| |
 |
|
|
| |
(Sidney)
Sevek Finkel
Born:
December 19th
1932
|
|
|
Brother Isaac, sister-in-law
Gertrude, Sidney age 17 - c1948
|
|
|
|
|
- Sevek Born December 19th 1932
- World War Starts for Poland September, 1, 1939
- October 1939 forced to move into a ghetto in Piotrkow
Trybunalski with sisters Ronia, Lola, Frania with
father
and mother. No schooling. Everything is taken away
from us. We exist like slaves.
- 1940 My sister Ronia is discovered outside the Ghetto
in a Christian hospital giving birth to an infant
boy.
She is shot and the child thrown out the window.
- October 1942 The ghetto of Piotrkow is liquidated
and 90 percent of the Jewish residences are put into
cattle cars and shipped to their death in Treblinka.
Amongst them are my mother, Faiga, and my youngest
sister Frania.
- My father, Lieb, together with my brother, Isaac,
and I manage to save ourselves from the gas chambers
and remain behind in the ghetto.
- Early 1943 my brother father and I go to work in
a woodworking factory called Bugaj. Camp is located
close to
our home town of Piotrkow. We stay in this slave labor
camp till November of 1944. We are loaded into cattle
cars shipped to a much worse slave labor camp in Czestochowa,
Poland. We stay there till December when
we are again put into cattle cars and arrive in Buchenwald
Concentration Camp, Germany, January 1945.
- On April 10th, one day before Buchenwald is liberated
by the Americans; we are made to march to Weimer
where we are loaded on open cars. Three weeks of starvation
and disease killed two-thirds of our transport of
1500 prisoners.
- In May 1945 we arrive in Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia.
The Germans had supposedly fled and we are
free! I catch typhus and almost die. I am reunited
with my brother, Isaac, and eventually my sister,
Lola.
- In August of 1945 the young Jewish refugees are
flown to England.
- Late in 1946 I am sent to a boarding school called
Bunce Court. I don’t know the language and had
no
schooling for six years. I am basically illiterate.
I have a very hard time fitting in but eventually,
because of the loving attitude of the teachers I begin
to learn.
- I leave for America in 1951 where my sister Lola,
now married and a mother, had preceded me. My brother
settles in England where he raised a family of one
son, Lionel, and a girl, Anita.
|
|
|
|
|
|
