Biography of solomon radasky

His mother and sister were killed on Janurary 25, for saying that they had no coats or jewellery when the Germans asked them if they had these items. On April 2, , his father was shot in the back by a German when a Jewish policeman pointed him out for stealing bread from a boy who smuggled it over the wall of Warsaw ghetto. On July 22, , his 2 brothers and sisters were deported to Treblinka, that was the last time he ever saw somebody from his family.

That the shop that Solomon used to work in, was the largest employer in Warsaw Ghetto and still sells popular Eisenhower jackets today? He was tricked into going to Shultz' shop because somebody told him his sister was there. It was the longest lasting Jewish uprising. On May 1, , Radasky was shot in the ankle but the bullet missed his bone so he didn't lose his leg.

He was forced to walk 3 kms to work everyday and had to hide his limp in fear of getting hung by the soldiers. A particularly awful experience for Radasky was when a man in his group was smoking but wouldn't confess to the Lagerfuhrer. Radasky was one of them, but before being beaten to death, an officer took him to be deported to another death camp, Auschwitz on July 3, Upon arriving in Auschwitz, Radasky was immediately taken to get his number tattooed on his arm which was His numbers had a significant meaning as the seperate numbers added up to 18, and the letters in Hebrew stood for a word meaning 'life'.

This gave him the hope to keep holding onto life and to endure the pain he was put through for the time being. After being tattooed, he was sent to work on building railroads but collapsed from the amount of work he was doing. He was taken to a hospital and there he found out his number was registered as working in the coal mines where it was guaranteed that he would die within 2 weeks.

However, some men were kind enough to help him with food and also brought him to the Capo , who got a job for him at the sand mines in exchange for fixing his cap on May 2, Radasky worked in the sand mines for over a year where he carried sand to cover the ashes of the dead from the crematoria. He witnessed the horrors of people walking into gas chambers and never coming back out.

In , he saw living children being thrown by their arms and legs into the crematoriaum. One day, a Hungrarian man gave him and his group, 11 pieces of bread, eventually he disappeared but he was a huge impact on Radasky because if it weren't for his kindness, he may not of lived on. Radasky left Auschwitz when they began liquidating in Janurary 18, and was after brought to Gross-Rosen camp.

Radasky thought he was going to die in this camp. Soon after this camp, he was sent to Dachau on Janurary 24, , where he didn't do much except for eating snow for water and he soon left the camp on April 26, Subsequently, he travelled on trains and stopped at Tutzing, Feldafing and Garmisch. The day after, planes were dropping bombs and a few hours later they needed to be cleaned up.

This Capo was a murderer. He had a green triangle. The Germans opened up the jails and they made the prisoners our bosses. Some of the boys worked in Canada. When the transports came they separated the valuables. They risked their lives to smuggle out gold and other things. The next morning they woke me up and they took me with them.

They put me in the middle of the line and we walked together out of the gate. They told me that as soon as we get out of the gate, I would be safe because over 6, prisoners walk out of the gate every day and nobody knows who is who. Their activities included playing music for the prisoners who were marching to work and for the arrival of important guests at the camp.

In addition, they played at parties for the SS and gave formal concerts for the camp staff. There were orchestras at most of the major concentration and extermination camps. They would not let me go to the other job. I stayed with them until the last minute when Auschwitz was liquidated. They helped me out with little pieces of bread and a little soup.

One day the boys asked me if I could make a cap for the Capo, and they brought me some striped material. I took a piece of string to take a measurement. I asked them for some thread and a needle, and I made the cap in about 2 hours. For stiffness I took some paper from a cement bag and doubled the material at the top. The Capo liked the cap.

I was his guy from then on, and he never beat me the whole time. I was working for over a year with the boys at the same job, digging sand. Ten of us worked in the sand mine. There was a little guy from Breslau that we made our supervisor. He stood on top, and we were 20 feet down below. Every day we loaded up a wagon with the sand and pushed it 16 kilometers.

That was 2 trips of 4 kilometers one way and 4 kilometers coming back--over 10 miles a day. Twice a day we carried sand to Birkenau to cover the ashes of the dead. The sand was to cover the ashes that came from the crematoria. I did this for more than a year. The ovens were on one side of the crematoria, and the ashes came out this side.

The other side was where the gas chamber was. The Sonderkommando Sonderkommando: Special Commando , 1. Few Sonderkommando survived as they were usually killed and replaced at periodic intervals. There were several Sonderkommando revolts. The group at Auschwitz-Birkenau staged an uprising in and set off an explosion that destroyed Crematorium IV.

A German unit that worked along with the Einsatzgruppen in the Soviet territories. Their task was to obliterate the traces of mass slaughter by burning bodies. There were big holes for the ashes and we covered the ashes with sand. I saw when the transports came. I saw the people who were going in, who to the right and who to the left. I saw who was going to the gas chambers.

I saw the people going to the real showers, and I saw the people going to the gas. In August and September of I saw them throw living children into the crematorium. They would grab them by an arm and a leg and throw them in. One Saturday, when we were working, we turned around and saw a soldier with a rifle, so we started to speed up.

I will put out a bucket with trash in it. Look under the trash, and you will find eleven pieces of bread. He asked us to bring him money from Canada, which we did. He used to tell us the names of the Jewish holidays. One day he disappeared. The Russians were pushing back the Germans at Stalingrad. Transports were coming from the Lodz ghetto. That is when we saw them grab the little children by the head and the leg and throw them into the crematoria alive.

Then the Hungarian Hungarian Jews: the tragedy of the destruction of Hungarian Jewy is that it came late in the war. The deaths of approximately , Hungarian Jews occurred between May and July ; most of them were gassed at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Germany occupied Hungary on March 19, in response to the threat of the approaching Soviet Army.

Prior to that time the authoritarian government of Hungary, although allied with Nazi Germany, resisted German demands to implement the Final Solution program. The occupation forces included a Sonderkommando unit headed by Adolf Eichmann. Between May and July Eichmann succeeded in deporting , Jews. However, the Hungarian government stopped the deportations in July.

Eichmann was opposed by efforts to rescue Hungarian Jews, most notably by the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg. Wallenberg saved the lives of tens of thousands of Jews in Budapest by creating safe houses and distributing protective passports, the so-called Swedish Schutz-Passes. There was this group of young people who wanted to destroy the crematoria.

There were four crematoria in Birkenau. The young girls worked at an ammunition factory, and they smuggled in explosives. One crematorium was destroyed. They hung 2 of the girls in front of us when we came back from work. Life was going on. Everyday was a different problem until January 18, , when they began liquidating Auschwitz. On the 18th I left Auschwitz, and 9 days later the Russians liberated it.

Those 7 days cost me 5 months. When we left, everybody had to get out of the barracks. I was walking the whole night with a rabbi from Sosnowiec. The Rabbi had come from Block 2, which was the tailor shop. I saw that the soldiers behind us were shooting the people who fell down. The Rabbi fell down in the road and this boy from Belgium and I held up the Rabbi between us and kept walking.

We saw a sled pulled by a soldier, and we asked him if we could pull the sled with the Rabbi in it until morning. They gave their block leader some gold and diamonds to let them hide the Rabbi in the barracks. They hid him in a closet that they had built in the wall. The Kaddish is recited at a grave and on the anniversary of the death of a close relative.

Although the prayer itself contains no reference to death its use in this regard perhaps arose from the belief that saying the praises of God would help the souls of the dead find everlasting peace. Source: Rosten, The Joys of Yiddish. At daylight we came to a small town and the farmers let us stay in the stables. In the evening we had to get out.

We walked to a railroad station. In two days the train brought us to Gross-Rosen Gross-Rosen: a concentraton camp located near a granite quarry of the same name in Lower Silesia. The working conditions involved backbreaking labor in the quarry and special work assignments during what were supposed to be hours of rest. The camp was expanded into a network of 60 sub-camps involved in armaments production.

The main camp held 10, and the sub-camps 80, prisoners. The Jewish population of the camp varied. From March until January the camp received an uninterrupted flow of Jewish prisoners, including prisoners from the partially evacuated Auschwitz camps. Gross-Rosen was evacuated in early February by rail and on death marches. Records show that prisoners were sent to Dachau, 3, to Bergen-Belsen, 5, to Buchenwald, 4, to Flossenburg, 2, to Mauthausen and 1, to Mittelbau, however, the records are incomplete.

I never saw the Rabbi again. Gross-Rosen was murder. The guards walked around with iron pipes in their hands. In the daytime we had to stand up, and at night we slept head to food. The only food we got was a slice of bread and a cup of coffee at night. I thought I was going to be die there. They walked us to the railroad station, and in 3 days we came to Dachau Dachau: one of the first Nazi concentration camps opened March 22, , and located 10 miles from Munich.

Dachau was a model institution for subsequent camps and a training ground for the SS. During the last months of the war Dachau became a dumping ground for inmates from other camps and conditions deteriorated further. Up to 1, prisoners were crowded into barracks intended for A trial was held by an American court and 36 members of the SS staff were sentenced to death.

At Dachau there were high-altitude and freezing experiments and a malaria and tuberculosis station. There were tests to see if seawater could be made drinkable. Many inmates who were forced to participate died horrible deaths. The Nuremberg Military Tribunals found that the medical experiments served the ideological objectives of the Nazi regime and that none of them were of any scientific value.

The train ride was terrible; the train pulled up and pulled back, up and back. We ate snow for water. A man was in there with his son who went crazy. The son grabbed the father by the neck and choked him to death. At Dachau there was a selection for the typhus blocks. I had a friend from Radom who was strong. He could have made it, but they put him in the typhus block.

I left Dachau on the 26th or the 27th of April, I was liberated on May 1st. During this time we were traveling on trains. We were in Tutzing and in Feldafing and in Garmisch. There were big mountains there. One day they had us get out of the train, and we had to go up twenty feet to the other side of the mountain. Then the Germans set up machine guns and started to fire at us.

A few hundred were killed as we ran back to the train. The next day we heard planes dropping bombs. A few hours later the soldiers opened the door to the train. They said they needed a few people to work cleaning up from the bombs, but we were scared to go. After all these years in the ghetto and losing everybody, now this is the end. Who is going to be left to say Kaddish for my family?

We went to this small town on the other side of the mountain where the train station had been bombed.

Biography of solomon radasky

To one man they gave a shovel, to another a broom and to me they gave a pick. I saw a counter in the station where they were selling little black breads. I said to myself that I would like to eat a piece of bread before they kill me. Historically, the choice of accepting martyrdom was an option, and conversion or expulsion were alternatives.

The Holocaust eliminated the element of choice. Where rescue was impossible and resistance would be futile there are numerous accounts of Jews going to their deaths with dignity. I grabbed a little dark bread into my jacket and started eating it. I did not move, even though he beat me. I fell down and he kicked me and I got up. I had to finish eating that little bread.

Blood was running down my head. When I finished, I went to work. I had gotten my wish. Then I knew that I was going to survive. Early at 4 a. We pushed to look out of the two little windows of the train. We expected to see the Russians coming but it was the Americans. We hollered. A jeep drove up with two soldiers. One was a short man, an MP.

He spoke good German. He asked who we were. We said we were from the concentration camps. Everybody started hollering and crying. The American soldiers said we were free. They arrested the Germans and the Germans got scared. It was May 1, The Americans cooked rice for us. If you do, you will die. There is too much fat in that for you to eat now.

Because your stomach has shrunk, if you eat that you will get diarrhea. I will give you a piece of bread, and you should toast it. I sat in the sun. I boiled a little water and sugar. In two weeks my stomach stretched. They gave us pajamas to wear, but we had no shoes. One day I saw the same MP in the Jeep. We were there at 6 am. We saw the soldiers get breakfast.

He signaled for us to get breakfast too and he told the Captain about us. The Captain said to bring us in. We were nearly naked in our pajamas and with no shoes. The Captain gave us a paper to go to the PX and we got shoes, pants, shirts and jackets. We were told to come back at lunchtime. We got three meals a day for weeks. At the Displaced Persons Displaced Person: DP , one of approximately 1,, to 2,, persons who had been uprooted by the war and who by the end of had refused to or could not return to their prewar homes.

Until the State of Israel was established in , legal immigration to Palestine was blocked by official British policy. Displaced Persons camps were set up at the end of WWII to house the millions of uprooted persons who were unwilling or unable to return to their homes. The Jewish survivors languished in camps primarily in the Allied zones of occupation in Germany.

At first the DPs lived behind barbed wire fences under guard in camps that included former concentration camps. For example, in the British zone the survivors were held at the former Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Eventually, the Jews gained recognition as a special group with their own needs and put into separate facilities. I brought her oranges, bread and butter.

When she got well, she gave me a pair of white linen pants. In Germany Feldafing had a big name as a place where you came to find missing people. They put up lists of names of survivors on the walls. A lot of liberated people came looking for relatives. Did you ever hear the name of Bursztyn? I had nothing to lose. Two brothers from Lodz, tailors, made me a suit with two pairs of pants out of a grey and white blanket.

My friend and I put our belongings together in one package and went out on the highway to hitchhike to Turkheim. I left Feldafing in August of The next day my wife, Frieda, came to see Sofia. We got married in November My wife was from the same town as I was, and I used to deal with her family. With us there was a feeling, like a family.

We were very poor. At that time you had to have a card to buy things. I went to the Burgermeister, who was like the mayor, to get coupons to get a suit. The problem was that I did not have any money to buy it. My wife and Sofia had a little money that they loaned me to buy a suit, and I loaned this suit to my friend when he got married.

My wife had no dress. We were going to get married on Saturday night. Saturday during the day I knocked on the door of this German woman I knew. I had spoken to her in the street, and we had talked a few times. She had a daughter who was the same size as Frieda. I got 2 packages of cigarettes, 2 Hershey chocolate bars and a little can of coffee and put them into a paper bag.

I came to ask her to help me. I went over to the cedar robe and opened the door and I saw a sky-blue dress. I took up the dress on the hanger and held it up and saw that it was a beautiful color. The daughter started crying. Meanwhile, his father, mother and elder sister were all killed in the ghetto while he was sent away. His mother and sister were shot on the spot when some Germans asked the mother if she had any jewelry and she said no.

His father was caught smuggling food at the gates and shot in consequence. Almost all the inhabitants were killed; Radasky, one of the few survivors, was shot in the ankle. The Germans moved the few remaining Jews to work and death camps. His remaining two sisters and brothers were put on a train to Treblinka , and he was put on a train to Majdanek.

They were separated because Treblinka could only receive 10, prisoners in one trip, and there was around 20, total. He never saw them again. At Majdanek, Radasky reports being forced to walk barefoot three kilometers to and from work every day. His ankle was still healing from his gunshot wound, which a former doctor in the camp was able to operate on with only a pocket knife.

He could not limp at all, however, for fear of being removed from his job and killed with the others who could not work women, children, elderly, sick etc. Once another worker smoked a cigarette and a German officer saw the smoke. He came riding around on his horse and demanded to know who did it; nobody answered. He was subsequently transferred to Auschwitz.

Upon arrival, there was a selection process in which many people were selected to be machine-gunned in a field. He, however, was selected to be a worker and taken to get a number tattooed on his arm He reports being sent to work at numerous camps including Buna, Gross-Rosen, and Dachau. As the Americans advanced closer and closer to the camps the Germans put everyone on trains into the mountains.

Finally, on May 1, , the Americans caught up to the train outside a small town named Tutzing and liberated the prisoners. Once restored to good health, Radasky headed to a town in Germany, Feldafing , where many liberated people went after the war in hopes of finding friends and family. He was then introduced to her friend, Frieda, who became his wife in November They had a son born May 13th, He could not speak English , but was able to demonstrate his skill at a local fur shop.