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The camp was deported to Gliwice and many Jews were shot along the way. We were herded like sheep and anyone who could not run was shot on the spot, which is how Wyszogroder Zechariah Rak son of Shlomo David died according to the testimony of Itzhak Leizer Zaltsburg. Rak suffocated in a bunker hideout when he was on the threshold of salvation.

Thousands of Jews from all corners of Auschwitz arrived in Gliwice. For lack of space, many slept outside on the cold night of 19.1.1945. The transfer of people to Buchenwald began the next day. Zvi Neuman and I were sent to Buchenwald. We were loaded onto cargo train cars, 120 people in each. The cars were open and it was extremely cold. Many died of frost, hunger, thirst and crowding. One transport of 2000 Jews were taken into the forest and the majority of them were shot to death. Hirschel Taub, a fellow from Płońsk who lives now in Israel was shot in the leg and survived.

Buchenwald was pure hell. We were stripped naked and our cloths taken from us before we were led to a strange bath area where our hair was sheared and we were dipped in a small pool of vitriol sulfuric acid that burned our flesh and hurt to tears.

I received torn pants and a pair of low shoes. We were housed in sheds in the small camp, I was put in Bloc number 61. They squeezed 50 people in each chamber, 700 Jews in total. The block personnel were Russian prisoners of war. Roll calls were the worst. We stood freezing for 3-4 hours until it was done, each one we survived was a miracle.

After two weeks Zvi Neuman and I were transferred to Grunberg [a subcamp of Gross-Rosen concentration camp]. This was a real concentration camp. Here Jews were starved to death. The camp was in a forest. We slept underground in subterranean caves. Water flowed from the walls and the moisture penetrated our bones. Every night at 4 am when it was coldest, we were woken for roll call.

The work was divided between three corps: 1. Loading cement into train cars; 2. Tree sawmill. 3. Tunnel digging in the high mountains. Both of us worked in the sawmill. After two weeks we were transferred to the tent camp where I met Moshe Kuperman from Wyszogrod. The camp commander never moved without his dogs who assaulted Jews on a daily basis.

There were three work shifts. Because there were fewer beds than people, a person slept in which ever bed was free at the time. The shift between midnight and 4 am was the worst. The workers would return to camp during the frequent American night bombings, arriving at first light and there were no available beds. Not a single Jew survived more than 8 days on this shift. These Jews fell like flies. New Jews were brought daily to replace those who collapsed and were taken to Buchenwald.

All of this was done by people who clearly knew at this point that their end is definite and fast approaching.

A day before the seventh day of Pesach this camp was liquidated. All the Jews from the area were returned to Buchenwald. We were forced to parade running and 30% of us were murdered on the way because they lagged behind exhausted.

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At dawn we arrived at a forest 8 kilometers from Weimar where we were allowed to stop running and rest a bit until the SS men finished their meal. We were then forced to continue the running parade. Suddenly, there was a commotion. Someone probably noticed American airplanes. First to flee were the SS men who returned when things calmed down. At nightfall we were parked on a wide lot and ordered to lay on the ground while they surrounded us with machine guns. I was totally exhausted at this point. My spirit sunk, my body drained, and I am lonely and desolate. I was sick and tired of my life. Often during this parade I asked death to take me but this time I dug a hole with my food bowl in which I could protect myself from their bullets and stay alive.

It was a night of dread. The machine guns indicated a predictable end. Morning came and I met Zvi Neuman again. We were both happy to be reunited. Together again. That's good.

We were forced to run to Buchenwald through Weimar. I was totally whipped out at this point. I simply wanted to die. I owe my life to Zvi Hirschel Neuman, my friend in misery, who picked me up by my armpit, supported and encouraged me: “Now?!” he scolded me “now that they are close to their demise you want to commit suicide? Get over it and keep going”.

With my last bits of strength, I arrived at Buchenwald. It was total chaos there. People wallowed on the floors; people almost killed each other during food distribution. Pots spilled, the Nazis showered severe beatings. Jews fell to the floor to lick the spilt food to revive their dying souls.

This is how it was for the 2-3 days we spent in Buchenwald. The verse “ Those who die by sword are better off than those who die by starvation” was profoundly clarified there.

On 10.4.1945, the day before the liberation of Buchenwald, we were taken by foot to Weimar station. We were loaded onto freight cars, 120 people in each car, for transport. There we met two Jews from Wyszogrod. Simha Epstein was already half-dead and Liebisch David Freizinger who looked like a very old person.

We were heavily bombed along the way. We would leave the train car and disperse to find shelter in the fields. In one of the gardens we found sugar canes which we began guzzling to relieve our hunger and while doing so filling our pockets with canes to eat later and to use as barter for cigarettes. There was also one stop that landed us in a potato field. We dug the young potatoes and ate them unpeeled. Every day 20-30 people died in the train car and taken out into the fields. It was less crowded. We hoped to at least have more space but the stupid criminals did not forget even in the days of their definite and fast approaching end to keep making our life miserable by continuously overcrowding our train car.

We continued on. One time we stopped at a lot full of rafters and planks near a stream. We put pots of water over campfire and cooked unpeeled potatoes. The Russian prisoners of war ruled over us. Each Jew was given soup with 2 pieces of potato and the Russians kept hitting us during meal time. Many Jews died under their hands. Apparently, Russian antisemitism was just as bad as that of the German Nazis.

Jews died here of hunger and fatigue. A Jew filled a cup with water, brought it to his mouth and died in the middle of drinking it in front of my eyes and those of Herschel Neuman.

I carried the dead to burial along with three other Jews. When we stopped to rest after about 180 meters, a Russian prisoner of war came over, cut a slice from a dead body and ate it in front of us. I almost went out of my mind seeing this.

Zvi Neuman and I decided to escape but the SS arrived to separate the Jews from the Aryans for transport to Theresienstadt. My Kapo ,who looked Aryan, moved to the side of the Aryans with his secretary. When we separated to go, American bombers arrived, showered several bombs and most of the Aryans were killed, including my Kapo, Feder, a pure Jew with clean hands, what a shame.

30.4.1945. We arrived in Theresienstadt, to the Hamburg barracks. It was an enormous ghetto for the Jews of all diasporas. There were rumors that human incinerators will be built here to quickly exterminate the remaining Jews. It is unknown whether the rumors were true. Hunger prevailed. Food storages were full but Shtashskin, the Czech Jew ghetto manager, left us to starve and left the inventory to himself. Zvi and I discovered a pile of potato peels which we gorged and we survived. There was actually complete freedom of movement within the ghetto, there were no Kapos nor Gestapo. Only near the high barbed wire fence Czech soldiers armed with sticks stood to prevent an escape, but inside the ghetto no one stopped us from searching and rummaging. We cooked the potato peels and ate them.

Even so, starvation persisted. We organized and sent a delegation to the camp manager demanding he give us food but he bribed them with office jobs and we were left hungry. A Typhus epidemic spread through the camp causing the death of scores of Jews and the near-death of many others. We decided to send a large delegation to cut through the fence and insist the Red Cross help us. Someone informed the manager who yelled at us that were conspiring against the regime, endangering ourselves with a death penalty, and what are we doing but this was already May 7, 1945, and he knew his end was fast approaching so he referred us to the Judenrat saying that he is a simple follower of their orders. Five of us including myself went to the Judenrat. It took four hours of bargaining until they assented to release a daily ration of 400 grams of bread, a slice of cheese, and a small piece of sausage per person as well as to open a hospital to isolate the sick.

While we were bartering with the Judenrat, several Russians passed through the camp gate, saw the Czech policemen with the sticks and asked them what this place is. When they heard the answer, they yelled a Russian expletive and ordered the gates be opened. Jews began hugging the Russian soldiers and dancing around them with the bits of vitality they still had in them. With barely enough energy, everyone raided the food storerooms.

By the time we emerged from haggling with the Judenrat, the storerooms were already empty. I was able to take only a sack of potatoes.

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For some reason, the Russians as well decided to close the ghetto on us. Maybe for fear of the rampant fast spreading epidemic. Dead bodies covered the streets and we stepped on them.

I was fed up with the locked gates and along with Zvi decided to escape. We snuck out the window that night and arrived in Warsaw on May 20, 1945. Jews there told us to keep running because the Pols were massacring the remaining Jews by throwing them out of train windows in motion.

We fled on foot to Wyszogrod. On the way, we were told in Sochaczew that the Pols murdered Yaacov Schlosberg's son-in-law in broad daylight. We arrived in Wyszogrod on May 23, 1945. We found Yoskeh Levin and his wife Marishka, Itzhak Pasterniak, Efraim Buchner, and Israel Schwartsberd.

We stayed in town for five months during which I married my wife, may she live a long life. My daily routine was to go to the destructed synagogue, sit on the foundations and cry. Every other day I walked the perimeter of the cemetery asking forgiveness from the dead and saying Kadish for the ascent of the souls to the next world.

At the cemetery there were no gravestones nor memorial mention. The town was demolished and desolate, not a Jew in the street. When we reached the Vistula before entering the town, Goyim who saw us made signs of the cross on their chests saying they did not believe it possible to ever see surviving Jews returning. To our question about Jews who remained in town they answered yes but in truth only Goyim were there.

Wyszogrod was and is no longer. A graveyard, memories of youth and childhood, and vanished hopes and dreams are all that remain. The illusion of possible life in diaspora is buried there forever.

I dedicate my notes to the memory of days past so that future generations remember what has happened to past generations. So that the horrors will not be forgotten and will be believed – the Goyim are capable of sinking low down a slope. I did my best not to spotlight myself other than as a medium through which to deliver the facts that did happen to me and would have lost valuable illustrative qualities without my perspective – that is the only reason of mentioning myself.

At the end of my notes, I take the liberty of several sentences about myself as an individual. They too hold symbolic and moral lessons.

In November 1945 I travelled from Wyszogrod to Germany to make Aliya to Israel. I arrived in Israel in 1949 several days before celebrations of our state's Independence Day and I see this as symbolic of my live and our generation.

The symbolism is not coincidental, it turns out, because we were granted a miracle by God in Heaven of a swift transition between the liberation from the Nazi nightmare and the happiness in our new state and in the same way the memory of Amalek was erased so were our horrors and we all arrived at the event of our resurrection with whole hearts and innocent souls despite our battered, injured, anguished bodies.

Even while we were in the displaced persons camp in Eschwege and our common identifying mark was profound bereavement - I shook myself and focused all my energy and diligence into public activism garnering support for Israel. I did so as a member of Agudath Israel, my movement, but in the name of all of Israel and for its benefit. When we received the news mid-May 1948 of the founding of the state I was honored to have been chosen by camp management to lead a celebratory parade to express our excitement. When I roared my military commands, I finally felt an autonomous man who is the ruler of his fate and an independent person.

I pray:

Master of the Universe, guard us from horrors, grant peace to our state and strength to your people! We stood through enough! Grant that our children never know what diaspora is and that they never go to foreign countries. May our suffering be ransom and absolution for them as well. And peace upon Israel for generations and generations.

Foundations of the Demolished Synagogue

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Remember, September 26, 1939 – 16 Elul – the day the Nazi Ashmedai began the destruction of European Jewry and six million were annihilated by his impure hands damn him. Remember, December 1939 – Kislev – the Nazis began to demolish our magnificent synagogue, the Wyszogrod place of Torah study, the pride of our town and the heart of its community. Remember, March 6, 1941 – 5 Adar – the day 700 Wyszogroder Jews were deported to Nowa Slupia, amoung them our last rabbi, the Genius Rabbi reb Naftali Spivak z”l and our posek the Genius Rabbi David Zvi Lubin z”l. Remember, that only 3-4 of the Jews deported that day survived. Remember, that was also the day the savage Natzis built the Open Wyszogrod Ghetto and crammed all its Jews into half of Plotska Street, the corner of Krotka Street and Ogrodowa Street, and the corner of Knishta Street. Four families in one room. Remember, August 8, 1941 – 9 B'Av - the murderers closed the the ghetto with barbed wire and deprived our Jews all remnants of their hope and freedom. Remember, in July 1941 – the Nazi murderers squeezed hundreds of men, women, children and elderly who returned from Nowa Slupia and Warsaw into four trucks and sent them to their deaths. They vanished that day without a trace, their place of death unknown. May God avenge them. Remember, on that same day 500 additional Jews were transferred through the Vistula to Warsaw and they never returned. Remember, on Shabbat parashat Va'yetze 1941 the Nazis and their local assistants liquidated the Wyszogrod Ghetto and sent all its Jews to Nowy Dwór and Czerwińsk. They never saw Wyszogrod again. Remember, December 13, 1942 – 6 Tevet – a day of sorrow on which the Nazis and their helpers burnt the remaining Wyszogrod Jews after suffocating our holy, our women, men and children together in the gas chambers of Birkenau and Auschwitz. Remember, the Jews of Nowy Dwór, Zakroczym, Leoncin, Czerwińsk and Nasielsk who were with our loved ones in Ghetto Nowy

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