Holocaust survivor shares memories

by Karen Abeyasekere
100th Air Refueling Wing Public Affairs

5/19/2014 - RAF MILDENHALL, England -- "Those that went to the left stayed alive; all the people who went to the right went to their death," declared Zigi Shipper, a survivor of the Holocaust, describing the endless lines of children and adults sent to concentration camps during World War II as he shared his memories of being sent to Auschwitz, Poland, when he was 14.

Shipper, 84, spoke to Team Mildenhall members April 30, 2014, during a question-and-answer session as part of Holocaust Remembrance Week.

Born to a Jewish family in Poland in 1930, his parents divorced when he was 5. However, back then, divorced was frowned upon.

"I didn't know about divorce; all I knew was my mother left us, and I was brought up by my grandparents," Shipper said. "My grandparents were very religious Jews and to them, divorce was worse than death."

As if losing his mother wasn't bad enough, Shipper wasn't even 10 years old when his father left, escaping to Russia after war broke out in 1939. His father believed only young Jewish men like him were at risk for being taken by the Germans, and that children and the elderly would be safe.

Life in the ghettos

A year later, the Germans forced Shipper and his grandparents to move into the ghettos in the poorest part of their town, Łódź, in Poland.

"There were 150,000 people still left in Łódź when we had to go to the ghetto; a lot of them ran away and hid themselves in small villages," Shipper recalled. "But there was no room for us." Shipper explained that when he lived at home with his family, they had a three-bedroom apartment with facilities such as bathroom and toilet.

"In the ghetto, we had one solitary room in a block, without a bathroom or toilet, and no running water. If you had to go to the toilet, it was down two flights of stairs. Especially when it was 20 (degrees) below zero and you had to pump water in the morning - it wasn't good," he said.

Although Shipper's father attempted to come back and see his son, he couldn't get in to the ghettos in Łódź. The Germans occupied the area, and Jews couldn't travel anywhere as they weren't allowed to go on public transport.

"But in 1941, he managed to get to Warsaw (Poland) to a ghetto there," Shipper said. "That was the last I heard from him."

Taken by the Germans

In 1942, Germans needed people to go to Germany and work, and they asked the Jewish police to supply them but the police couldn't, so the Germans did it themselves.

"We didn't go to work for a week, then they (the Germans) came - from street to street and house to house," the Holocaust survivor recalled. "They took the people they wanted, but my grandmother went into hiding and I stayed because I thought, 'they won't take me.' - I was about 12 years old at the time."

However, the Germans did take him, and slung him onto a truck.

Escape to survive

"But I jumped off; it was the first time I realized how lucky I was, because the lorry wasn't moving. The guards were in the yard and they didn't see me - had they seen me, they would have shot me because I was running away," Shipper declared. "I managed to hide myself and stay there until the evening came, then went back.

"On the lorry, there were babies - that's the reason I jumped off, because there were babies, old people and disabled people. I thought, surely they're not going to take us to work; they're going to take us to the nearest woods and kill us! We assumed that's what happened to the people who actually went on those lorries, because nobody ever heard a word from them," he said.

From April 1940 to August 1944, and while he was still living in the ghetto, Shipper worked in a metal factory in Łódź. He helped make a variety of different items for the German war effort, but as none of them ever got finished, he didn't know what they were.

In 1944 the ghetto was liquidated. All those working in the factory were told they would be taken to Germany to work.

If you're not on the list ...

"That's how I went on the cattle trucks; they took everyone who worked in the factory to Auschwitz, to our 'holiday camp,'" Shipper remarked. "We were the lucky ones because we were on a named list; they called our names and we went to one side.

"But there were other people and they had to go through a selection. Most of them had to go to a little place where there were German SS guards on each sides, pointing right, left, right, left," he said. "All the people that went right, went to their death."

Babies, children and women were sent to the gas chambers. Many of those who weren't murdered died anyway from malnutrition or disease. Others committed suicide.

"I honestly don't know how I got through it," Shipper said.

Auschwitz-Birkenau was an extermination camp which held gas chambers and crematoriums. Within it were different camps, almost interlocking with each other, which were concentration and labor camps.

"Either they sent you to work, or they killed you," he stated. "You couldn't stay there. Luckily, we were only there a few weeks before they sent us to a concentration camp. It was just as bad, but they didn't try to kill you; they didn't try to throw you in the gas chambers. All we did was stand outside and freeze to death. It was near Danzig, Poland, which was even colder than anywhere else, and it was already November."

Struggle to survive

"That was the place where I thought I was going to die. There were a few hundred of us, and the only way to keep warm was to huddle together," Shipper said. "After a certain time, some people from the inside had to move so people on the outside could get in."

Shipper was able to get away from there when he got a job in a railway yard.

"They wanted 20 boys to go to work in a labor camp on the railway. To a certain extent it was better - at night at least it was warm in the barracks and working on the railway lines there's always a chance to steal some food, and we did sometimes," he recalled. "Vegetables - potatoes, carrots, beets - whatever there was. There were no facilities to cook it, but if you're hungry you eat; you don't care."

Shipper made friends in most of the camps he was in. It was an advantage to have friends there; those who didn't, didn't survive.

"This way, if one of us managed to steal something, we used to share it. We looked after each other - if somebody wanted to steal something from us, or wanted to give us a hiding, we were like a family, like brothers. I certainly would not be alive if it had not been for my friends," he said.

A downward spiral

But things began to get worse for Shipper. After working on the railway lines for a while, the Germans took Shipper and the other boys to yet another camp. They didn't know if it was in Poland or Germany. Then Shipper began to get ill.

However, as there were no doctors or medication available, it wasn't until after the war that he found out what was wrong with him. It was a killer disease.

"I had typhus; can you imagine typhus without medication, or water even?" he exclaimed.

Typhus is a disease caused by bacteria. There are two types, endemic and epidemic, both originally thought to be viruses. The disease occurs after fleas or lice from other animals such as rats transfer bacteria to humans. Even though a typhus vaccine existed before World War II, typhus epidemics continued throughout the war, especially in German concentration camps during the Holocaust.

"They came for us in coaches and took us to Danzig (Germany); from there, we had to walk to a Polish port - Gardenia - and (they) put us into barges and told us they were taking us to Germany," Shipper declared. "They slung me into those holds - how I survived that, I'll never know. But had I not been ill, I would have climbed on deck and got some water; it would have been sea water, and that would have killed me, but I'd have done it."

The journey on the barge lasted approximately seven days.

On a voyage to certain death

Before they arrived in Danzig, Shipper and the others managed to get off the barge one evening, when the Germans left for the night.

"We (met) some Danish and Norwegian prisoners-of-war and they took us all across. We could have escaped then, and some people did run away, but I couldn't walk or even stand," he said. "When they took us off the barges we had to walk for 15 km. My friends helped me and they saved my life."

Everyone that had been in the camps when they were liquidated went on a death march.

"Either you walked or you died. If you couldn't walk, or you fell, they shot you," Shipper said, matter-of-factly.

Eventually they arrived at the German port. They were to be put on enormous boats that were moored there.

"We knew what was going to happen because two of the boats were already full with prisoners; one was still empty, waiting for us to go on it. There were planes flying above us; we knew it must be near the end of the war and it couldn't be German planes because they started bombing," said Shipper.

One of the bombs hit a boat. People started screaming and jumping off the boats, plunging to their death.

Liberation!

"Minutes later, people started shouting and waving things. We didn't know why until somebody said, 'Look around you - you're surrounded by British tanks!'" Shipper exclaimed. "That was May 3, 1945, when I was liberated by the British Army."

Shipper was 15.

He crawled over to one of the tanks and asked a British soldier for some water.

"I asked him in German, because I couldn't speak English. Still today I don't know why I asked him in German - my mother tongue at the time was Polish," Shipper said. "But he gave me some water. It was the first water I'd drunk in seven days, having typhus."

The only way he and the others survived on the barge was to eat snow scraped from the floor, as there was no drinking water.

British Army officers came, and told the prisoners that there were no Germans anywhere, and there was masses of food for them to eat.

"We helped ourselves; there were tins of meat, tins of fruit, bars of chocolate, biscuits, cakes - you cannot imagine how much food there was! But our stomachs couldn't take it. People were lying on the ground with a piece of apple or chocolate in their mouths, dead. The officers meant well, but they didn't realize that we'd have a problem," explained Shipper.

What doesn't kill you makes you stronger

Suffering and surviving such unimaginable horrors may have proven too much for some. Many may have given up, but the experiences have made Shipper a stronger person.

"You've got no choice. You've got to try to live - you don't want to die, especially as a young child, you think to yourself, 'Only old people die,'" he said. "But it was 95 percent, at least, pure luck that I survived. It was being in the right place at the right time and making the right decision; I didn't know I was making the right decision - jumping off the lorry. Had I not jumped off, I wouldn't be here to tell you."

After the war, Shipper found out his grandmother had died on the day of the liberation of Theresienstadt, Czech Republic. He never found out what happened to his father, and assumed he must have died in the war.

He also presumed his mother was dead, but he was wrong.

Reunited

Once liberated in 1945, Shipper spent time recuperating in a children's home in Germany. During that time, he received a letter with a British postmark. It was from a woman saying she thought he might be her son, as she gave birth to a child of the same name.

However, she said the year of his birth was different to her son, so she thought the chances of him being the same person were slim-to-none. But she was desperate to know if there was even the slightest chance they could be the same person.

To confirm her thoughts, in the letter she asked him to look at his left wrist to see if there was a burn mark, because her 4-year-old son had one. He checked his wrist, and sure enough, the burn mark was there.

"I knew then that the letter was from my mother," Shipper said.

Shipper came to England in 1947 to be reunited with her. Although he didn't want to live with his mother - she was virtually a stranger to him - he did end up staying in London.

"Although she and my new family did treat me very well, it wasn't home like my grandmother was home," he said.

It was there that he met his wife Jeannette, a French Jewish woman, in a Jewish club, and they married in 1954. They have two daughters, Michelle and Lorraine, six grandchildren and one great-grandchild.

Past, present, future

Now 84, Shipper regularly shares his story in schools, colleges and universities around the country, and feels it vital that younger generations know about what happened and how they can prevent anything similar happening in their lifetime.

"Young people, they're our future," Shipper said. "There's very little we can do about the past, but we can do a lot about the present and the future. I feel they should know what happened, because of racism, bigotry, prejudice and hatred. So I beg young people, do not hate, because hate will ruin their lives.

"At the end of the day, will the people who they hate know? No, so they'll be the ones to suffer. They can make the difference," he said.