I was in the Lodz Ghetto for four years.  The Germans rounded up my family members. Only my mother and I were left in our apartment on Piepzowa #4 when they liquidated the ghetto in 1944.  The Lodz Ghetto was horrible.  I saw Germans killing babies, I saw people dying from hunger.  If they ran out of bread in the bread line, you didn’t eat that day.  I was very lucky.  One time, when my mother was away, the Germans pulled up to round up Jews in our area.  I was 14 years old.  I locked the door and hid behind the stove.  A German soldier broke down the door and came into our apartment. I was so scared.  The German looked right at me and said to his partner in the hall, “nobody’s here.”  

 

My mother and I were taken to Birkenau.  When they opened the door of the train, they pushed me to the right, and my mother to the left.  I didn’t see her anymore. At Birkenau, I saw sparks at night coming from the crematorium; the chimney was going day and night.  I saw a lot of people being beaten in the concentrations camps.  I was lucky, I was never hit.  Someone was watching over me.  I was one of the lucky ones; I was picked to go from Birkenau to Auschwitz.  They picked 75 boys to become bricklayers.  That’s when I got the tattoo, B 8049.

 

On the death march, we stopped over for a couple of days; there was a big tent they had set up in advance.  One time, we were bombed by a German plane; a lot of people were killed.  The next day I saw some people eating “meat.”  I was liberated in Gunskirchen outside of Linz, Austria.

 

In the DP camp, we still had to stay in a line to wait for food.  I signed up to go to Israel, Australia, or America and went with the first country that would take me.  America came through the first so in 1947, I left for New York.  The United States Committee helped.  When I came to New York, the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) helped me.  They sent me first to an orphan’s home in Cleveland and then to Detroit

To learn more about this survivor, please visit this site.
https://www.holocaustcenter.org/visit/library-archive/oral-history-department/pludwinski-jack/

 

Learn about the Holocaust and never forget what happened to our people and others during those times.