FROM BIALYSTOK TO BERKELEY VIA AUSCHWITZ

                                           By Elijah Polak

Most Holocaust survivors of Ghettos and concentration camps exhibited symptoms of PTSD and coped in one of two ways. The first was to constantly talk and write about what happened, like Elie Wiesel, my friends Shalom Eilati and Danny Chanoch, and my mother, Fruma. Wiesel (of the mantra Never Forget) wrote Night, a widely read book based on his experiences as a prisoner in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps, Eilati published the memoir Crossing the River, detailing his experiences in the Kaunas Ghetto and as a hidden child, and Chanoch has traveled the World giving lectures about the Holocaust, as well as making the documentary Pizza in Auschwitz, about taking his two grown children for a visit to Auschwitz and to his ancestral shtetl.

In her mind, my mother was forever trapped in Stutthof, and years later she would tuck some food under her pillow in case she dreamed she was hungry. 

The second way of coping with the PTSD aftereffects was to deliberately develop (self-induced ) amnesia, to forget the whole experience as much as possible. That was the way I chose. Though some events were just too horrific to ever be suppressed, I managed to mostly disengage myself from the Ghetto-Concentration camp memories.

Unfortunately, such self-induced amnesia is all-encompassing rather than selective and, in the process, I have lost most memories of my childhood and of some post WWII experiences. My memories are therefore very fragmentary.

I was born in Bialystok, Poland, in 1931. My father, a civil engineer, frequently worked on road construction far from home. We were a multilingual family: Yiddish, Polish, Russian, and some German and Lithuanian were spoken interchangeably. In 1939, as a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Poland was partitioned between

Germany and the Soviet Union, and Bialystok became part of the Soviet Union, along with the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. In 1941, we were living in Kaunas (Kovno), Lithuania, when, in July, it was overrun by the Nazis as part of Operation Barbarossa, a campaign intended to conquer the Soviet Union. Many

Lithuanians viewed the Nazis as liberators from the Soviet occupation and were eager to collaborate with them.

In particular, shortly before the Germans formed the Kaunas Ghetto, members of the Lithuanian Rifle Association rounded up some 10,000 Jews in Kaunas and shot them at an abandoned World War I fortification. The surviving Jews, including my father, my mother, my uncle Paul, and myself, were herded into a section of town called Vilijampole, or the Slabodke, in Yiddish, which got fenced off and became the Kaunas Ghetto. (For a detailed description of the bleak life in the Ghetto, see Shalom Eilati’s memoir Crossing the River, available on Amazon.) Records show that the Ghetto was subjected to several Akzions (roundups) during which large groups of people were selected and removed for extermination, and that early in 1944 the remaining GhettoJews were transferred to a Concentration Camp not far from the Ghetto, where men and women were housed in bunks in separate barracks but were free to move around in the camp.

All I remember of Ghetto life is eating potato peels, being forced to go to a square to watch a man being hanged, sent to a trade school of sorts to learn locksmithing and machine tool operation, spending endless hours there learning to file a flat, being uprooted with my family from the Ghetto to the nearby Concentration Camp, and put to work in a machine shop there. I also remember a man attempting to commit suicide by hanging himself off a hook in the lintel of a door in the barracks and men rushing to rescue him. I also remember the last children’s Akzion (March 27, 1944) when the SS was rounding up most of the remaining children and the German sergeant in charge of the machine shop saved my life by telling the SS that he needed this boy to operate a lathe. After that last children’s roundup, only 131 boys remained. There seems to be no record of how many girls survived.

In July 1944, as the Red Army drew nearer, the Germans decided to evacuate the Kaunas Concentration Camp. We were loaded onto boxcars and sent westward. After a few hours, we reached Stutthof (in northern Poland, on the Baltic coast), a major concentration camp, where all the women, girls, and small children were taken off the

train. The smaller children, their mothers, and the old women were killed upon arrival; the remaining women and girls, including my mother, were confined to the camp. The men and 131 bigger boys remained on the train. After a few more days on the train, we arrived in Landsberg (in southern Germany on the Austrian border), a Dachau satellite camp. The camp was still under construction. We were to be used as labor in the construction of huge underground bunkers in which the Germans planned to build Messerschmitt 22 jets, the Nazis’ so-called surprise weapon for winning the war in the summer of 1944.

My recollection of Landsberg (which is close to 2,000 feet high) is that it was cold at night. We were housed in fiberboard huts without running water or toilets. We were supposed to use outdoor latrines. The men still had a certain amount of script that had been used as pay for work in the Ghetto. It was now worthless, and the men dumped it into the open pit latrines. The German guards promptly ordered a few men to strip, dive into the

chest-deep excrement, and extricate the bills. A week later, the guards collected the children, including me, who were unsuitable for use in the bunker construction project, and shipped them, in two trucks, to Dachau, the mother camp. We were held in Dachau for ten days.

Then we were sent by freight train to Auschwitz-Birkenau, a journey which took 3 days. We arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau on the night of July 31-August 1, 1944. I have a few recollections of Auschwitz-Birkenau. We were not fed the first few days after our arrival while the guards were deciding whether to let us into the camp or send us directly to the gas chambers. But I will never forget that some Russian prisoners of war in the enclosure next to ours threw us some bread, which they could ill afford to lose, over a barbed wire fence. The stench of the crematoriums permeated the air. I remember standing in line to be tattooed and getting number B-2869, sleeping in a three-story bunk with many others, keeping very still to save energy, and huddling up to

the guy next to me for warmth. The food was hauled in, in buckets, a murky slop with something floating in it that some claimed was human flesh. A kapo with a stick beat the bare buttocks of anyone who committed a perceived offense. In my own case, I was taken to a hospital with a bout of diphtheria and was left to treat myself by hand-picking large chunks of gunk out of my throat. Miraculously, I survived. When I was released from the hospital, I fainted in the shower. A few days later, there was a selection in which Dr. Mengele selected and removed the smaller kids for his experiments. I fainted, fortunately unnoticed by the guards, right after the selection.

With the Soviet Army only a few days away, on January 18, 1945, the SS began evacuating Auschwitz and its satellite camps. Nearly 60,000 prisoners, mostly Jews, were forced to march to the city of Wodzislaw in the western part of Upper Silesia. SS guards shot anyone who fell behind or could not continue. The death march lasted several days, and I was frost bitten on my hands, face, and feet while sleeping at night on straw in some barn. More than 15,000 died on the march. In Wodzislaw, the prisoners were loaded onto unheated freight trains and deported to concentration camps in Germany, particularly to Flossenbürg, Sachsenhausen, Gross-Rosen,

Buchenwald, Dachau, and Mauthausen. I got shipped to Gross-Rosen, where corpses were stacked like cords of wood and where I was surrounded by many men in the last agony of dying. I remember trying to pull a pair of good shoes off a dying man because mine were shot and, in this unbelievable hell, other prisoners yelling at me: ‘‘Wait until he dies."

After a fairly short stay surviving in Gross- Rosen, I was shipped to Buchenwald, where, thanks to the ongoing chaos, I could pretend to be a Russian and landed in the Russian prisoner-of-war camp. Life with the Russians was definitely a bit easier than in the Jewish part of the camp. After the U.S. Army liberated Buchenwald on April 15, 1945, Jewish rescue teams came to help survivors. They found Elie Wiesel in the Jewish partof the Buchenwald camp, and they shipped him to Paris, but they did not find me, since they did not look for Jews among the Russian prisoners-of-war.

Here, my memory grows murky. The nearby city of Weimar and the Buchenwald camp were ceded by the Americans to the Soviet Army. A few days after liberation, I do not remember how, I found myself traveling east on Soviet hospital trains. I have no recollection of where I found food or where I slept. My first definitive recollection is being pistol whipped in the middle of the night in a park in Lviv (in the Ukraine) by a man

who grabbed the small bundle of stuff I was carrying and forced me to give him my pants. In the morning, when I was wandering the streets of Lviv in tattered underwear, I ran into a Russian officer who asked me what happened. When I told him, he handed me the two bags of groceries that he was carrying and all the cash in his wallet. And he pointed me to a repatriation center. He undoubtedly saved my life.

My next memory is of finding myself in a Jewish orphanage in Kaunas with a bunch of Jewish kids who had survived the war in Uzbekistan. I was emaciated, skin and bones. I had scabies and was running a low-grade fever. The scabies infection was quickly treated with a vile-smelling hydrogen sulfide solution. But to deal with the effects of starvation, the orphanage had to send me to a TB sanitarium. There, they concentrated on building up my weight by feeding me glasses of hot goat milk with big chunks of butter melted in it. And added to that, sandwiches filled with large chunks of smoked pork lard. After a couple of months, I returned to the orphanage, still extremely thin, but more or less functioning.

I think I had completed four years of primary school before the war. Of my prewar education, I remember that in first grade my left arm was tied behind my back to convert me from a south paw to a right-hander because, like Leonardo da Vinci, I was producing script that could only be read in a mirror. I also remember being very bored

and getting advanced a grade at some point. Also, my parents kept moving me from one language school to another, with the last year in a Yiddish school and the one before that in a Lithuanian one. The orphanage kids attended a Russian-language school, so I was enrolled along with them. I do not remember which grade, but I seemed to be coping. Although I could speak Russian, I could not write it, but I must have picked up

writing in Cyrillic characters very quickly.

My father perished in Auschwitz in August of 1944, and my uncle Paul was killed by a felled tree in Landsberg, but my mother survived and was liberated in Stutthof. After liberation, my mother headed for Bialystok, where she became a cook for a small group of Jews living communally. She managed to contact her sister Sarah Friedman in Dayton, Ohio, who always included a $20 bill in her letters to my mother. In addition,

my mother found an organization dedicated to reuniting families, and it helped her find me in the Kaunas orphanage. She used Aunt Sarah’s money to pay a Russian NKVD major stationed in Bialystok to escort me across the border into Poland.

Life in Bialystok was bleak. My mother and I shared a small room in a large building without running water or a toilet. The toilets and washrooms were at the end of long corridors. Armed guards were stationed at the front door because returning Jews had to be protected from roving anti-Semitic Polish gangs. Our room was furnished with two folding army cots and three wooden crates: one for a table and two for chairs. We used a public bath once a week. It was too dangerous for a Jewish kid to attend school where there was a possibility of having acid thrown in your face. With no possibility of continuing my education, I went to work as a blacksmith’s apprentice. Our smithy had no power tools, and the work was hot and strenuous. Often, we were paid in vodka, and

I developed a considerable tolerance for alcohol. My crowning achievement was a pair of wrought iron gates for a local cemetery.

We lived like that for almost a year. In the meantime, my mother got romantically involved with Lejba Szachnes, a miller from nearby Krynki, who had been taken prisoner of war by the Soviets in 1939 and spent the war years in Uzbekistan. His wife and two children were killed by the Germans. Fortunately for him, before the war, a small

community of Krynki people had settled in Melbourne, Australia. Lejba contacted them, and they arranged immigration papers and transportation for him to go to Australia. It was agreed that once he was settled, he would obtain immigration papers for my mother and me and that they would marry once we arrived.

From here on, my memories become much clearer. Fortunately for my mother and me, we had cousins in Orleans, France. Our cousins, Leah and Aaron Amrofel, offered to take us in while we were waiting to go to Australia, and we lived with them from Spring 1948 to May 1949. We moved from our one-room hole to their magnificent mansion on the outskirts of Orleans, a home that had once belonged to a Russian prince. They had six children of their own, three boys and three girls, and they had also adopted a nephew whose parents were killed by the Nazis. The family had somehow managed to survive the War in central France and escaped internment. My cousins owned a clothing store in Orleans and operated a bus-like mobile store as well, which they drove to the markets in the small surrounding towns. They were extremely busy. My mother immediately took over the kitchen for them. I helped some in the markets. 

While the rest of us could get along in Yiddish, my young cousins spoke only French and, as a result, my French improved very rapidly. The whole process was further helped along by a weekly private lesson and serious self-study, which consisted of plowing through 50 condensed French novels. My French teacher, Mr. Jahan, was the high school principal. We did not have a language in common, which occasionally led to amusing situations. He had a poster on his wall that said ‘‘A Quoi Bon?’’ He was unable to explain to me what it meant, and it took some months for me to figure out that it meant “What’s the Point?” By the time we left, after almost a year, I was fluent in French, and my written French was quite decent. Life in France was pleasant, and I fondly remember the summer holiday that our cousins took us along to in Pornichet, a resort town on the Atlantic Coast. It was there that I first tasted cherries, and thinking that they were grapes, I swallowed them pit and all.

Eventually, our papers came through, and we left for Melbourne. After four weeks at sea, 16 of them without seeing land, and traveling in the hold of a converted freighter, the Luciano Manara, which was carrying jeeps as well as a group of migrants, we landed in Melbourne. My first impression of Australia, where my mother and I arrived with $20 between the two of us, occurred while we were standing at the end of a very long line of mostly male migrants waiting to pass Customs Inspection and Immigration. The Customs Inspector spotted my mother, went over to his office, and brought out a chair for my mother to sit on. I could see immediately that Australia was a most welcoming, civil country, and it was going to be easy to make progress for anybody willing to work

hard.

My mother and Lejba Szachnes married within days of our arrival. With the help of Lejba’s Krynki connections, they bought a very large house in Caulfield (a suburb of Melbourne). My mother converted it into a boarding house for tram drivers and conductors, most of whom were recent arrivals from Britain and also started a small

A kosher catering business that served food and drink at Jewish functions. My stepfather and I were the haulers, wait staff, and bartenders. In addition, my stepfather was employed as a laborer at the Australian Jewish News, and I printed mailing labels for the newspaper as a part-time job.

Since I was not living in an environment where I was constantly immersed in English, learning English turned out to be much harder than learning French. For about a year, I took weekly private English lessons and made use of a sequence of well-known novels that were rewritten using a progressively larger vocabulary: 500 words,1000 words, 5000 words. By the time I was ready to resume my formal education, I had been out of school for 10 years and was way too old to go to a regular high school. A fellow Holocaust survivor suggested that I enroll in the George Taylor and Staff private school that catered to Australian children whose education had been disrupted by various circumstances. Without question, George Taylor and Staff had a wonderful system for bringing students up to level. Thanks to them, within three years, I passed the State of Victoria-wide matriculation exam (U.S. high school equivalency), graduating with second-class honors, and got admitted to the Department of Electrical Engineering of the University of Melbourne with a small scholarship to boot. Those days, university education was free in Australia. I continued to work part-time both for my parents and for the Australian Jewish News. Despite the extra load, I graduated in 1956 with second-class honors.

Engineering students were required to spend the summer of their third year in industry. I was accepted by the research laboratory of ICI (Imperial Chemical Industries. They gave me the assignment of checking out the circuit diagrams for the control system for a new ammonia plant that was designed by my boss, Bill Tetley. After studying them for a few weeks, I concluded that the control system would not work and told the Chief Engineer about it. Since I was only a lowly summer student, my opinion was ignored, and the system was installed just before Christmas 1955. That Christmas day, I got a call at home from the Chief Engineer informing me that I was right, the control system did not work. Since not operating the system caused the company a 25,000-pound

loss a day, would consider coming in and fixing it. It took me a few days, with the help of a union electrician, to jury-rig a working control system. As a reward, I got a bonus and was sent to a Time-and-Motion-Study school for three weeks, which was a very interesting experience, not least because sherry was served during the afternoon

breaks. When I graduated, ICI offered me a position as an instrument and control engineer in their research laboratory. It did not take many months before it became obvious that I was ill-prepared to tackle the very difficult problems that we were being asked to solve. The chief engineer suggested that I go abroad for graduate studies.

I applied to MIT, Northwestern and the University of California, Berkeley (UCB). I was accepted by the UC Department of Electrical Engineering. Also, I was offered a teaching assistantship that paid my fees and given a stipend I could live on. At the end of 1957, I arrived by ship in San Francisco, just before the 1958 Winter Semester this time traveling third class with stops in Honolulu and Vancouver, Canada. I dropped off my trunk at the International House, where I was going to live and took a train to Dayton, Ohio, to meet my aunt Sarah Friedman, her six children, and numerous grandchildren. I must have stayed a month with them during that visit. I also visited Detroit to meet the Greenbergs, descendants of my aunt Yeta, my mother’s other American sister.

Back in the Bay Area, I settled down to my studies and work. I was awarded an MSEE degree in 1959 and a Ph.D. in 1961. In 1958, I was a summer internship student at the National Cash Register Company in Dayton, their first Jewish employee, and lived with my aunt Sarah. In 1959and 1960, I interned for the summer at the IBM Research

Laboratory in San Jose, California.

After graduating, I went back briefly to Australia, but the academic employment situation was grim there, so I returned to the U.S. I was offered and accepted an Assistant Professor position from the University of California, Berkeley, where I remained for the rest of my professional life until I retired in January 1993, as a Full

Professor. During my academic career, I wrote four books and close to 300 papers. During this period, I also supervised the doctoral research of 34 students. In 1968, I was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship at the Institut Blaise Pascal in Paris, France, which enabled me to escape the free speech movement chaos at Berkeley as

well as to refresh my French. At the time, the Institut Blaise Pascal was a socialist and communist hotbed, and everybody hated Americans. Since I was the only American at the Institut, all of their wrath was spent on me. As my French quickly revived, I was able to respond in kind. In fact, it seems I became so proficient at responding to their criticisms that years later French people would remind me of how nasty my retorts had

become.

In the early 1970’s, I began a close and very fruitful collaboration with Professor David Mayne, of Imperial College, London, England, which let to United Kingdom Science Research Council Senior Postdoctoral Fellow awards at Imperial College, London, England, in 1972, 1976, 1979, 1982, 1985, 1988, and in 1990. Each time I was awarded a fellowship in England, I would spend three months in London during which a lot of nice research work was done. While at the International House, I met Ginette Gray, a Unitarian, who was studying Library Science, and we fell in love. Ginette converted to Judaism and we married in 1961. We had two children, Oren and Sharon, who gave us 5 grandchildren: Alexander,Arielle, Avraham, and Nathaniel from Oren and Rachel from Sharon.