Isaac G. was born in 1925, in Chestochova, Poland.
His father was a cabinetmaker, and in 1931, facing poverty and growing
anti-Semitism, he took his family to a larger community, where they
lived in a neighbourhood with other Jewish families, and where Isaac
and his older brother Brunard attended a public school for Jewish
boys. Isaac’s parents had lived through the First World War,
and had found the Germans to be polite, decent people. They did not
run away from the encroaching war in Poland, as they could not envisage
such civilized people committing such atrocities.
When the German Army occupied Poland in 1939, Isaac was forced
to clean the streets and shovel snow in work details of Polish Jews,
after priests, rabbis and union leaders were lined up and shot.
At 15, he took a
cabinet making job, and, one day while at work, was taken from the
factory to a slave labour camp. He lived in camps surrounded by electrified
barbed wire, guarded by soldiers with rifles and dogs. Prisoners from
the Jewish barracks wore uniforms and were forbidden packages from
home. Their food consisted of thin soup, barely enough to keep them
alive, and sometimes Isaac managed to steal potatoes from the fields.
In 1945, he was sent to Buchenwald,
a concentration camp, in cattle cars packed with people. When the
Russians approached eastern Germany, the inmates were marched out.
His attempts to escape by hiding in straw and heading into the forest
were thwarted, but eventually he managed to fool the SS officers on
the long march. He was picked up by French soldiers, and it is them
who he considers to be his liberators.
Isaac had no news
of his family until after the war. His father, mother and sisters
were gassed at Auschwitz, but, after meeting a Jewish couple on a
train who told him his brother was still alive, they were reunited.
Isaac testified in the trials against the SS officers of Buchenwald.
In 1947, he and his brother came to Winnipeg under the sponsorship
of an aunt in Manitoba, as the Canadian government refused to accept
immigrants that did not have close relatives in the country. In 1951,
he married his wife Hilda, beginning his new and happy life. They
have 4 daughters and 6 grandchildren. Since retiring from life insurance
sales, Isaac has taken time for volunteer work, and to speak at high
schools about Holocaust issues, both of what happened to the Jews,
and what can happen in places like Bosnia and South America.
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