Waldemar Ginsburg

Born: 1922

Place of Birth: Riga

Arrived in Britain: 01/10/1948

Interview Number: 62 (N)

Interview Summary

Date of interview: 23/05/2004

Waldemar Ginsburg was born in 1922 in Riga. His father, Michael Ginsburg, came from a secular Jewish family from Vilna. He became a sailor and sailed the world. He was based in Marseilles. His mother Pauline Strom, came from an Orthodox family in Kovno but she turned away from religion on attending University to study accountancy. She married Michael in 1919 and they went to live in Marseilles, where Michael worked as a clerk to a shipping company. Waldemar lived for 6 years in Marseilles but his parents separated and he and his mother came back to her parents in Kovno. Waldemar attended a German School there. He had no trouble at school until Hitler came to power in Germany and attitudes changed. The Jewish pupils left and he was sent to a Lithuanian School. So he spoke French, Yiddish to his grandparents, German, Lithuanian and later Russian. His mother remarried a man from Russia called Samuel Garzon and they lived together with her parents. Waldemar went to University after school but found a great deal of antisemitism amongst certain students there. He suffered verbal abuse. 

In the summer of 1940 the Russians invaded. Property was confiscated, businesses nationalized and the middle class bourgeoisie were earmarked for deportation to Siberia. Waldemar remained at university and suffered less from anti-Semitism since the pro- Nazis went into hiding. His step-father remained in business but this was temporary. Just as transportation started to Siberia the following year, the Germans invaded on 22 June 1941. The family debated fleeing east but opted to stay. Life quickly deteriorated. The Germans introduced anti Jewish laws and on 15 Aug 1941 forced the Jews into a ghetto in the Slabodka district of the town. They shared a little house with 3 families. Food rations were meagre and the ghetto was run by the Jewish Council and Jewish police. The able bodied were sent to work and this enabled people to barter and obtain more food. Waldemar worked first in the airport, then for an army construction unit repairing buildings and then as a plumber’s mate. This was the best job. On 4 Oct 1941 the hospital  in the ghetto was burnt down and all those inside killed. On 28 Oct 1941 there was a big action and 10,000 Jews were deported from the ghetto and shot into a mass grave at a nearby fortification at Ninesfort. This reduced the numbers from 28,000 to 18,000. Many women and children were taken including a number of Waldemar’s family. 

Life continued more normally after this with groups going out to work and a ghetto infrastructure operating as best it could. People did not die of starvation but more of natural causes such as his grandmother. This changed in the Autumn of 1943 when the SS took over from the SM. The ghetto was renamed a concentration camp and work groups were taken out to other camps. Waldemar went to work for Heeresbau in Sanciai, a suburb of Kovno. He was there when the terrible Kinderaktion took place on 28 March 1944. This happened in all the camps. Children under 14, the elderly, weak and infirm were deported and killed. Those remaining became very despondent. In July 1944 Waldemar was transported to Stutthoff, where he was separated from his mother and sent on to Dachau Camp no 1. He worked as a plumber and then when camp 1 was quarantined, he was transferred to Camp 3, where he had to work constructing underground bunkers for the firm Moll. This was much harder work but those in charge of the camp were not as strict. In the Spring of 1945 they returned to Camp 1 and back to plumbing. He was then lucky to become a store keeper and did not have to leave the camp for work. He would read newspapers and they knew what was happening. 

In April 1945 they were taken on a death march in groups of 100. They marched for a week and then were abandoned. They were liberated by the allies. Waldemar by now had contracted an infectious disease and was hospitalized for 6 months near Munich. He was the only member of his family to survive. He met Ibolya from Hungary and they married in 1946. Waldemar took a course in radio technology for 1 year and then became an assistant teacher on the course until Oct 1948. They lived in an apartment near Munich. In the meantime cousins in England had tracked him down and they sent a work permit for him to come to work in their textile mill in Elland, Yorkshire. This was Thornton Textiles. They came and stayed with the family until 1950 when they moved into their own home. Waldemar became a manager at the mill and was warmly welcomed by the workers. He later moved to Kagan textile mill until he retired. 

Place of Birth

22nd June 1941. The Red Army was taken by surprise and they fled. Lithuania was occupied by the German Wehrmacht. On the first day of the hostilities, there was a chance for us to escape. We could have packed our luggage and tried to escape. We had to make that big decision what to do: stay put or escape and survive under Russian control. On that day, 14 members of our immediate family gathered to take that fatal decision and decided to stay put. It would be easier to survive under the Nazis than escape to Russia and finish up in a slave labour camp. Well, out of the 14 members I was the only one to survive, because they all perished.

Choice: Nazis or Soviet slave camp

[10,000 Lithuanian Jews] were taken in batches of 100 [to Ninesfort fortress] & pushed into a deep pit & machine gunned. Eliminated in batches of 100. It took the whole day to push them in. They started covering them with soil. Anybody who was still alive, still moving, they were still shooting. That was witnessed by Lithuanian people who lived not far from this fortification. The soil they say was heaving for a night & a day from the people who were still alive. One boy aged 14 or 15 managed to crawl out at night. He managed to move the dead bodies & hid until daylight. Then he marched into the ghetto, covered with lime. He told the ghetto council what was happening, was sworn to secrecy. They told him not to tell anybody what happened, because there might be a panic in the ghetto & people might refuse to work. They said that would be the end of the ghetto, they would kill everybody, so he kept silent. Now, our biggest shock was the loss of our loved ones & families but what also compounded our horror was the fact that our killers, the people who pulled the trigger, were our own Lithuanian neighbours, thousands of young men who had volunteered to help the Nazis. 80% of the killing machine was non German. There were Ukrainians, there were Hungarians, Rumanians, Croats, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians. It would have been of some comfort to us if we could have identified our killers as sadists, as misfits, if we could have removed them from the human race, but they were part of the human race, they were like you & me. They were not much different & yet they could be brainwashed to murder innocent people. This shook, this shattered my belief in a progressive & benevolent humanity. Our concept of evil was wrong, we realised the line separating good from evil was a lot thinner than we imagined.

Now the camp system again was more favourable to certain people than to others, the privileged people were perpetuating their privileges. It is very strange how once you get into a privileged position the pressure from the other privileged people and the drive is to keep all the privileged in the same group, so the ones who were better off in the ghetto became also privileged people in the concentration camp in Sanciai, and they had better jobs and better positions, and they were usually in kitchen jobs, or kapo supervision jobs, which was always easier than any other jobs. Well, we came to Germany [Dachau], the order was already more or less a pecking order was already established when we came. However, it was like a miracle, the people who were privileged in the concentration camp in Sanciai [Kovno], got kitchen jobs and cleaning jobs in that new concentration camp, and they were again privileged. So it was self perpetuating, the caste system, to have a charmed life, and it meant in a camp like ours it meant extra rations, it meant easier work, and it wasn’t an extermination camp, not like in Auschwitz, anybody could be killed, a privileged person had a good chance of surviving in this German concentration camp, if he hadn’t to do concreting and didn’t have to do the heavy work involved in building those underground factories.

Privileges in Kaufering

The children in our camp was well looked after, they were never hungry, they were never short of food, they were looked after. They were sheltered as much as possible, and then on baby blessings all the time, our most prominent Rabbis blessed them and people were prepared to give their lives for them, but the prayer was, “Save our children”, the children must not be harmed, and there was a genuine conviction that there will be divine intervention where the children were concerned. On the 28th of March a detachment of Ukrainian militia walked in with orders to eliminate, not only the children, but anybody who was non productive, which means the old, the sick, the ill, the disabled, and that. We were at work, I don’t know what would have happened if we would have been there, if the able bodied bodies, men had been in the camp, but we were at work, and the most cruel, in the most cruel manner, the babies were separated from their mothers, some mothers were shot, some mothers went with their children, they were thrown into wagons, into lorries, the old and the sick were also forced in, it was a blood bath, and they were taken to a local spot where they were executed, and that was on the 28th of March [1944] by a detachment of Ukrainian militia.

'Kinder Aktion', Kovno, March 27-28 1944

There was a silence which lasted many years until- until, my children became old enough to be told about it. They kept asking certain questions, you know, “Why do you talk with a funny accent?” and, “Why don’t we have grandparents and family like the other children?” So we had to tell them something.

Not talking about it with children

Now as far as socks were concerned, there weren’t any, so what we did, we cut up army blankets which we were given to cover ourselves. We cut a piece off and we made foot wrappers, that was warm enough and it helped, but it was very risky, because Kirsch, our Lager Kommandant discovered what we were doing and he accused us of sabotaging army property and that was punishable by death. So he took as an example five prisoners, and they were hanged in front of the whole camp, and their bodies were left to hang for 24 hours as a deterrent.

Making socks, Kaufering

How did you manage? We wanted to go on strike but the kapos said, “Remember what happened to the French Jews, what happened to the German Jews, what happened to the Russian prisoners of war, you will starve to death if you don’t go out to work.” So after a day we went out to work. It is amazing how much punishment one can take.

Aftermath of 'Kinder Aktion', Kovno

The last day in April we slept in a little wood, it was snowing, and by the time in the morning we woke up we were coved with snow and we were wet through, but we were so exhausted that we slept through this snow blizzard. We woke up and I was completely stiff, Josh had to pull me out, and it was a sunny morning, so I went out of the wood to get some sunshine. No guards, we were alone. In the distance I saw a Russian prisoner of war and he announced that overnight the guards disappeared, and he said the Americans are due any time. Well, we heard a rumble and we quickly hid in the bushes just in case they were the retreating SS troops, but as we looked out we saw a few vehicles, and the first one had the French tricolour, so I realised that these are allies, must have been a reconnaissance group, they approached us and they looked at us, “Where do you come from?” I had to explain in French what we were, and my first words to him were, “Du pain s’il vous plait.” Some bread please. And they gave us chocolate, stupid it was. Anyway they fed us, and they took us to the place for displaced persons.

Liberation of Kaufering

We were still in our civilian clothes, we still had our documents with us and we had to surrender everything, and we got blue striped prison uniforms which looked like pyjamas. Now I had to surrender all my documents, all my papers, all my pictures, and until then I was still a person, I still had an identity in the camp in Lithuania. Here I got a number, sewn into my uniform and I had to surrender every picture, every paper I had, but apparently the German prisoner, he was a German criminal, who searched me, apparently he had some compassion because he took my mother’s picture and asked me, “Is that your mother?” And I said, “Yes, that is my mother.” “Well I will give it back to you, you had better keep it.” But everything else was taken away, but unfortunately just at that moment an SS supervisor was passing by, he took the picture and rebuked him, “You can't do that, he might still imagine he is a human being.” He took the picture and tore it up, so that was the last documentation I had from home.

Arriving in Kaufering