America and the Holocaust

The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of approximately six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. "Holocaust" is a word of Greek origin meaning "sacrifice by fire." The Nazis, who came to power in Germany in January 1933, believed that Germans were "racially superior" and that the Jews, deemed "inferior," were an alien threat to the so-called German racial community.
During the era of the Holocaust, German authorities also targeted other groups because of their perceived "racial inferiority, the disabled, and some of the Slavic peoples Poles, Russians, and others). Other groups were persecuted on political, ideological, and behavioral grounds, among them Communists, Socialists, Jehovah's Witnesses, and homosexuals.

Nazi concentration camps, 1933-1939

European Jewish population distribution, ca. 1933

Major ghettos in occupied Europe

Extermination camps in occupied Poland, 1942

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Jewish Family Testimony

The family lived in Wieluń – Bolków village, Poland, and had 5 boys and 4 girls. The family was a very rich and prosperous. They owned a windmill, cattle and horses flock, farm, land and forests. Their house was of 4 floors. They even owned a telephone which was very rare at that time. All the villagers of Bolków worked for them. All of this was ruined and many members of the family murdered during World War II.

The father of the family was named Daniel. His father name was Abraham. Daniel died on January 1939 in Bolków Poland.

The mother of the family, Daniel's wife, Brana, was from the nearby village of Sknyńńo. She was the daughter of Dawid & Adela Berkowicz (a cousin of Daniel). She was deported during the war from Bolków to the Lututów ghetto in Poland. In August 1942 she was deported to the Chelmno extermination camp, where she was murdered.

1. The firstborn was Ruben - Jakob, who was born around 1900. He was deported from Bolków to the Łódź ghetto. In 1944 he was deported to Auschwitz - Birkenau, and from there to other German forced labor camps, along with his brother Abramek. He had a wife Brucha who perished in Auschwitz. He survived. He returned to Poland after the war, he re-married there, and immigrated to Israel in the 1950's. He died in 1967, in the Six Days War.

2. The second son was named Berek. He escaped to Russia in 1940 with his wife Helen, who passed away in Russia. He stayed there for 4 years. Then he left Russia to return to his home in Poland. He married in Łódź, had 2 girls. He moved to Israel with his family, and after a few years left for Brazil. He passed away in the year 2000, in Brazil.

3. The first daughter and third sibling of the family was named Ruth, born in 1911. She lived in Piotrków Trybunalski. She worked for the Germans in a factory during the war. In 1944 the Germans broke into her house, a German officer shot her, and left her husband Allo Berkowicz, and her 9 year old son, named Zygmuś ("Zalman" in Yiddish), in the house, later to be deported to Auschwitz - Birkenau. By some twist of fate, Meyer (who is Ruth's brother), worked in a documentation job "schreiber", that documented all of the incoming people into the camp, and when they were transported to the camp, Meyer found them in the list, and for the next 8 days, Meyer came in hiding to feed this beautiful and talented boy with an extra piece of bread or some soup. On Yom Kippur, 5705 (September 26, 1944), Meyer came to feed the boy, but the boy declined, because he said to him that tomorrow the Germans will cremate all of the boys, himself included and he doesn't need the bread anymore... That night, on the eve of Yom Kippur, 2000 children were murdered, including Zygmuś. The following day, Meyer went to feed the boy, only to be faced with an empty block.

4. The second daughter and fourth sibling of the family was named Dwora - Dorka (Dora). She was married to Goldbart and had 2 children. She was deported with them along with her mother, Brana, to the Lututów ghetto, and along with her mother, they were all deported to their death to Chelmno.

5. The third daughter and fifth sibling, Esther, got married at the start of the war. She fled with her husband Dawid Berkowicz, her husband's father and her husband's brother to Russia. She was in Russia for many years, under severe, inhospitable circumstances, where she had 2 children. At the end of the war, she returned to her home town in Poland, only to leave it after 2 weeks, in order to move to Germany as a middle station to their final destination of the US and is alive to this day. Esther Berkowicz wrote a book about her war experiences and her family.

6. The third son and sixth sibling of the family, Meyer, was suspected of sabotaging the family mill, and was sent to a German prison in Papenburg, at the German - Dutch border. There were no Jews in this prison, but because Meyer didn't look like a Jew, he was able to survive. In the winter 1941 - 2, he was released from jail, and was sent to pave roads for the German army in Wielun, under extreme conditions of cold weather. In 1942 he was deported to the Lodz ghetto, which was highly inhospitable in terms of human condition. During his 2 year "residence" in the ghetto, he worked for the Germans in order to scavenge for goods that the Jews left in their homes in the ghetto. He also met 3 of his brothers, Ruben, Abraham, and Zalman in the ghetto, and lived with them, along with 3 other people in a 1 room flat, he also met his future wife, Esther Ankielewicz in the ghetto. In 1944, the liquidation of Lodz occurred, and Meyer left in one of the last transports to Auschwitz - Birkenau for around 3 months, where he worked as a documenter of incoming people, and then from there to Braunschweig, Germany, where he worked in a car factory until his liberation, by the US army. Still in Germany, he joined the Israeli army, and immigrated to Israel along with Esther and his daughter Tzipora, in 1949 and is alive to this very day.

7. The fourth daughter and seventh sibling of the family, was named Adela, born in1921. In 1942 she received forged Aryan documents that claimed that she was Polish, and not Jewish, as was her husband, Jakob Jablonski. They escaped to Germany in order to work there, until the liberation by the Soviet army.

8. The fourth son and eighth sibling of the family, Abram "Abramek", born in 1924. During the war he was transported to the Łódź ghetto in 1942 till 1944, after which he was transported to Auschwitz - Birkenau for a couple of months, after which he was Germany to do slave labor in various labor camps, along with his brother Ruben. In August 1945, after liberation and surviving the Nazi concentration camps, he desired to visit his old home in Bolków and see if there remain other survivors from the family. When he came to his house, he was greeted by a Polish man who used to be a housekeep for the Berkowitz family, and made himself the owner of the house after the family was deported. The Polish man, former worker of the Berkowicz family, greeted Abramek very warmly, because he thought that all of the family was murdered and he was the only one left. During that night, the Polish man murdered Abramek, in order to keep the property to himself. Today, he is buried in the Jewish graveyard in Łódź, killed at the age of 19, by Polish hands, after surviving the ghettos, Auschwitz, and other German forced labor camps…

9. The fifth son and ninth sibling of the family, Zalman, was deported from Wieluń in 1942 to the Łódź ghetto, along with Meyer, Ruben and Abramek (Esther Ankielewicz was there as well). He remained there until 1943. One day, he was unexpectedly taken by the German army, at the young age of 14, and was never to be heard from again. There are some who claim that he was taken to Auschwitz in order to be a guinea pig in an experimental testing of the cremation technique.