Literature of Holocaust and Genocide

Norris Biron, Liberator

Norris Biron was just a teenager when he was drafted into the United States Army during the final years of World War II.   Little did Norris know when he was in basic training in Georgia that the drive to liberate Europe would take him to a concentration camp in Austria.
In July of 1944, after Norris completed Army basic training, he sailed for Europe with the US 71st Battalion.  Norris and the 71st were part of the push through France into Germany with Patton’s Third Army. By April 1945, the Third Army had reached Austria where one day when Norris and two other soldiers were reconnoitering the area, they came upon the Gunskirchen Concentration Camp, part of the Mauthausen-Gusen Concentration Camps Complex in Austria, which included 54 sub-camps that used slave labor.

Norris was shocked and surprised to see this camp and the conditions in the camp.  Bodies were all over the ground.  Emaciated men fled through the gates.  Others, unable to walk, were carried by Norris and his compatriots.  They fed their D-Rations to the starving and malnourished inmates.  Norris says he will never forget the horrible smell of the camp—the smell of unwashed bodies, the smell of burning bodies, the smell of fear!
After World War II ended on May 8, 1945, Norris was assigned to interrogate German prisoners suspected of having committed war crimes.  During this time, he was asked to take prisoners to the trials in Nuremberg.  Norris remembers listening to some of these trials.
Norris still has nightmares of Gunskirchen concentration Camps.

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simon-sidney.m4aIn 1925, Sidney Simon was born in Belitze, Poland, now part of Belarus. Sidney’s parents, Samuel and Czerna, had five children: three boys, Mojshe, Sidney, Richard, and two girls, Katie and Ida. Sidney’s father, Samuel, owned a restaurant and a liquor store. His mother, Czerna, was a very good, hard-working woman who helped his father and even had her own business, buying shoes and boots and selling them from their home.
In June 1941, when the Nazis invaded Belitze, Poland, they terrorized the Jews and eventually put the family in a ghetto. Sidney’s older brother, Mojshe, along with a group of twenty-one young men, escaped from the ghetto into the woods, where Mojshe became a partisan. A short time later, the Nazis decided to liquidate the ghetto, so the rest of the family fled into the woods.
Sidney then became a partisan and later was recruited by the Istrabitilsky Battalion, killing Germans retreating from Russia and at the same time revenging the murder of his brother. He also fought Germans when he was drafted into the Soviet army.
After the war, Sidney was in a displaced persons camp until he and his family immigrated to the United States. In the United States, Sidney met Rosalie, whom he married in 1950. Eventually the couple moved to Atlantic City where Sidney developed a number of businesses, including real estate. Sidney and Rosalie now live in Margate and have three children and four grandchildren.
Sidney and Rosalie went back to Belitze twice in the 80s and 90s. On both trips to Belitze Sidney was reminded that the Holocaust affected perpetrators and their children, as well as Holocaust survivors and their children. He tells the following story to explain this:

In our town, a shoemaker, named Sheshko, and his family had made a good living before 1941 when the Germans occupied Belitze. But in early 1942, when the Jews were sent to the Žetel Ghetto, Sheshko and his family left everything they had with their neighbor, Kulesh, a Christian friend. This friend said that he would keep the family’s possessions safe until the war ended.
When the Germans made the Žetel Ghetto Judenrein (free of Jews), the Sheshkos escaped to the Kulesh’s home. Kulesh said, “Yes, I will hide you and your family in my stable. I will feed you. And after the war, you will be freed.” While the family hid in the stable, their friend rode on horseback to the Germans and reported them. The Germans came and captured the family. They took them to the church, tortured, and shot the whole family.
When we were in the partisans, we knew about this man, Kulesh. One night a group of partisans went to Kulesh’s house, asking him to show them how to get to a certain place. They took the man onto the cable ferry (a boat pulled from shore to shore by a cable and wench set-up) and pulled it to the middle of the River Neman, beat him up, gouging out his eyes. Then they took rocks, attaching them to both his feet and dropping him in the river.
When we were back in Belitze the first time, Rosalie and I wanted to visit the Jewish cemetery. We saw an old man in a horse and wagon with milk cans on the back. I stopped him and asked him for directions to the cemetery. He said, “I live near the cemetery.” We followed him to the cemetery, introducing ourselves. After we visited the cemetery, we saw the man come out of his house and he approached us. He said, “Partisans came in and took my father because they thought he had reported the Sheshko family to the Germans. This is not so! A neighbor saw the family and he reported them. So the partisans took my father away. I don’t even know where his bones are.” He then said, “I have one question. I heard that one of Sheshko’s sons is alive. Do you know if Hyme Sheshko is alive?” I said, “Sure. He’s alive.” I wanted the son to worry about Hyme avenging his father.

Even forty-five years and more after the Holocaust, what people did still affects their families.
The second time we visited Belitze, we again went to the cemetery. An old woman, the wife of Kulesh’s son, came out of this same house near the cemetery. We watched her and she went to a garden she had planted in the cemetery. She was picking cucumbers. I asked her, “Do you know these are graves? Do you have permission to plant here?” She said, “I am part of a cooperative. I don’t know from nothing.” I told her, “I’ll tell the Russians what you are doing.”
After the Jews from Belitze were destroyed and their culture vanished, this non-Jewish woman still has no respect for the Jewish dead, desecrating the graves in the Jewish cemetery. She and her husband seem only to worry about what they have lost not about what their neighbors lost in that time of terror.
However, many in Belitze did welcome us, greeting us with bread and salt, the symbols of welcome.
Sidney Simon’s memoir, Among the Birches of Belarus: A Partisan Youth’s Revenge, will be published in 2009. To learn more about partisans see the film Defiance to be released December 12, 2008.

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goldfarb-phillip.m4aFievel (Phillip) Goldfarb was born on August 25, 1921, in Sêdziszów, Poland, near Krakow. Phillip was one of nine children, seven sons and two daughters (one of whom died in childhood): Anna (1900), Oscar (1905), Aaron Selig (1907), Pinek (1909), Wolfek (101), Julius (1913), Isaac (1916), and Fievel (1921).

When the Germans occupied Poland in 1939, Phillip fled east, where from Lvov in the Ukraine, he was deported by the Soviet Union to Siberia and later to Kazakhstan to work in labor camps.

After World War II, in 1946, Phillip returned to his hometown, Sêdziszów, Poland, lookng for surviving family members. He discoverd that his mother, Chaja, oldest brother, Oscar, and two sisters-in-law, Dora and Zyska, along with Aunt Rifka and her eight children, had been murdered in Belzec Death Camp. Selig and Pinek had been murdered when the Nazis liquidated there labor battalion in Pustkow. His other siblings had either immigrated to the US or Israel. Philip lived in four displaced persons’ camps, marrying Celia Turner in 1948. The couple immigrated to the US in 1949.

Celia and Phillip bought a chicken farm in Mullica Township, New Jersey, in 1953. Celia died in 1984. They have a son, Arthur. Phillip has two grandchildren, Jason and Lindsay.

Phillip published his memoir The Pear Tree Did Not Survive, in 2007, and is now translating his brother Julius’s Holocaust diary (in Polish and German), written while Julius was hiding from the Nazis in a bunker near Rzeszow, Poland; he was in the bunker for eight months until he was liberated by the Soviets in 1944. Phillip’s translation of the diary will be published n 2008.
Phillip’s pod cast tells about his pre-World War II life with his family.

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Goldfarb Timetable

1921 Born in Sêdziszów, Poland

1929 Father dies.

1939, September Escapes to Brod and then Dubno, Poland

1939, November Moves to Lvov, Poland

1940 Siberia, USSR

1942 Kazakhstan, USSR

1945 Home to Sêdziszów, Poland

1945-1949 Displaced Persons Camps (Salzburg, Austria; Saltzburg, Germany; Wetzlar am Lahn, Germany; Hanau, Germany)

1948, August 22 Phillip marries Celia

1949 USA, Brooklyn, New York

1953 Buys chicken farm in Egg Harbor Township, New Jersey.

1955, March 27 Arthur born.

1981 Arthur marries Rosemarie.

1983 Jason, grandson, is born

1984, August 31 Celia dies.

1985 Phillip sells the chicken farm and moves to the Ocean City area.

1986, February 28 Lindsay, granddaughter, is born.

1088 Phillip moves to Sommers Point.

1990 Arthur marries Dale Duffy

2006 Phillip moves to Egg Harbor Twonship to be with Arthur and Dale.

2007 Phillip publishes his memoir, The Pear Tree Did Not Survive.

2o08 Presently Phillip is translating his brother Julius’s Holocaust diary, written in Polish and German.

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Arbeit Mach Frei

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Aushwitz Introduction

This introduction is from the USHMM’s online site and includes a poem from Charlotte Delbo’s trilogy, Auschwitz and After.

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Fanny Lesser’s LiberationFanny Fixler Lesser, born in Majdan, a shtetl in Czechoslovakia, near Chust, was one of nine children. In 1944, the family was deported to Auschwitz Concentration Camp, where Fanny was separated from her family. She was selected and sent to Weiswasser, a Nazi slave labor camp in Poland. During a death march a year later, Fanny and other women were exchanged by the Nazis for trucks and ammunition given by Sweden. The Swedish Red Cross then took the women to Sweden to recuperate. There Fanny learned that only her father and two oldest brothers had survived.

While on a train in Germany, in 1948 Fanny met her future husband, Max. They married and immigrated to the United States, settling in South Jersey. They have four children.

Max died in 2004, but he is memorialized in Fanny’s memoir, Lives Entwined: Fanny and Max Lesser, Holocaust Survivors, published September 2007.

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Sonia Kaplan was born in eastern Poland, in Wlodzimierz Volynski. In 1941, when Sonia was eleven, her town was occupied by the Nazis. Sonia was rescued twice in the ghetto. She eventually escaped to the forest where she joined the Russian partisans.

At the end of WW II, at fifteen, Sonia was the only survivor of her family. Sonia immigrated to the United States, to Atlantic County, first operating a chicken farm and later managing businesses and hotels. Sonia has two daughter, Gloria and Ellen, and one son, David. She has written her memoir, “My Endless War, My Shattered Dreams.”

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Rosalie Lebovic Simon was born in Tresea, Czechoslovakia, one of six children—five girls: Helen, Charlotte, Lenka, Rose, and Rosalie and a boy: William. In April of 1944 the family was moved from their home to the Mátészalka Ghetto. Then in May of 1944 the family was deported to Auschwitz Concentration Camp in the southwest of Poland. Eventually Rosalie was sent to two slave labor camps—Geislingen and Allach; both these labor camps were in Germany. In May 1945 as she was again being moved by the Germans, her train was liberated by American soldiers. In November of 1949 she immigrated to the United States, to Baltimore, Maryland where she met her husband, moving later to the Atlantic City area.

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 Janet Zuchter Moskowitz, born in Bedzin, Poland, was sent with her mother, brother, and some aunts, uncles, and cousins to Auschwitz-Birkenau, in 1943.  Janet survived Auschwitz Concentration Camp and a death march to a sub-camp of Ravensbruck.  She was liberated in May of 1945 by the British.

After liberation Janet married Max Moskowitz and they lived for a time in Germany where they had a daughter, Ida.  In 1950, the family immigrated to the United States, eventually buying a chicken farm in Egg Harbor.  Janet, who died in May 2007, wrote her memoir, “The Miracle of Survival: Angels at my Back,” published in September of 2007.

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