred soon. What’s the date?

ABRAM: The 5th of October.

DREW: Amazing. Well, a lot of people are talking right now about how Biden might need to withdraw because they need someone younger. Have the Democrats been in contact with you?

*Abram laughs*

DREW: It's amazing. It's amazing, one hundred years old. What's it like being one hundred?

ABRAM: Well, I have not yet reached one hundred yet. Three months to go.

DREW: But what’s it like? I mean, it's amazing. You can still speak about your experiences, you’re still fit.

ABRAM: Well, one hundred, it makes a lot of difference. Yeah. Physically it does. But I don't think mentally.

DREW: It's amazing. You're still living independently at the age of ninety nine.

ABRAM: Yeah. I live independently. I have some help. Yeah. And I have good kids.

Before The War: Abram’s Early Life in Poland

DREW: Amazing. So you were born in Łódź, Poland?

ABRAM: Yes, Łódź, Poland. This was the second largest city in Poland. It was the youngest of the big cities in Poland.

DREW: And what was life like growing up in Łódź?

ABRAM: Well, Łódź.

The Jews were never expelled from Poland. There was a huge Jewish population in Łódź. 34% of the population was Jewish. It was a huge industrial town and we had the second largest textile industry in Europe after Manchester.

In some ways Poland was the unluckiest country in Europe. The border between east and west. And we were attacked on all sides. Even the Vikings attacked Poland from the north. So Poland was always the target of attacks.

DREW: Such a long Jewish history in Poland. Were you born into a large family?

ABRAM: In those days it was average. We were four children, I was the youngest. I had three sisters.

DREW: And what was Jewish life like in Łódź growing up?

ABRAM: Oh, well, we were one hundred percent Jewish. We had our culture, we had our Jewish schools. We had our political organizations.

DREW: Yes. And you were involved in the Labour Bund movement?

ABRAM: Oh, well, yeah, of course. You see, when I was only four years old. We would have hot discussions about politics in our home, as young as four. I didn’t understand. But I was interested to hear.

My father was like most of the Jews of Łódź from a religious background. My father was a rebel at the beginning of the 20th century. A rebel.

His father had a little school of religion. My grandfather wanted me to go to it. I didn't want to go, I didn't want to spend from nine to two studying all day. But he persuaded me. And I went, I knew how to do it.

And when I finished school from nine to two, my grandfather would escort me to the door and give me a little bit of money to buy sweets. And he said, don’t tell your grandmother.

And my grandmother would take me by the door to take me home and would do the same thing. That’s how I learned to keep my mouth shut from a very early age.

And at a young age, I played sport with the Bund. I became a junior champion gymnast at the Sport Cup. We had brilliant competition. But then the war came.

I had three sisters. One sister was two years older than me. One was four years older, and my oldest sister was seven years older than I was. I was the youngest.

And we were the sole survivors of our whole extended family.

DREW: Wow. How large was your extended family?

ABRAM: I lost my mother, my aunt, my two aunties with young children and her husband.

My father tried to save them. But there was the Molotov Ribbentrop Pact. Stalin and Hitler, Nazism and Communism.

How ridiculous it was. One of the provisions of the Molotov Ribbentrop Pact was the division of Poland between Germany and Russia. The East was given to the Soviet Union, the West to Nazi Germany.

DREW: I wanted to ask you, growing up as a child in Poland, the center of Jewish life in Europe, did you encounter anti-Semitism?

ABRAM: We fought against anti-semitism, you see? We fought it anyway was possible, even physically. I never took a back step.

I never took a back step. And when we were confronted, we fought back quite strongly. I taught my son that. Never be a bystander. I taught him how to defend himself. We knew how to defend ourselves, because the hooligans would never attack you one on one.

DREW: Wow. So, when you were growing up, you were confronted by hooligans who would try to beat up Jews in Poland?

ABRAM: Yes. But you see, we always fought back. We always fought back. And I could fight.

DREW: Growing up, was something like the Holocaust even conceivable to you as a kid? Could you ever, could you ever imagine that?

ABRAM: Look, the Holocaust happened and it was unprecedented in the history of mankind. That hatred. It didn’t matter where you lived, they hated you because you were Jews.

And I never understood it. Jews contributed to the development of mankind. We are a small percentage, but we’ve made enormous contributions to humanity - in science, medicine, learning. Look at the Jewish scientists, people like Einstein.

Outbreak of War: Nazi Germany Invades Poland

DREW: What was it like on the day you heard Nazi Germany had invaded Poland?

ABRAM: We didn’t hear it. But we knew it was coming. Before Poland, there was Austria, albeit willingly. Then Czechoslovakia and the Sudetenland.

So we knew for certain - everyone knew that Poland was gonna be attacked. And Poland was actually the one country to physically oppose Nazi Germany.

As a youngster, I was sure that the Polish army would be able to withstand Nazi Germany. But how wrong we were.

DREW: So you thought that Poland would be able to resist the Nazi invasion?

ABRAM: Well, yes. We didn’t think that the Nazis would be able to conquer Poland in ten weeks.

Look at the subsequent history, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943. They held out for over four weeks with nothing. They couldn’t conquer them. They fought hard and the Nazis destroyed the whole ghetto. Left it in ruin.

DREW: What was it like when you heard that war had broken out in 1939? Did you hear it on the radio?

ABRAM: No, we didn’t hear it. Radio wasn’t so popular, it wasn’t affordable for everybody. But we all heard the sirens and the first bombs dropping when they attacked Poland at five o’clock in the morning.

They bombed the railways of Łódź. This was the only bombing of the city of Łódź in World War II.

DREW: When the war broke out, how did the Jews of Poland feel, knowing that Hitler and the Nazis were attacking? You knew of the persecution of Jews and the Nuremberg Laws?

ABRAM: Oh well, yeah. We all knew him. We all knew him. I was 15 years old when the war broke out, I had just finished my seventh year of schooling.

And I knew about it and I heard Hitler speaking and ranting. The propaganda.

And we heard the propaganda minister Goebbels. He spoke about the ‘’superior race,’’ the ‘’master race.’’ And he was a cripple. He had a club leg. And he was the propaganda minister.

And we knew that Germany would attack Poland. They wanted the Polish Corridor to connect with Danzig. That was the excuse, we all knew it. As a kid, I felt certain that the Polish Army was strong. But it was ultimately tanks against horses. Because the Polish cannons were still being pulled by horses.

Germany had superior technology. The most amazing thing is that 32 per cent of the German recipients of Nobel Prizes were Jewish!

They persecuted so many Jewish scientists and intellectuals. Look at Einstein, look at the great writers. Nobody could imagine what would happen later.

DREW: How did your family respond when the invasion happened? What was the initial period like before the ghettos were formed?

ABRAM: The war broke out on the 1st of September. On the 8th of September, they entered and occupied the city of Łódź. And Łódź was 34% Jewish. A lot of people moved eastward.

When we were under Nazi occupation, my sister moved to the East with her husband. She married just before the outbreak of the war.

When Nazi Germany invaded Poland, she was still living with us. She married a month before the outbreak of the war. My parents sent a smuggler for my sister and they smuggled her and her husband to the other side, the Soviet zone.

We didn’t go with her. People always ask: Why didn’t you go?

Because people came back from the Soviet side - people came back, especially men who had run and left their families. And it was not the paradise that the people expected.

The communists hated the Bundists. People came back and told my father: don't go there. Don't go to the Soviet area. No, because they are looking for you.

The NKVD, the communists, they were executing Jewish Bundists from Poland. If that were not the policy, we would have taken the risk.

DREW: I’ve read a book by Timothy Snyder, a historian of the Holocaust. He argued that in the first couple months of the joint Nazi-Soviet occupation of Poland, the Soviets were perhaps the most brutal. The way they rounded people up for mass liquidations.

ABRAM: Yes, especially their political opponents. Two leaders of the Jewish Bund in Poland before the war - Henryk Ehrlich and Victor Alter - were arrested by the NKVD and ultimately executed by the Soviets. They were arrested and convicted.

Henryk Ehrlich and Victor Alter. We knew in the ghetto that they had been executed.

Forced Into The Ghetto

ABRAM: And all the restrictions on Jews that were in place in Germany were applied to us immediately in Poland. All the Nuremberg Laws.

So the Bundists fled as much as they could. And the Bundists who couldn’t flee were all arrested. And they were all executed.

DREW: When was your family forced into the ghetto?

ABRAM: This part is a long story which I detail more in the book.

On December 10th, 1939, I was fifteen years old. Where we lived, actually, it was a Jewish area.

We were surrounded at midnight, and we were all given 20 minutes to leave with what we could pack. To go down to the camps.

We were put not far from the center of the city, maybe 10 kilometers - no more. And this was one of the first concentration camps.

We were sent there not because we were Bundists or political opponents but because we were Jews. And 10,000 Jews were held there.

After being held there we were transported to a couple places, far from Łódź. We were transported in cattle trains. From Łódź, we didn’t know where we were going.

DREW: What was it like in the cattle trains?

ABRAM: Well, well, it's beyond imagination. Children, babies, young people, old people. And we didn't know where they were going to take us.

DREW: I've read about the thirst that people endured in the cattle trains.

ABRAM: Yes. And this was in 1939.

ABRAM’s SON: And where did they transport you to?

ABRAM: We didn't know where we were going, but five thousand of us were sent to Krakow and five thousand were sent to Lublin. We were sent to Krakow.

When we managed to get out, we didn't have money. Jews couldn’t get money out of the banks and even if you could it was midnight.

My father knew some of the Bundist leaders in Krakow. My father went and asked for certain names.

They gave us an address, and we we went to the home of an Alexandrovich. He was a doctor and a leader from the Bund. And he was an officer in the Polish Army. And he lived opposite the Wawel Castle.

DREW: Oh, yes, the Wawel Castle. I’ve seen it in Krakow.

ABRAM: You see, he lived directly opposite. And his wife was there with two children, a boy who was eleven and and a daughter who was nine. They took me in.

I lived with this family in Krakow. My two sisters went to other Bundists in Krakow.

And my father and mother went somewhere else.

DREW: So you were immediately separated from your family in Krakow.

ABRAM: We couldn't hide in one place. Five people.

I learned this later, of course. My father had a contact with the Polish Socialist Party Underground. And my parents decided to go back to Łódź. We didn’t know what the future would bring in Krakow. We wanted to do something different.

DREW: So your family worked with the Jewish Underground to get back to Łódź?

ABRAM: In a way. It was hard work and a burden on our friends. The men in these families were not part of the Bund and were not members of the Polish army. So it wasn’t easy.

I didn’t know this at the time but my parents decided to go back. Five people, and Jews without papers, without money. How could you do it?

I wasn’t taken into the confidence of my parents but I learned later that they took me because I was the youngest. They planned to come back for my sisters. We were put on a train in Krakow and we took off our armbands.

DREW: You had to wear armbands as Jews?

ABRAM: Oh, yes. And we went out during the night. I didn’t know what was happening. I was with my mother and father and one sister. My parents sat together and my sister told me to sit somewhere else.

Then, my father told us that we would get off at the next station. So we were ready.

We pretended we were asleep and took off the armbands. And we went out and two Poles were waiting for us. We didn’t even know what signals to look for.

DREW: So they basically smuggled you back into Łódź.

ABRAM: Yes. They took us through the night to a small country town. And we were hidden. There was severe winter snow.

Every night when it would get dark they would put us on a sled, my parents and me. And we would travel through the night from little village to little village.

I didn’t know this but the German patrols didn’t go into those little towns through the nights. So my parents had worked everything out. When daylight broke, we would be hidden in a barn or house. Night after night for over two weeks.

DREW: So it took you two weeks to get from Krakow to Łódź?

ABRAM: Yes.

DREW: Wow, that’s amazing. Smuggled through the countryside, sleeping in barns, that’s amazing.

ABRAM: When we came to Łódź, we knew exactly what to do.

So by this time, the Germans had almost completed work on a ghetto for Jews. We didn’t know that - a ghetto.

We went back to the place where we lived and other people were already living there. They had been forcibly relocated to make way for the new Jewish ghetto and its borders.

DREW: So you went back to your home and someone was living there?

ABRAM: Yes, with our furniture, with everything. Thankfully my father had a connection so we could find somewhere else to live.

DREW: Can I ask you: what was it like when you saw someone living in your home with your furniture?

ABRAM: Well, we understood all these things. What could the poor people do?

We didn’t have five rooms or four rooms. It was a small place, only two rooms, some furniture and some bedding. But my father had a connection. You always needed a connection.

Where the Poles had been forced to move out for the ghetto, we got an empty room. With nothing. But my father went back and got some bedding, you see? Two beds. We found a wardrobe, some utensils, pots and pans. And this became ours.

DREW: Wow. So this was in the Łódź Ghetto?

ABRAM: Yes, this was in the Łódź Ghetto. Poles had lived there but it wasn’t far from the main Jewish cemetery.

DREW: Was everyone living in the ghetto at this point?

ABRAM: No - it wasn’t finished. But the Ghetto was finally closed on the 1st of May 1940.

DREW: Wow. So this is a period of just four, five months then. Between the outbreak of war and being closed into the Ghetto.

ABRAM: Also in Łódź there were a lot of ethnic Germans. A lot of them went over immediately to the Nazi side. They became Nazis overnight. With Nazi armbands, with the Hitler Youth, with everything.

DREW: What was it like when you'd see someone with the swastika in the streets? What was that like?

ABRAM: Well, we hated it, haha. But there was not much we could do. But once, instinctually, my father and I were propelled to act, you see?

We saw maybe four of the Hitler Youth attacking a Jew, a religious Jew. And we couldn't help it. We instinctively jumped in. And we gave them a hiding, you see?

DREW: Wow. So you beat up these Nazis?

ABRAM: Yeah. You know, when we realized what we had done, we went into hiding. We didn’t show our faces for a week. But they didn't look for us. Because the hooligans were ashamed to tell the Nazi higher ups that they were accosted by two Jews. One grown up and one young one beat them up. This is what my father and I thought.

DREW: Amazing. They didn’t want to tell the Nazi higher ups that Jews had beaten them up.

ABRAM: No. Imagine the shame! It's a shame. This is what we thought because they didn’t look for us. Luck!

DREW: Wow. That's amazing. If you had been caught for that I imagine they would have executed you.

ABRAM: We realized in this situation that the Jews were a broken people then. The Jews couldn't buy from non-Jewish shops, we were subject to the Nuremberg Laws of Nazi Germany. They were executing people, hanging people in the ghetto.

DREW: Can I ask you: what does it feel like as a human being to be despised simply because of who you are as a person? To be despised simply because you were born Jewish?

ABRAM: Well, of course we did everything to fight back. You see, we always did fight back physically. But the religious Jews, they thought God would help them. This is how the ghetto started.

We knew God wasn’t helping us. This is why my close family and friends from the Bund fought. The older brother of my close friend, my youth leader in the Bund, he was in the army at the time of the outbreak of war.

DREW: How long did you live in the Łódź Ghetto before they began deporting people to the concentration camps?

ABRAM: Most didn’t know about the concentration camps. The Jewish Council was formed and established. The controversial collaborator Chaim Rumkowski became the head of the ghetto.

There was a bit of smuggling. But this part of Poland was incorporated directly into Germany. We were actually in Germany. The Polish language was forbidden and officers were everywhere. Poles were forced to move and the Polish intelligentsia were arrested and executed.

DREW: What was the relationship like between the Poles and the Jews during the Holocaust and during World War II?

ABRAM: Well, during the Holocaust we were separated from the Poles, the mainstream of Poles. Łódź was annexed by Germany so we were in Germany. The other part of Poland under the Nazi Protectorate still had Polish police and there was a very active Polish Underground.

The Warsaw Ghetto was the biggest ghetto and it was in the Protectorate. They had a lot of smuggling. We struggled to get radios. But in the Łódź Ghetto some people did hide some, but not many. Because it was a death sentence for these people and their families.

We had people who built radios for us. Not many. Only on the receiving end. The whole family would always be murdered if these radios were ever discovered.

DREW: Wow. How present was Nazi violence in the Ghetto?

ABRAM: The guards would amuse themselves. When they were bored, they could shoot at a child, could shoot at a person. A guard would aim and shoot if he saw somebody look out of a window close to the barbed wire. And they had the Gestapo in the Ghetto.

DREW: What were the Gestapo like?

ABRAM: Oh, well, the Gestapo were the Gestapo. They were criminals and they would torture people. They would look for rich people from before the war. All the shops were closed, the bank accounts were looted. So they owned everything.

We had to be on our guard all the time. Especially the Underground. You had to be very careful. You couldn’t make mistakes.

DREW: You were working with the Jewish Underground the whole time?

ABRAM: Yes. We did what we could do. You see, we couldn’t do what they were doing in Warsaw. They were in the Protectorate so there was a lot of smuggling.

We were in Germany and it was very hard to smuggle in Łódź because the ethnic Germans lived side by side with the Poles.

It wasn’t everybody but the majority of ethnic Germans in Poland were immediately in favor of Hitler and the Nazis.

Life in the Camps and a Lone Sympathetic German

DREW: Did you ever encounter a German who was against Hitler?

ABRAM. Well if they were anti-Hitler, they didn’t dare tell me.

DREW: So you never encountered a sympathetic German?

ABRAM. No, never. Actually. Yes. In Auschwitz.

He was a prisoner, a political prisoner.

DREW: A German political prisoner in Auschwitz?

ABRAM: Yes, yes.

DREW: What was he imprisoned for?

ABRAM: Oh, well, he was imprisoned for being part of the socialist movement. Most of the so-called Blockführer’s were brutes. So we didn’t know.

But I was with a friend, and we observed one guy who never touched anybody. And when he gave out soap he stood so that he could make sure everybody got his amount.

So me and my friend realized: he's different from the other brutes.

DREW: Was he a guard, or a Kapo?

ABRAM: No, no, he was a Blockführer. He was in charge of Jewish inmates. We saw that he had hid some people. For example, most blocks were two hundred, three hundred people. He had more than double. Because you could move there.

We were in the so-called ‘‘Gypsy’’ camp at Auschwitz.We saw this all and me and my friend thought: something must be on. So we approached him during the soap distribution. You couldn’t go to him and approach him. But then, I don’t know, after a few days or a week, when we passed him we smiled at him. And he smiled back.

DREW: Wow.

ABRAM: This was unusual. So we knew humanity. So we knew.

And we went to this block. And slowly, slowly we were able to approach him. But you couldn’t talk to him.

A few days after we smiled at him and he smiled back, we smiled and said hello to him. He said hello.

And then another day he said, when everybody goes to bed - bed, haha, if you could call it that - he said, when everybody goes to sleep, come to my quarter. And we came.

And then he told us his story. He told us that he was a social democrat. He was arrested. He showed us his torture scars. Half of his buttock was missing. He said, I will try to help you as much as I can.

DREW: What did they do to him, to harm him in this way?

ABRAM: They tortured him. I don’t know what they tortured him with. With canes. They did a lot of torture.

But this is how we went on, until one day, we saw that we were next to the gas chambers or crematorium. It was camouflaged. We could see the flames there. The smoke coming out. We could see.

There was camouflage with high electrified wire. You couldn’t even put down a finger, you would be electrified. And you couldn’t look through it because the guard would shoot you.

DREW: Wow.

ABRAM: They did everything to finish us off. They said they were going to do a bit of gymnastics with us for our help and our health. Can you imagine?

DREW: So all these sickly inmates were forced to do exercise?

ABRAM: Oh, yes, in all weather conditions. And we did gymnastics in the snow and the mud. We weren’t allowed to have our shoes involved. Anyone with good shoes was taken away. Even wooden clogs. This was horrible.

I had very good shoes just done before the outbreak of the war. And they didn’t take my shoes away. Luck.

DREW: Just luck.

ABRAM: Just luck. It helped me out. And they did throw us a pair of trousers and a jacket with no underwear. This was in freezing conditions.

And sometimes, they said we had to sort this apparel whenever they made selections. They would say you were being sent to work but actually you would just be sent straight to the gas chambers.

Auschwitz to Braunschweig

ABRAM: One day in October, an engineer from a big enterprise in Germany for metal workers came to the camp. And I knew all these tricks. But it was the end of October, you see. So I asked for metal work. I was working at the metal factory in Auschwitz.

I was in two minds. You didn’t have time to think much. Shall I take it? Because like I said, you stepped out of the lines and you were sent to the gas chambers.

But it was October. Freezing. I told my friend, I said, I’m taking my chance. I’m going out. I had worked at the metal factory in the ghetto. My friend was the foreman, I was his deputy. So I took the chance.

I stepped out. He asked me a question. I don’t know if he even knew the answer to the question. “How many turns does a boring machine operate at per minute?’’ he asked. I had worked at a boring machine in the ghetto. So I told him.

I answered the question and he sent me out. I didn’t know where I was going, whether I would be sent straight to the gas chamber. But I took my chance and it was the right step. And here I am.

DREW: Wow. So that’s how you got out of Auschwitz? Before being sent to another concentration camp?

ABRAM: Yes. Well, Auschwitz was a death camp. This was a concentration camp.

I was sent to Braunschweig. They put us on trains, dragged us into the middle of Germany, to Braunschweig. They put us to work in a truck factory, repairing damaged trucks. It was a new camp. And it was bombed. It was near the railway. But the actual camp itself was never bombed.

Every morning, we would have to go out when it was still dark, in the winter. This was already 1945. And when we came to one spot, they changed our clothes. They took us through the winter cold. We had nothing on. Just the shoes. For two days. After two days we received new clothes.

DREW: So prisoners were kept naked in the winter?

ABRAM: This was when we were taken further into Germany on the trains. On the cattle trains.

DREW: So, on the cattle trains, all the prisoners were kept naked?

ABRAM: Yes.

Liquidation of the Łódź Ghetto

DREW: My God. That’s sick. What was it like when you, when you were first transported from Łódź, what was it like when they liquidated the ghetto and they sent people to the concentration camps?

ABRAM: Remember, these weren’t concentration camps - these were death camps.

We were taken to the death camps. We didn’t know everything, but we knew about Auschwitz and Treblinka. We knew these were places of death. But we didn’t know what methods they used.

The Allies were broadcasting. And they mentioned Auschwitz and Treblinka.

DREW: So you heard this over the radio?

ABRAM: Yes, through the illegal radio. But we didn’t tell the people in the ghetto.

What would be the use? What would happen? We didn’t want the people to lose hope.

DREW: So people knew that these were death camps?

ABRAM: We knew them as places of death. Yes. But the methods, we didn’t know. The Allies didn’t broadcast this, but the Allies knew.

DREW: What did you think, what did your family think when, when they went to liquidate the ghetto?

ABRAM: When they went to liquidate the ghetto, I was only with my mother.

DREW: How did you go from the Łódź ghetto to Auschwitz?

ABRAM: People on the way to Auschwitz, they would write something and place the notes through the opening between the planks of wood on the train. And when the train came back empty, those who cleaned the train - they would find it. And we had the broadcasts. Always we knew.

DREW: Did people try to resist getting on the trains? How did it happen?

ABRAM: Look, resistance. With what could we resist? In Warsaw they could smuggle because it was in the Protectorate, not the Reich. There were a lot of smugglers, there were Poles to deliver things, the Polish Underground was very active. So it was completely different to Warsaw.

We always discussed resistance but if you can’t acquire one single gun, we thought: how would it work? How would we fight back? I trained how to use a rifle.

But I trained with a broomstick. We were trained by former soldiers. But you can’t shoot with a broom.

DREW: Of course. I read about your account of the liquidation of the ghetto. The Nazis would even throw children from the upper floors.

ABRAM: This occurred when they liquidated the hospitals of the ghetto. The SS would come with trucks. They would throw the babies down from the second floor onto the trucks. Some of the young SS members took off their uniforms and even used bayonets on their rifles to stab the children.

This took place on the same street as the factory where I worked in the Łódź ghetto. This took place during the 1942 Łódź ghetto ‘‘SS Action.’’

Patients had to be registered in the hospital and if somebody escaped, if they didn’t present themselves, they would take the rest of the family.

DREW: So what did you do when the ‘‘Action’’ took place?

ABRAM: The SS ‘‘Action’’ lasted a whole week. You couldn’t move - everyone had to stay in their place. So you stayed in your home.

We did everything to hide. And I hid with my mother, my father. My two aunties with husbands were in Russia - my father organised to take their six children to a safe place.

And with children from the age of three, five, six - it’s not easy. They’re still children.

It was too late. And I saw it happen, hidden in the bushes with my mother. I didn’t let her see it. I kept her head on my shoulder.

My father couldn’t escape. He was taken with the aunties and the kids. I went to the prison in the ghetto in the evening to look for them. But immediately I knew it was different.

Usually they would stay in the ghetto prison for a day or two. But when my father was taken with my auntie, they were immediately put on the trucks and sent to Chełmno.

DREW: Wow. So you and your mother were sent together? How were you taken during the SS Aktion?

ABRAM: Well, I had to be strong for my mother.

I always said: ‘‘Oh, well, my father will somehow manage to escape.’’

What could I do? This was the liquidation of the ghetto in 1944.

When we were hiding in different places in the attic, we made a ladder. A wooden ladder was not possible because there was no wood. And even if we had wood, it would be too big, too heavy, and there would not be enough room to use it. We would only have a few minutes to pull it up. So we made a ladder out of rope.

And after a month, my mother couldn’t climb up it anymore. The Nazis wouldn’t come to the ghetto in the night time. They were still afraid. So we still had the nights. But then it became impossible after one month.

My mother couldn’t do it. She was 53 years of age. She wasn’t physically weak but she realised she couldn’t do it. And she said she would present herself for deportation and that I should go and hide.

My conscience wouldn’t allow it. To leave my mother on her own. I thought that I could maybe help her, wherever she would be taken. But how wrong I was.

Arriving in Auschwitz - The Murder of Abram’s Mother

DREW: So you presented to the Nazis with your mother. What was that moment like?

ABRAM: Well, we went together in the cattle trains. And then after a few days, we arrived at Auschwitz.

DREW: What was it like almost those cattle trains to Auschwitz?

ABRAM: You can imagine. We tried to keep up the morale of the people, but you couldn’t keep it up. I knew it was not good.

DREW: How did you deal with the thirst?

ABRAM: You had to deal with it, otherwise you would fall into despair. If hunger was not enough. There was the despair.

We always tried to give people good news when we had it. How many bombs had been dropped on Germany by the Americans through the day and the British at night. The tonnage of the bombs.

And we tried to convey this in our way to the people. To give them hope.

DREW: How long did it take you to get from Łódź to Auschwitz? How many days?

ABRAM: A few days. Maybe four, five days. Because they had to stop for the military trains. All the lines were busy with the military. Because the Russians had already made it back over the other side of the Vistula.

DREW: And people would die on the cattle trains?

ABRAM: Of course. Of course.

DREW: And what happened when you arrived?

ABRAM: Well, this was the most tragic part. You see, when they flung the doors open, they said ‘‘Everybody out - men on one side, women and children on the other.’’ And this took only a few minutes.

DREW: So you were separated from your mother?

ABRAM: My mother realised this, that she would not get out of this place, because the SS were so brutal.

My mother realised straight away that she would not get out alive from there.

Instantly, we were not allowed to talk to each other. But she turned to me and said: ‘’You should do everything humanly possible to survive. And when you survive, you should tell people wherever you will find yourself.

And I have tried to fulfil the last wish of my mother.

This was 1944.

The Insanity of the Nazi Mindset

DREW: It was so close to the end of the war.

ABRAM: We were still in the Łódź Ghetto when the Allies landed on D-Day.

That’s why it was so catastrophic for us. There were radio listeners. Some were so excited that they started to talk openly about the Allied landings in Normandy.

The Gestapo and the criminal police would arrest anybody with a radio. Our radio was not known to anybody.

One of my friends had a radio with his sister. He rushed home to find it. After the war, he went back and found the radio. Now his radio is in one of the museums in Israel on a kibbutz.

DREW: So people knew about Stalingrad and D-Day as it happened.

ABRAM: We all knew about Stalingrad.

DREW: You must have all known that the Nazis were losing.

ABRAM: By then, it was almost over. But they still murdered.

ABRAM’s SON: It shows you the manic intent of the Nazis. When they were deporting the Hungarian Jews to death camps in 1944, they were decoting all these resources and rolling stock to take them to the ghettos and death camps.

Some came to Łódź, right?

ABRAM: No, no, not the Hungarian Jews. German Jews, Austrian Jews, some from Czechoslovakia. But not from Hungary.

They murdered half a million Hungarian Jews in less than 10 months.

DREW: And this was while they were losing. They were losing and they were still devoting all this rail stock to the Holocaust.

ABRAM: Yes.

ABRAM’s SON: It’s insanity.

DREW: How do you understand the insanity there?

ABRAM: People ask me this and I always say: Don’t even try. Because it’s impossible for a normal mind to understand or grasp what actually happened.

DREW: Have you ever thought to yourself - why did Nazism exist? Why did this happen?

ABRAM: There is no ‘‘why.’’ How could there be a ‘‘why’’? What did we ever do?

DREW: Exactly. What did the kids do? What did those babies do that they threw from the upper floors of the ghetto hospital?

ABRAM’s SON: Evil will always find a place where good men stand by. Famous saying but it’s so true.

DREW: How could it happen that an entire country, an entire nation could fall to this?

ABRAM: And a civilised, developed nation.

DREW: That produced Einstein and Bohr and all these great scientists. It’s actually incomprehensible.

ABRAM: How could they convince an entire nation that the Jews were a threat when they represented less than one percent of the Jewish population. No more than one per cent.

And they contributed to Germany.

DREW: So many German Jews fought for Germany in World War I.

ABRAM: You know, Hitler was in the Army in World War I and a German Jewish officer nominated him for a medal.

DREW: For the Iron Cross, wasn’t it?

I was reading about Carl Schmitt the other day, the so-called Crown Jurist of the Third Reich. He did so much to propagandise for the Nazis. He intellectually defended the Holocaust and all this evil.

And I was reading that one his first best friends in life was a German Jewish boy who ultimately served in World War I and died fighting for Germany.

How could it happen that they all turned on them?

ABRAM: Lies. The lie of the superior race.

DREW: And intellectuals were part of it.

Facing Josef Mengele on the Selection Ramp

ABRAM: Doctors, even doctors! The experiments in the camps.

DREW: Like Mengele. Did you ever see Mengele in the camp?

ABRAM: Of course I saw him.

DREW: You saw him with your own eyes?!

ABRAM: When I arrived at Auschwitz, he was here *points two meters away* and I was there.

DREW: My God, that’s sick. You feel sick, you feel cold thinking about this.

ABRAM: I didn’t know then who he was. I didn’t know his name.

DREW: But you saw him with your eyes.

ABRAM: Yes, I saw him, yes. He was performing the selections.

DREW: My God. So he selected you to survive, did he?

ABRAM: Yeah. He pointed to me.

DREW: Did he say anything? ‘‘Off to the side’’?

ABRAM: No, no. He didn’t say anything. Just pointed and whistled and motioned me to the side.

DREW: So Mengele stood before you and pointed you to the side to live - to work as a slave?

Mengele. That’s sick. Mengele himself.

ABRAM’s SON: And think what it tells you about how corrupted the Nazis had made the German society. A doctor who had sworn the Hippocratic Oath to preserve, prolong, protect human life. And he was taking lives and experimenting on living people. It shows you how corrupt it was.

DREW: My god, it’s sick.

Surviving Auschwitz

DREW: So at this point it is 1944.

Do you know what month it was in 1944 when you were sent to Auschwitz?

ABRAM’s SON: August. August 1944.

ABRAM: The second last transport to Auschwitz.

DREW: Oh my God. So Hitler would be dead within 12 months of this point.

ABRAM: Yeah. Not even 12 months.

DREW: So, August 1944.

Your mother, her last wish. How old were you when she made that last wish to you that you would tell people about what you experienced?

ABRAM: 20 years old.

DREW: Now you’re 99. So for 80 years you’ve been fulfilling your mother’s last wish.

ABRAM: Yes.

DREW: My God. What was it like, that last moment when you saw your Mum?

ABRAM: I can see it in front of me. I see my mother when she is telling me.

ABRAM’s SON: His memory - he trained himself to remember everything because he couldn’t write anything down.

ABRAM: Well, you see, I registered everything in my brain.

DREW: How did you train your memory?

ABRAM: I knew that this is what I had to do. I knew I couldn’t write anything down. I didn’t have a pen and I didn’t have paper.

Hunger, Torture and the Auschwitz Uprising

ABRAM: And even if there was pen and paper, the Nazis were always on the lookout - they knew that if we had the chance, we would document everything.

And some did. There were Jews who documented the crematoria. They wrote something down and hid it. And it was found after the war.

I was there in 1944 during the Auschwitz uprising.

Every few months the Jews who were forced to work in the gas chambers and the crematoria were gassed, liquidated and cremated themselves. This is why the Auschwitz uprising broke out. Those crematoria workers knew it would be their turn.

Some of the crematoria workers rose up in the Auschwitz Uprising. They knew it would shortly be their turn to be executed.

The most brutal officer in the SS - they picked him up and threw him into one of the furnaces alive.

DREW: My God.

Did you receive a prison number when you were at Auschwitz?

ABRAM: No, I’m one of those who did not. And I was lucky.

The Resistance told me to avoid a number if I could because they took down your number during selections.

I didn’t have a number so they couldn’t take me down. I could move around and disappear. They couldn’t look for me.

DREW: Wow. Again, just luck.

ABRAM: There were a few in my section of the camp who received numbers. I don’t know. My luck.

DREW: My God. How do you deal with the memories? I imagine you must have had so many nightmares over the years and things like that.

ABRAM: Oh, well, I pushed it away. Otherwise, I wouldn’t make it. Because I had to. I had to do what was possible for me to do. And I had to fulfil my mother’s wish.

DREW: So that was the thing that kept you going the whole time.

ABRAM: Yes. And luck. Always luck.

ABRAM’s SON: And it was also a matter of surviving with your humanity. Because when he was liberated by the US Army in 1945, they had captured some SS and the US soldiers offered Dad a Tommy gun to go and shoot them. And he said, ‘No, I can’t do that.’

And the GI asked Dad why and Dad replied: ‘‘If I do that, I become what they are.’’

DREW: My God. Abram, I read that when you were liberated you weighed just 29 kilos (63 pounds).

ABRAM: Yes.

ABRAM’s SON: And never spent a day in his life in hospital. Still to this day.

DREW: So you were 21 years old and you weighed 29 kilos. I can’t even imagine. How did you keep yourself going?

ABRAM: My will.

DREW: Iron will. 21 years old and 29 kilos when you were liberated.

ABRAM: And still I wasn’t sick. And I always knew, when food was plenty, not to eat too much.

A lot of people died after the war because of that. They were so hungry, they ate anything they came into possession of. And they couldn’t handle it. The body went into shock.

DREW: How much would you normally eat? What was the diet in the camp like?

ABRAM: Diet? *Starts laughing*

DREW: No, no, I mean - I’m sorry, I meant -

ABRAM: *laughing* It’s alright!

DREW: I meant, like, what was the amount of food that prisoners were given?

ABRAM: Let me tell you.

DREW: I’m so sorry for saying the word ‘diet.’

ABRAM: *Still laughing* It’s alright. This is why it’s impossible for people - to grasp it. To understand it.

In Auschwitz, in the morning, when we got up, it was dark. We had to be counted at the roll call. We received a so-called - it was supposed to be - coffee. Well it was dark water. It would look warm when it was cold. The wind would blow in from the Carpathian Mountains.

DREW: And you were dressed in rags.

ABRAM: Not rags. I had nothing underneath. Just a jacket and trousers. No socks. I had shoes. Which were very good.

DREW: And these would have been sub-zero temperatures.

ABRAM: Oh, well, yes. It was freezing.

An Iron Will

DREW: My God, I just don’t understand how you can even keep going in such a situation.

ABRAM: Like I said, my will.

DREW: It’s amazing what the human mind and the will can do. My God, the willpower.

ABRAM: There were people who gave up. I couldn’t.

DREW: What would it be like for someone who did give up?

ABRAM: I didn’t want that. They would know that their family was gone and they were suffering so much.

I would say: ‘‘Go on.’’

Even in Auschwitz-Birkenau, when me and my friend saw somebody who wanted to give up, we would approach him.

Well, you couldn’t just approach somebody and have a discussion. We waited for a moment. We approached this person. And my friend said: ‘Don’t do it.’

Because as long as you are alive, there is hope. Because they want you dead one way or another.

ABRAM’s SON: That’s the title of his book: ‘The Strength of Hope.’

ABRAM: And it’s also life. It’s the will of the mind.

DREW: I wonder - what was the closest you think you came to death? Were people ever killed next to you?

ABRAM: Oh, well, of course. Of course. You couldn’t do anything.

DREW: Could you tell us about one situation like that?

ABRAM’s SON: You should tell him about your fingernails.

ABRAM: Well, this was not at Auschwitz. This was in Germany.

DREW: When you were taken to Germany for slave labour. They sent you to Germany as a slave, basically.

ABRAM: Yes. You see, we worked in a factory in Braunschweig that produced trucks and repaired trucks. You would see what would come back to Braunschweig and could be repaired.

We had a lapel and we had to be in one line. Not sticking out even a little bit.

And what happened was this. I always checked - but this time there was an SS man. He had these high boots. Steel-toe capped boots.

I always checked and made sure my arms were tucked in. But when he approached me, I could see that he was looking at me. I was prepared for it. So when he kicked me in the genitals, I covered them. And he kicked me on the side of my wrist.

I still have the scar. It healed but I still have the scar.

DREW: My God.

ABRAM: Another time. I had to relieve myself but you could only go when they told you.

When you needed to go, your body couldn’t function normally. And I knew it. So I looked for an occasion when I could go.

I was unfortunate because somebody must have saw me. The Kapos were waiting for me when I went to leave the toilets. They took me to the place they treated people. They held me down and pulled out my fingernails with a plier.

DREW: SS men pulled out your fingernails?

ABRAM: Not SS - they were Kapos. Have a look.

DREW: My God, I can see your fingernails look different even to this day.

ABRAM’s SON: And he still didn’t get an infection. Do you know why?

ABRAM: There wasn’t any medication. There were no bandages. But I had heard about it. When you’re bleeding, the best antiseptic can be your own urine. And I did it.

I had no bandages. There were paper socks from the cement. I washed it in secret, washed it and wrapped it up. No infection.

DREW: And you had to go back to work with your fingernails like that? My God. I can’t understand. I just can’t understand.

ABRAM’s SON: It’s hard to comprehend, isn’t it?

DREW: It actually is incomprehensible.

ABRAM: Yeah.

DREW: Were there any other times like that - when you were tortured or beaten?

ABRAM: Well, otherwise, I tried to avoid it.

For example, in Braunschweig. It was a working camp. So when this camp was new, when we arrived, it was newly built.

Newly built in 1944. They would send German prisoners to serve as Kapos. On another occasion I did the same thing, covering my genitals to stop them kicking me with a steel-toed boot.

But the time they pulled my fingernails out was brutal. I gritted my teeth - the pain. Very painful.

DREW: Oh my God. I can't even imagine. I get a little hangnail on one of my fingers and it kills.

*Abram laughs*

ABRAM: And you still had to work.

DREW: My God. Can you still imagine the pain in your mind?

ABRAM: Well, I can imagine the pain. I don't feel it. But I know it did hurt.

Abram’s Liberation

DREW: Can you describe to us the moment of liberation? When the US troops came?

ABRAM: Yes. The 1st of May, 1945. We were in the last camp. There were no Jews there before. There were slave laborers from all across Europe.

They put us on trains. They wanted to take us further, but where? I don't know. We didn't know.

We could hear the bombs already. The frontline was barely only a hundred kilometers away. You could see the planes flying overhead bombing.

DREW: What did it feel like inside when you saw the planes?

ABRAM: Oh, well, we were happy.

*Laughs*

They put us on trains and we didn’t know where we were going. And when we came to a forest, they stopped and said: ‘Now, everybody out, we are going to fetch blankets.’ We didn’t have anything to cover ourselves.

Note: Due to length, I will continue the rest of the transcript in a second Substack post.