Continuing on my series looking at the published stories of so-called ‘Holocaust Survivors’ we have the case of Yechiel Kamioner published in the River Dale Press.
To wit:
‘Yechiel Kamioner’s life changed forever in 1939.
He was 19 when German soldiers bombed his Wielun, Poland, home. Soon after, he was placed in a Nazi concentration camp and forced into slave labor for six years.
The numbers “1283” and a Star of David was carved into his metal prison tag so he could be identified as both a captive and Jew.
When World War II ended, Kamioner journeyed to America with his wife and daughter, but among the many things he left behind, Kamioner’s prison tag was among them. Although he would never set eyes on the scrap of metal again, his daughter, Helene, has thanks to the work of Israel’s official Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem.
“I think if he were alive, he would cry,” said Helene, now 68. “I mean wouldn’t you if you found something from your history?”
Yechiel was 92 when he died in 2002. He loved Riverdale for its strong and supportive Jewish community, Helene said. He had married his wife, Chava, in Munich after the war, had Helene, and then moved to the United States with some help from the Hebrew Aid Society. They first settled in northern New Jersey where Yechiel worked as an egg dealer, before eventually moving to Riverdale.
While Yechiel would sometimes talk about what he went through during the war, how he was beaten and starved, Helene never imagined something tangible from that past — his prison tags — would resurface. That is until Evgeny Rozin contacted her. An archivist who works in Yad Vashem’s artifact section, Rozin discovered the connection between the discovered tag and a slave laborer who had worked in the Hasag Pelcery ammunition factory in the ghetto of Czestochowa.
Yechiel and his entire family were shipped to Czestochowa, but he and his niece were the only ones to leave alive. The rest of his family was killed in a gas chamber.
“I believe that my father considered his life and the fact that he was spared … a miracle,” Helene said. “My father was an extraordinarily positive man, and he believed he would come through this experience.”
The average life span for a worker at the Hasag factory labor camp was two months, and more than 50,000 Polish Jews died during their time there. Those who did survive suffered from lice infestations, typhus, hypothermia and malnutrition.
Despite all this, Yechiel remained devout to his faith, Helene said. In the initial early morning bombing of his home, Yechiel ran out of the house, but not without grabbing his father’s religious artifacts first.’ (1)
Interestingly Kamioner here claims that he worked as a forced labourer at the Hasag Pelcery ammunition factory and was living at the ghetto at Czestochowa for some six years. Yet – as he himself relates – the average life span of the camp workers was two months.
This forces us to wonder just how Kamioner beat such odds.
The options are few, but the most plausible is that conditions were never as bad he portrays them and that the deaths from disease were a result of the deteriorating conditions on the home front as the tide of the Second World War turned against Germany and resulted in the wide spread deaths from typhus in similar camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau.
References
(1) http://riverdalepress.com/stories/holocaust-survivors-prison-tag-grim-tales-survive-world-war-ii,66303