A mass murder occurred across Europe in March of 1942.  For 11 months 4,500,000 people were killed.  Approximately 6,000.000 Jews including 1,500,000 children were killed.  Today there  are 350,000 survivors alive.  This is one survivors story.
My name is Solomon Radasky.  I was a survivor from the Holocaust.  I am from  Warsaw.  I lived in Praga.  I owned a fur shop where I made fur coats.  For Jewish holidays people went to synagogues.  78 people in my family I was the only one to survive.  My parents Jacob, Toby and my sisters and brothers Sarah, Rivka, Leah, Moishe, Baruch were all killed.   
The year 1914 was a very cold winter with lots of snow.  I was forced to work with lots of people clearing snow from railroad tracks.  My job was to keep the trains running.  My mother and sister were killed in the last week of January in the year of 1941.  one day the SD and the Jewish Police saw me in the street and was forced to work on the railroads.
My father was killed in April of 1942.  He went to go get bread from children in the Warsaw Ghettos who smuggled it.  A Jewish Policeman saw and told an German soldier and the Soldier shot my dad in back.  Deportation began on July 22,1942.  I worked at Tobbens' shop.  They made lambs' wool jackets for the German army.  Today the jackets are known as Eisenhower Jackets.  For lunch they gave us bread and soup, dinner was bread and coffee.  When Poles came to shop they would trade with them for extra food.  
A friend told me he saw one of my sisters working at the Shultz's shop.  I had to pay 500 zlotys which was a lot of money, but I did.  I couldn't find my sister and I had to stay because the Ghetto was surrounded by German soldiers.  The next day was the beginning of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
On May 1st 1943, I was shot in my right ankle.  The bullet went through my skin but not to the bone.  So I didn't lose my leg.  I was taken to Umschlagplatz.  The Treblinka extermination camp was only taking 10,000 people a day.  Our  group had 20,000 they cut off half of my train and sent it to Majdanek.  I was sent there.  Majdanek was a death camp.  At Majdanek they would take our clothes and give us striped shirts, and pants and wooden shoes.  I was sent to Barracks 21.      
An old man who was a doctor in Paris took a small pocket knife and started operating on my ankle.  He told me ,"I have no medication, you have to help yourself. When you urinate you used your urine as a antiseptic on your wound."  
I had to walk 3 kilometers to get to work.  I had to go out the gate without limping.   I was very  scared.  Here at Majdanek they hang you for any little thing. I was very lucky, God must have helped me.
A few days after work some people couldn't take it, and fell down in the middle of the road. If you couldn't get up then they would shoot you right  where you were lying.  After work we would have to carry their bodies back, because "If 1,000 people go to work then 1,000 people had to come back."
I was taken to Auschwitz.  While at Auschwitz I had to get a number tattooed on my arm.  My number was 128232. The separate numbers add up to be 18.  In Hebrew language letters of the alphabet stand for numbers.  After I got my tattoo I got a potato.
I was sent to Buna.  The Capo there was a murderer.  One time at Buna I fell down and couldn't get up.  The Capo screaming  started beating me and pulling me aside.  We had to take off our clothes, and stand naked all night.  The next morning a truck came and pushed us all into it.  We thought they were taking us to the gas chambers.
I was taken to Auschwitz.  I was at the hospital barracks, Block 20.  A man named Erlich told me," It was very bad here.  Dr. Mengele comes two times a week to make selections.  But this is Tuesday and he will not come again this week."  Some doctors had tried to help hide Jewish people in Cracow.  When SS came they took the Jews that were hiding the took the doctors who hid them to Auschwitz.    
I begged the man at  the table to let me work, I said "I want to go out.  I have friends outside.  Please let me out."  He gave me a piece of paper that said Block 6.  They took my number to the Capo.  He gave me a green triangle.  The Germans opened up the jails and made the prisoners our bosses.  Some of the boys worked in Canada.
When transports came they would separate the valuables.  They risked their lives to smuggle out gold  and other stuff.  Everyday they brought the Capo cigarettes or salami, so he would say "yes".  The next morning they woke me up, and took me with them.  They told me that I would be safe because more than 6,000 prisoners walk out of the gates everyday and nobody knows, who is who. 
There was a orchestra playing by the gate.  They wouldn't let me go back to my other job.  I stayed with them until the minute Auschwitz was destroyed.  They helped me out with very little pieces of bread and some soup.
One day some boys asked me if I could make a cap for the Capo then they brought me some stripes of material.  I took a piece of string to take a measurement.  I got some thread and an needle and I finished the cap like in about two hours.  The Capo liked the cap, from then on I was his guy.  
I worked for over a year with the boys digging sand.  Twice a day we took sand to Birkenau to cover up the ashes of the dead.  There were ovens on one side of the crematoria and the ashes would come out out of the other side.  The other side was the gas chamber.  During August and September of 1944 I saw them throw living children into the crematorium.
On Saturday while we were working we saw a soldier with a rifle.  So we started working faster.  He told us to "Slow down, today is the Sabbath.,"  He was Hungarian.  He started hiding food in his trash for us.  He did this for two to three weeks.  He asked us to bring him money  from Canada, and we did.  He told us the names of the Jewish Holidays.  Then one day he disappeared. 
There was a young group of girls who wanted to destroy the crematoria.  There was four crematoria in Birkenau.  The girls who worked at the ammunition factory, smuggled in explosives.  They hung two of the girls in front of us when we got back from work.
January 18, 1945 they began destroying Auschwitz.  I left on the 18th Auschwitz and 9 days later the Russians liberated  it.  Those 7 days cost me 5 months.  I walked the whole night with a Rabbi from Sosnowiec.  People who fell down were shot.  The Rabbi fell and a boy from Belgium helped get the Rabbi between us to help keep him walking.
We walked to the railroad station.  In two days the train took us to Gross-Rosen camp.  I never saw the Rabbi again.  Gross-Rosen was murder.  They put us in a shed with two thousand men.  In the day we had to stand and in the night we slept.  We only got a slice of bread and a cup of coffee for food.  I thought I was going to die there.
I was taken to Dachau, For a short while.  I left Dachau on the 26th or the 27th of April.  I was liberated on May 1st, during the time we were traveling on trains through big mountains.  The Germans sent us up about 20ft above the mountain and started shooting at us.  A few hundred were killed as we ran back to the train.
The next day we heard planes dropping bombs.  A few hours later some soldiers opened the door to the train.  They needed a few people to clean up from the bombs.  We were to scared to go.  So they said, "You, you, and you out," and they caught me.  I said to myself, " I think this is the end.  After all these years in the ghetto and losing everybody now this is the end.  Who is going to be left to say Kaddish for my family?" 
We went to a small a small town on the other side of the mountain.  Where the train station had been bombed.  One man got a shovel, the other a broom, I was given a pick.  There was a counter in the station where they were selling little black bread.  I said to myself that, "I would like to eat apiece of bread before the kill me."  I was ready for Kiddush Hashem.  I grabbed a little piece of dark bread and put it into my jacket and started eating it. A soldier saw me and yelled, "Go to work."  I stayed until I finished my bread.  I didn't move even though he was beating me.  I fell down and he kicked me and I got up.  I had to finish that bread.  Blood was running down my head.  I went to work when I was finished.  My wish was granted.  I then knew that I would survive.
At 4AM the next morning near Tutzing, there was heavy traffic on the highway.  We pushed and shoved to get to the two tiny windows on the train.  The people outside the train were Americans.  We cheered!  A jeep drove up with two soldiers.  There was a short man an MP who spoke good German.  The soldiers asked who we were.  We told them we were from the concentration camps.  Everybody started cheering and crying.  The American soldier said we were free.  We cheered!  They arrested the Germans who.  The Germans were scared.  That day was May 1st 1945.
The Americans cooked rice for us.  The MP saw me take some rice and he said," Don't eat that.  If you do you will die .  There is too much fat in  that for you to eat right now.  Because your stomach has shrunk, if you eat it you will get diarrhea.  I will give you a piece of bread and you can toast it."  What is toast," I asked. "Toast is when you make the bread hard."  They brought us to Feldafing.  I sat in the sun.  In two weeks my stomach stretched.  They gave us pajamas but we didn't have shoes. 
At the Displaced Persons camp in Feldafing a man asked me to bring his niece who was in the hospital some food.  I took her oranges, bread, butter.  When she got better she gave me a pair of white linen pants.  "You saved my life," she said.  I left Feldafing in August of 1945. 
My friend Sofia said, she had a friend (Frieda)  and wanted me to meet her. My wife was very shy and wouldn't come down to meet me.  My wife and I got married in November of 1946.  My wife was from the same town I was from and I used to deal with her family.  We were very poor.  Frieda had no dress when we got married.  We were going to get married Saturday night,  during the day I knocked on the door of a German woman I knew.  She had a daughter who was the same size as Frieda.  I got two Hershey chocolate bars, and two cigarettes, and a little can of coffee and put in a paper bag.  I told her about Frieda not having a dress.  I told her I didn't come to rob her.  I came to ask her for help.  I opened the closet and  saw a sky-blue dress.  The daughter started crying.  I gave her the bag and said; "This is the money.  This is all that I have.  Later on if I have some I am going to pay more."  The mother said," Take it."  I thanked her and left.  The daughter was still crying.  I saw the mother on the street and talked to her.  (I didn't say to her," What you people did to us.") 
We got married on November 11th, 1946.  We moved to Turkeheim to Landsberg, after four years until we came to the United States.  My son was born May 13th,  1948.  The States of Israel was born on May 14th, 1948.  We came to New Orleans in 1949.  I couldn't speak English.  I worked at a fur shop.  They hired me at $0.50 an hour even though the going rate for beginners was $0.75 an hour.  I bought a sewing machine for $50.00 then I started taken in work.  Then I was hired by the Haspel Brother store where I was foreman.  I built myself up and we raised and educated our children.  After 28 years Frieda and I went on our first vacation in 1978 to Israel.  There were 375,000 Jews living in Warsaw before the war.  I doubt that there are 5,000 living there today.  "It is very, very important for me to tell this story."

 

Jasmine McLamb

Holocaust Project

Rossville Jr. High

 April 2005

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