David posted below about his relatives who were killed in the Holocaust. I have thought many times about posting about my own family’s experience, but haven’t until now. My father is a concentration camp survivor, and in my case my nearest relatives who were killed are my grandparents and my uncles. Here is their story.
My father was born in 1928 under the name Aronek Kierszkowski in the town of Suwalki, Poland, a town near the border with East Prussia and Lithuania. My grandfather Oszer was one of the wealthiest men in town, as he owned a prosperous import and export fur business. When the Nazis invaded Poland in September 1939, my father went to Warsaw to try to store his furs for the duration of the war. My grandmother, my dad, and my three uncles became refugees, and they fled to Wilno (now called Vilnius) to escape the occupation. My grandfather was caught and was believed to have been killed in an action at Tawniki, near Warsaw.
The Nazis occupied Wilno soon after they attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, starting the two year period of the Vilna Ghetto. My father lived through that period in the Vilna ghetto with his mother and three brothers until the ghetto was finally liquidated in 1943. Men and older boys were sent to labor camps; women and young children were sent to the gas chambers. My father, then 15, was sent with his older brother Dudek to the labor camps. My grandmother Riva, and my father’s two younger brothers, Maksik (then 12 years old) and Isaczek (then 5), were sent to Auschwitz and gassed.
My father and his older brother Dudek worked in labor camps in Estonia during 1943-44. Dudek was shot in the fall of 1944, leaving my father without any relatives in the camps. At that point, advances of the Soviet Army led the SS Einsatz Kommandos to commandeer three ships from the German Army in Estonia, which he packed with Jewish prisoners — including my father — and camp guards, and sailed for Danzig. My father ended up in the winter of 1944-45 in the concentration camp Stutthof, near the port of Danzig.
In January of 1945, the SS started to evacuate Stutthof to escape the advancing Soviet forces, and my father was sent along with thousands of other prisoners on the infamous death marches westward. The death marches ended when the Soviet troops caught up with the SS and their prisoners in a camp near near Rieben in West Prussia. My father was liberated on March 10, 1945, when Russian army scouts entered the camp near Rieben. It was one day past my father’s 17th birthday. He was the only member of his immediate family to survive the war.
From there, my father eventually made his way to West Berlin, and then to West Germany, where he lived in the Displaced Persons camps for a few years near Munich. He came to the U.S. in 1954 after waiting for the Korean War to end (he had seen enough war, and didn’t want to get drafted). At that point, he changed his name from Aronek Kierszkowski to Arnold Kerr. He has lived in the U.S. ever since, and last month he celebrated his 81st birthday.
Postscript: For those interested in the full story as told by my father, instead of the brief and sanitized blog post version, it was a few chapters of a book by James Charles Roy, The Vanished Kingdom: Travels Through the History of Prussia. Chunks of it, including parts of my father’s story, are available for free via Google books. Warning: My dad is not one to pull punches, and it’s pretty graphic. Gripping, but graphic.