Irving Shapiro Interview (Part 1)

Konrad Pregowski Author

04/07/2022 Added

67 Plays

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Interview with Irving Shapiro of Gering, Nebraska.

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[00:00:04.200]My name is Irvin Shapiro. I'm a businessman from Gering,
[00:00:08.730]Nebraska. Of course I wasn't always a businessman.
[00:00:15.480]I had, well,
[00:00:18.980]I was born in Meidzyrzec Poland, April the 15th,
[00:00:23.330]1923. I had a large family,
[00:00:27.920]lots of aunts, uncles, and cousins
[00:00:32.480]and grandparents.
[00:00:34.790]And they all perished during the Holocaust.
[00:00:41.570]The only one
[00:00:45.050]I had left was my younger brother,
[00:00:49.550]which I was shipped out together with him into a camp.
[00:00:54.350]named Majdanek and I had him for three months.
[00:00:59.390]After three months,
[00:01:00.770]they shipped him away on a transport and I never saw him again.
[00:01:07.520]I'm still trying to find him — search for him,
[00:01:14.840]but I didn't have any luck so far.
[00:02:13.690]My name is Irving Shapiro. I was born April the 15th,
[00:02:18.580]1923 in Meidzyrzec, Poland.
[00:02:24.460]In May of 1939
[00:02:26.710]I graduated from high school and the following September,
[00:02:32.020]the war broke out.
[00:02:35.620]I was too young at that time to go to the
[00:02:40.630]army. So I stayed home.
[00:02:45.610]And the first few days, the German bombers
[00:02:50.950]started flying over,
[00:02:53.290]over our town and dropped fire bombs just to
[00:02:58.660]make panic in town.
[00:03:01.810]It seemed to me like they did it all over
[00:03:04.120]Poland. Took about 10,
[00:03:06.940]12 days and the first German tanks
[00:03:12.040]drove in to our town.
[00:03:14.350]The first thing they did is drove into the brewery and loaded up
[00:03:19.900]with wine and vodka, which was produced
[00:03:25.630]in the brewery. And they drove out of town.
[00:03:29.380]They kept coming in all the time, back and forth like this.
[00:03:34.150]After a few days,
[00:03:36.160]the army came in and they start occupying,
[00:03:42.280]houses. 1942
[00:03:46.600]they started bringing in transport, the Jewish people from all over Poland.
[00:03:52.160]They brought them from Krakow. They brought him from, from Kielce.
[00:03:55.900]They brought them from Sosnowiec. They brought from all over Poland,
[00:04:00.910]especially from south Eastern, Southwestern, Poland.
[00:04:05.320]We didn't know why they doing it. But shortly after that,
[00:04:09.220]we found out instead of going around all over and
[00:04:14.210]every town and taken out transports of people,
[00:04:17.380]they used to bring them out to our town.
[00:04:20.380]And then the first,
[00:04:23.350]the 25th of August,
[00:04:26.830]1942,
[00:04:28.870]they took out the first transport of
[00:04:33.220]20,000 people from our town.
[00:04:36.340]They got everybody on the marketplace, the women and children,
[00:04:40.780]and they were going around and just
[00:04:47.260]gathering them up and whoever they didn't like
[00:04:52.330]whoever didn't walk fast, they just shot them right on the spot.
[00:04:56.530]They went in to the hospital
[00:05:01.180]and they killed every person in the hospital.
[00:05:05.950]And when they found the nurses and doctors,
[00:05:10.420]they killed them too.
[00:05:12.490]And then they took us about 20 of our young
[00:05:17.350]men to clean up the place. And we were cleaning off the walls,
[00:05:23.860]flesh and brains from people that they were splattered all over the
[00:05:28.840]walls. At that time at first transport,
[00:05:33.850]my mother was among the people that were sitting on the
[00:05:38.080]marketplace. So I went and I ran to a
[00:05:45.160]military policemen that I worked for and I begged him to go to the
[00:05:49.930]market and take my mother out and bring them to us.
[00:05:55.540]At that time
[00:05:56.900]I and my brother and my father lived next to the
[00:06:01.490]German headquarters,
[00:06:03.260]the . Because we worked my, ma,
[00:06:07.850]my father and my brother, and I worked for them.
[00:06:11.690]So we lived close to their headquarters.
[00:06:15.440]So I begged them to go and take my mother out. So he went,
[00:06:19.820]went through the market place and went over to the one of the guards and said to
[00:06:23.750]the guard, this is my Jew sitting over there,
[00:06:28.430]and I want her out. So the guard says, okay,
[00:06:32.930]take her with you. So he took her out and brought her to us,
[00:06:38.510]to the Ortskommandantur.
[00:06:41.450]And she spent with us that night.
[00:06:43.610]And the next morning I put her in,
[00:06:46.970]I hid her in the barn. They had some furniture sitting over there.
[00:06:51.440]So I put her in one of the closets and she was sitting over
[00:06:56.270]there. And at that next day, the, the,
[00:07:00.250]the German, uh, Gestapo and the,
[00:07:05.410]Kapo [AND] Schutzpolizei,
[00:07:08.480]which will add a lot of helpers of
[00:07:14.270]Ukrainians in German uniforms and
[00:07:19.430]Lithuanians in German uniforms. And they helped them.
[00:07:22.760]And they were going around all over town to try
[00:07:28.100]to search and see if they missed any people.
[00:07:32.540]And they came in to the Ortskommandantur and start searching in those,
[00:07:37.580]in the big barn.
[00:07:39.710]And my mother made a noise and they discovered her and they
[00:07:45.080]took her out and they put her together with all the other people that took her
[00:07:49.550]to the train station.
[00:07:51.200]I try frantically to find that military policemen,
[00:07:55.910]but I couldn't find them to take her out.
[00:07:58.250]And she went with it first transport of 20,000 Jewish
[00:08:02.870]people. They put them on cattle cars,
[00:08:07.010]200 people to a car.
[00:08:09.410]And they took them to Treblinka.
[00:08:12.980]We didn't know first where they were taking them.
[00:08:17.930]But then about three days later,
[00:08:20.960]one of my friends ran away. Somehow he lucked out,
[00:08:25.850]would run away from the train and he came back to town and he told us
[00:08:30.980]where they took him. They took him to Treblinka
[00:08:36.020]Treblinka that was, they called it in German,
[00:08:40.070]Ferichtungskamp.
[00:08:42.350]That means nobody worked over there.
[00:08:47.750]Everybody they brought it to this camp, went to the gas chambers.
[00:08:54.830]They have any crematoriums built Treblinka yet.
[00:08:59.010]So they used to bury the bodies.
[00:09:02.940]Gas them first first and buried the bodies and in, in,
[00:09:06.760]in ditches and covered them with lime.
[00:09:11.040]It's a matter of fact that some Polish people later on were telling us
[00:09:16.530]after the war,
[00:09:17.130]they would tell it because they live close by Treblinka and they saw the ground
[00:09:22.110]moving when they were burying and killing those people.
[00:09:29.940]A lot of people in the ghetto built hiding places.
[00:09:35.040]They build it in the attic, they build it in the basements.
[00:09:38.160]They made false walls and they were hiding like this.
[00:09:43.350]So we, the house that I was, they had a hiding place up in the attic.
[00:09:49.680]So we, all the people from that house went up to the attic and
[00:09:55.500]tried to hide.
[00:09:58.740]There was a little baby, with a mother with a little baby
[00:10:06.450]and the baby starts start crying and coughing.
[00:10:12.810]And we heard the Germans next door
[00:10:18.030]yelling, come out bandits we know you hiding there.
[00:10:22.350]If you don't come out we'll shoot you all.
[00:10:25.740]And the baby stopped crying and coughing,
[00:10:29.040]and everybody is afraid for their own life.
[00:10:32.190]So they start yelling at the at the mother,
[00:10:35.940]keep the baby quiet. And she couldn't.
[00:10:43.350]Then, the baby
[00:10:43.800]all of a sudden got quiet and next morning early in the
[00:10:48.420]morning. We found out the reason the baby got quiet.
[00:10:53.550]The mother put their hand over the mouth of the baby and
[00:10:59.190]choke the baby
[00:11:03.000]to save her life and the lives of
[00:11:08.040]20 other people.
[00:11:10.620]But that didn't do any good because they discovered us next
[00:11:15.450]morning. And they chased us all out.
[00:11:20.220]And they took us to the marketplace. At the marketplace,
[00:11:24.000]I found my father and my brother over there.
[00:11:28.200]And the rest of the people and we were
[00:11:33.780]gathered up,
[00:11:35.670]taken to the railroad station and put in the cattle
[00:11:40.200]cars, just like the other ones and took us away.
[00:11:45.840]We didn't know where we are going.
[00:11:48.180]We thought they're going to take us to Treblinka also.
[00:11:51.480]But then one of the men start yelling.
[00:11:54.670]We are not going to Treblinka because I recognize the
[00:11:58.960]countryside. It looked out, we had little windows to
[00:12:03.750]look out and he says,
[00:12:07.040]we are not going to Treblinka we was going someplace else. Finally,
[00:12:10.990]they brought us into Lublin,
[00:12:14.410]came to the rail station in Lublin and they put us on trucks.
[00:12:17.950]And they brought us in to that camp. They called Majdanek.
[00:12:23.950]My brother wasn't the same campus I was,
[00:12:28.300]but not in the same barrack.
[00:12:31.300]Then one day I went in to look, they start shipping out
[00:12:35.110]transports from the camp.
[00:12:38.230]And I went in to look for my brother
[00:12:41.980]and he wasn't there.
[00:12:43.540]And I asked the people in this barrack where my brother is and
[00:12:48.400]they told me they shipped him out with a transport.
[00:12:53.650]I couldn't find out where they shipped him. And about two days later,
[00:12:58.720]they shipped me out with a transport to
[00:13:06.040]they took us to Auschwitz to Majdanek
[00:13:11.800]and when we got in there,
[00:13:15.580]first thing they did is gave us
[00:13:20.350]tattoo. Our arms gave us numbers.
[00:13:25.510]And then they put us out in the camp to work.
[00:13:41.740]From Majdanek
[00:13:45.700]I was shipped out to Auschwitz when it came in,
[00:13:50.080]we didn't come in direct to Auschwitz.
[00:13:52.570]They brought us into a camp right next to Auschwitz, which was Birkenau.
[00:13:59.590]One day,
[00:14:00.970]one of the Gestapo came over and they were looking for
[00:14:06.700]30 men
[00:14:09.070]to take him to a different job. So they used to,
[00:14:14.020]they came, came over to us, but we were working and they poked us.
[00:14:18.790]They said, Hey, you, they poked us.
[00:14:20.890]And a lot of people were so weak that when they poked
[00:14:25.780]you, you drop to the ground. And when you drop to the ground,
[00:14:30.190]you never got up again.
[00:14:33.730]So they poked me and I managed
[00:14:38.680]to stand up.

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Irving Shapiro Interview (Part 1)

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