R' Aaron Shalom Krochmal's Story of Surviving the Holocaust

R’ Aaron Shalom Krochmal’s Firsthand Account of Surviving the Holocaust

Just a brief observation, before writing down the story of my survival from the Holocaust. According to the Webster's dictionary, the word Holocaust means burnt whole. Another meaning is a sacrifice consumed by fire. In the French translation of Chumash, the word is used to translate the Karbon Olah. In the absence of Karbanos it is interesting that the churban of Europe is referred to by the same word. My story shows how intricate Hashgacha Pratis is.

In Vienna, where I was born, my parents and I lived at 29 Kleine Pfargasse on the second floor with a window overlooking the street. My grandparents on my mother's side lived on the fourth or fifth floor in the same building. They had a textile business, which they ran from the apartment. My mother did millinery work in our apartment. Then, my parents opened up a store, -like a haberdashery- and my mother did millinery in the back.

When the German's took over, I (age 3) was looking out the window one morning. Soldiers would walk by, and every time an officer would come by, they would do their stiff salute. One time, two soldiers decided to practice their goose step. When seeing this, I burst out laughing. They looked up and correctly concluded that I was laughing at them. Enraged, they ran up the stairs and I don't know what they would have done to me if my mother hadn't talked them out of it while I was hiding under the table. I was very frightened.

Not long after, the Gestapo closed off the store and came looking for my father. Somehow, he was in hiding at the time and wasn't caught. Shortly after Kristallnacht, we made a planned getaway in the middle of the night -my grandparents, uncles, parents, and I. A car took us to the train station. Almost everything was left behind. We went to Koln. There the customs, all Nazi's, opened up the Tefillin to check for contraband (smuggled goods). Adults had to undress. I had my mother's engagement ring in my coat pocket and they never looked there.

From Koln, some guides smuggled us over the border into Belgium in the dead of the night. We followed the guides, by the light of cigarettes that they hid in the palm of their hands. There was snow on the ground and my mother slipped and broke her elbow. We walked until we came to an opening in the barbed wire on the border that the guides had cut. We slipped through to a farmhouse on the Belgium side. From there we went to Antwerp. My mother had to have a pin put in her elbow and was in the hospital for a long time. We all stayed in one apartment. I started school at the Tachkemoni School in Flemish (language).

When the Germans ran over Belgium, we joined thousands of others on the run from Antwerp. Somehow, we wound up in Dunkirk at the time the British were evacuating. They led us clear out of the minefields and gave us canned goods. We were sleeping in a furniture store or warehouse when a bomb exploded a few blocks away. The force of the explosion threw us in the air on top of the bed and there was a bright flash. At the times when we would find ourselves under the sound of bullets, we would throw ourselves to the ground and wait it out. We weren't getting anywhere so we went back to Antwerp.

On a second try we made it to France and wound up in Paris. Before the Germans took over Paris, we went to Nice. There I (age 7) continued school but this time in French. I forgot Flemish. We stayed there for about a year. When the Germans took over southern France, we went to Marseilles. Over the yomim noraim we hid in the country near Marseilles. No minyan. After that I was placed in a children's home run by the Lubavitcher Rebbe for a few weeks and then taken out.

We went to Luchon in the Pyrenees Mountains. There we had a minyan under the guidance of Rabbi Rubinstein, who later escaped to Switzerland. A group of men including my father decided to smuggle into Spain. My Uncles made it to Portugal, and from there they took a ship to Philadelphia. My father gave up and came back to Luchon. We tried to smuggle into Spain again. After hiking all night, the guides told us to slide down a deep mountain incline on the Spanish side to the highway below, and disappeared into the mountains.

Once on the highway we decided to walk to the left. After about twenty minutes, we saw a whole group of people in the distance walking in our direction (looked fishy). It turned out to be another group, walking under armed guard of Spanish soldiers or policemen who told us to follow them. We came to a building where we stayed overnight. The next day, quite a number of younger people escaped and headed into Spain. My father, mother, grandmother and I waited.

The Spanish marched us back towards France, and handed us over to the French police who together with the Germans marched us to France, where we wound up in St. Gaudens. We were put in the police station detention cell overnight, dark, dank, and with no toilet, like common criminals. We needed to use the facilities. We had to knock until a policeman with a rifle on his shoulder took us. I was so frightened and frustrated that I couldn't function, and my system was out of commission for a long time afterwards. The following day, we were taken to what must have been headquarters and it was negotiated with the police to put me in a catholic girl’s school, which was empty for holiday vacation at the time, under the supervision of the nuns. My father and a policeman accompanied me there at night and we were separated.

My mother and grandmother in one cell and my father in a separate cell were put in jail. A few days later, one of the nuns got permission from the magistrate to take me to see my family in jail. I spoke to them through a wired window- my mother and grandmother on my left side and my father on the right side. They couldn't see each other because a wall separated them. They sort of communicated through me on the outside. The session was cut short and that was the last time I saw my father.

Reb. Meir Shapiro zatzal had an older brother by the name of Reb. Avraham, whose son, Dov (Bertshe), married the daughter of Mr. Gassenbauer. We had all been in Luchon together. Somehow my mother wrote to Mr. Gassenbauer about me and he came to negotiate my release in St. Gaudens and took me back to Luchon. A day later, we (Mr. Gassesbauer, his son, and I) were walking from the outskirts of town, where they were staying, towards the town. Along came a patrol of three German soldiers who discovered three Jews (us). As we listened, they debated among themselves. One said, "Shoot them!" the other said, “Let's first take them to headquarters." The third was indifferent. Anyway, they decided to take us to headquarters where we were relinquished (released).

Mr. Gassenbauer saw that it was too dangerous to keep me there and he sent me to somebody else at the other side of town, who thought of various underground connections. As a result, I wound up with members of some sort of Jewish community or underground organization, and traveled with them by train. Eventually I was taken to Toulouse where they tried to place me in a family setting. First it was with a vegetable farmer on the outskirts of the city, but they couldn't keep me because I didn't have the necessary papers to make it legal. Then I was placed with a half Jewish family (the lady was Jewish). They didn't want to keep me. The daughter of a family, active in the underground Jewish committee, was a leader in the cub scouts together with a non- Jewish lady whose new husband had become prisoner of war right at the start of the war. They got to talk, and the Jewish girl asked her friend if she could find me a place to stay. They made up to bring me at night in front of the city hall and she would see what she could do. She and a friend from the underground came to the appointed spot and I was transferred. They took me in front of her house and Berthe told her friend to wait with me while she went inside to ask her mother if she could bring me in. The mother agreed and they took me in. The underground provided the necessary papers.

The school administration was sympathetic and I was registered in school. I passed for a regular French kid with a French sounding name. I also became a cub scout and participated fully in all the activities. The family consisted of Mr. Edmond Baylac and his wife Leonie, daughters Henriette and Berthe (Jean Pichon was prisoner of war) and son Francois. I became the little brother. Francois shared his room with me even though I was incontinent for several months. Mr. Edmond Baylac did not live at home because he was confined to a wheel chair. He had suffered an injury at work and was partially paralyzed. He stayed at a hospital and visited from time to time. He was also completely sympathetic and made me shoes using material from old used shoes, which came in very handy in the winter time. Most of the year children went barefoot. The older people wore sabots - wooden shoes.

To my French schoolmates, Berthe was my mother, Madame Baylac my grandmother, and Francois my father. Francois worked down the street in his atelier (workshop) pasting together “poches en papier” (paper bags) by hand at night and selling them from a pushcart in the marketplace by day along with various packing paper goods. He would also stay up to all hours doing homework for a correspondence course he was taking.

Berthe had an office job with the "assurances sociales" (social security office), where she would be in touch with the underground network. She would get wind of any planned roundup by the Nazis and on several urgent occasions she came home early from work and alerted the family. Francois whisked me away to the country where we stayed with a cousin of the family, who was a farmer, for weeks at a time until it was deemed safe to return to the city. This happened two or three times during my two years stay.

During the summers, I was sent to " colonie de vacances" first to Pringy near the Swiss border. The administration people knew I was Jewish (they would nod at each other while observing me in the shower room) but kept quiet.

The second summer I was sent to Dabeaux in the Pyrenees. They were sympathetic to the underground and the Maquis would come out of the woods and teach the counselors how to shoot guns.

By then the only language I knew was French. I had forgotten German, Flemish, and Yiddish.

As to my family, they were transferred to a series of concentration camps in France- Noe, Curs. My father was then sent to Drancy and from there to the Lublin region - Sobibor, killed at age 39 because he was a Jew. While on that subject let me also mention that my father's parents and five of my father's siblings, some married with families, had stayed in Lemberg and also perished.

My mother was able to pull the right strings in the bureaucratic maze (while in the concentration camps she was constantly writing letters) and managed to get transferred with my grandmother to Douadic and then they were released with a permit to settle in Le Puy, Hte hoire, a small town. There, a small group of Jews managed to be in the good graces of the catholic clergy under the unique leadership of Rabbi Poliatchek zatzal, whose son Jean would warn the Jews to stay indoors when a roundup would be in the making. After the war Jean Poliatchek became Professor of French literature at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. I met him on my trip to Israel, in 1966, in Bayit Vagan, but I wasn't fluent in my French anymore.

My mother found out where I was - through the underground - and even sent me a letter and a bundle of mostly useless things, which had to be returned with the messenger who had brought it. For example: leather shoes I couldn't wear, (even if they had fit, they would have been a give-away as to my identity). We didn't know where my mother was but shortly after the liberation, at the first opportunity, she came to pick me up and I joined my mother and grandmother in Le Puy. We lived there until we came to the U.S. in March 1946, which took 11 days by boat. The following September, I had my Bar Mitzva in New York.

As far as financial support, I think my mother was able to get money from my uncles in the U.S. through a great aunt, Regina Wald, in Switzerland. Regina Wald was the wife of the brother of my step-grandfather. Her son Shalom is now a lawyer with UNESCO.

Now this story is very simple. Or is it?

“It's all nisim. No chachmos. (wisdom)

After the war, I kept on writing to the family who saved me. The Hakaras Hatov which is felt knows no bounds.

Here is an excerpt that was translated from a letter dated October 17, 1966, written by Berthe Pichon.

My children are happy to have known you. Henriette (the one who looks like me) said, " It seems like I met a legendary person." Legendary? Why? I asked her. "First, because he was born during your youth. Then because he belongs to those times, so hard and that war. Finally, because he is part of that prestigious people, the people of Israel, and that thanks to you he wasn't killed by the Germans."

These thoughts left me dreamy. Because, for me you are this little child, little bird, that fell from the nest, that I went to pick up one evening, Place du Capitole, and that I loved right away like a young brother very dear.

My heart is filled for you with a whole lot of things that I couldn't express. I think the friendship or love that we can have for one another is the most beautiful thing that G-D has given us and I thank him for it infinitely. And it is so good to think that this friendship exists between us, despite the distance, the difference in education, and the race. It is there, very pure. Thank you for having kept it.

Photo Album:

https://photos.app.goo.gl/8StFyxnj4AV7fzDb9

Project Witness: Aaron Krochmal A"H

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zcLgxnt0uU