Holocaust Memorial Day

Walter’s parents decided to send him to Britain on the Kindertransport. The age limit for Kindertransport was 16, and Walter was 15. His sisters being 17 and 18 could not join him. The eldest managed to get a domestic permit where the lower age limit was 18. She arrived in Britain on 4th July 1939. The younger sister, however, was too old for the Kindertransport and too young to get a domestic work permit. She had to stay in Vienna and was sent to Theresienstadt and subsequently to Auschwitz.

Walter’s father was sent to Auschwitz on 29th September 1944 and his mother and sister on 23rd October 1944. This was the penultimate transport to Auschwitz, just 3 months before Auschwitz was liberated.

Walter arrived at Dovercourt, a summer holiday camp which was not used at that time of year. He was there until February 1939 when he was sent to a farm in Northern Ireland.

Walter worked on the farm for 3 years. Walter had to report to the police, but as farming was a ‘reserved occupation’ (important for the war effort) he was not interned as other ‘enemy aliens’ were.

Walter joined the British Army in March 1944. Whilst on embarkation leave, Walter married Herta, who also came from Vienna on a Kindertransport, but they only met in London in 1942.

Walter was sent to Belgium and then Holland in December 1944.

After the war, Walter discovered that his parents and sister had been sent from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz where they were murdered.

In 1939 when war broke out, Zigi’s father escaped from Poland to Russia, believing that it was only young Jewish men who were at risk, and not children or the elderly. However, in 1940 Zigi and his grandparents were sent to the Łodz ghetto. During this year his father attempted to return to see Zigi but could not get into the ghetto. Zigi never saw his father again and still does not know what happened to him.

In 1941 all children, elderly and disabled people, including Zigi and his grandmother, were rounded up and put on lorries to be deported from the ghetto. Zigi managed to jump off the lorry and escaped back into the ghetto where he remained, working in the metal factory, until the ghetto’s liquidation in 1944. When the ghetto was liquidated, all of the people from the metal factory were put onto cattle trucks and sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. On arrival, they were sent to the showers, where they were stripped, shaved and showered. Everyone else from the ghetto had to go through a Selektion, where a Nazi officer decided who was fit enough to work and those who should die immediately. Within an hour of the selection, those from Zigi’s transport who were not classed as fit for work had been killed.

A few weeks after arriving at Auschwitz-Birkenau, all of the surviving workers from the metal factory were sent to a concentration camp near Danzig. Once there, Zigi volunteered to work at a railway yard, where he was able to get more food.

With the Russians advancing, Zigi and the rest of his group were sent on a Death March and arrived in the German naval town of Neustadt, and told they were going to Denmark. However, before this could happen there was a British air attack, and during the chaos that followed, Zigi realised that all of the Nazis had left, and they were surrounded by British Army, and therefore liberated on 3rd May 1945. As soon as they were liberated, Zigi and his friends from Danzig and the march went looking for food. Three days after liberation, Zigi ended up in hospital for three months due to the effects of over eating after a long period of malnutrition. Once he left hospital, he and his friends were sent to a Displaced Persons’ Camp.