Elland couple look back on Holocaust Memorial Day

Jan 27 2009 by Barry Gibson, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

Elland couple look back on Holocaust Memorial Day

Today is the ninth annual Holocaust Memorial Day. The greatest crime in the history of humanity is remembered by a dwindling band of survivors, among them Elland couple Ibi and Val Ginsburg. BARRY GIBSON reports

The old, the children and the mothers were taken straight to the gas chambers

THEY sit in the front room of their semi-detached home in a quiet Elland cul-de-sac and Ibi and Val Ginsburg seem like any other pensioner couple, quietly enjoying their retirement.

But the pair are part of the dwindling band of survivors from the greatest crime in the history of humanity.

Ibi, 84, and Val, 86, came through the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Dachau during the Nazi Holocaust – but both lost nearly their entire families in the mass killing.

They are keen supporters of Holocaust Memorial Day, which takes place today and aims to educate young people about human rights abuses, both past and present, and to encourage greater tolerance.

Val said: “I’ve had my bellyful of hatred. I can tell you the consequences of prejudice.”

Waldemar Ginsburg – known as Val – was born in 1922 and grew up in Kaunas, the capital of Lithuania at the time.

He remembers a happy childhood. Val said: “I was the only child, I lived with my mother, step-father and grandparents so I was spoilt rotten.”

However, life in Lithuania wasn’t easy for the Jewish people like Val. He said: “About one-third of the population of Kaunas was Jewish. Relations between Jews and Gentiles were pretty reasonable but we lived parallel lives. There was anti-Semtism, Jews had restricted access to higher education and government jobs.”

For Val, the Second World War began in 1940 while he was studying architecture at Kaunas University.

He said: “We in Lithuania were hoping to survive the war but we had neighbours from hell – Hitler and Stalin. In 1940 the country was occupied by Russia and the communists started their purges right away against anyone who owned land, property or a business.

“My family had property so we were put on a list to be arrested and deported.”

But the Nazis invaded and occupied Lithuania in 1941, before Val could be sent to Russia. As German tanks neared Kaunas, his family gathered to decide what to do.

Val said: “There were 14 of us, including my mother, step-father, grandparents, aunts and uncles.

“We had to decide whether to stay in Lithuania or escape to Russia, where we would probably end up in a slave labour camp. We decided to stay put because we assumed the Germans would be more civilised than the Russians.”

Of the 14 family members who gathered to make that decision, only Val would survive the war.

Hot on the heels of the advancing German Army came the SS and Gestapo.

Val said: “There were 35,000 Jews in Kaunas when the Nazis came and they murdered 5,000 within the first two months.

“The rest of us were sent to a ghetto in a suburb of the town. Seven thousand Lithuanians were moved out of the area and 30,000 Jews were moved in.

“The conditions were atrocious, we were starving.”

But just as it seemed Val would die of hunger, salvation came in an unlikely form.

He said: “The Nazis threw us a lifeline that saved our lives. They told us to register for forced labour, which meant we could leave the ghetto and go to town where we could scavenge food.

“We used to do things like digging and laying drains, but I would also smuggle food back to the ghetto. I had a huge anorak with deep pockets that I would cram full of potato peel. My mother would clean the peel and then cook it. It kept us alive.”

By 1944, most of Val’s family had been executed. His mother Pauline was taken to Stutthof concentration camp in Poland where she died of hunger the following year, aged 45.

Val was taken to Kaufering, a satellite camp of Dachau in southern Germany.

He said: “There was no way to scavenge food anymore. After just a fortnight we looked like walking skeletons.”

Val worked 11-hour shifts six days a week, building an underground bunker about two miles from the camp.

He said: “We were building a factory to replace the ones that had been bombed. It was going to be used to build the brand new jet-powered Messerschmitt fighter plane. It was very difficult to survive on starvation rations.”

Somehow, Val managed to keep himself alive until American troops liberated the camp on May 1, 1945.

He said: “All of us were euphoric because we had survived. But then the information about our losses came in. Of the 35,000 Jews in Kaunas, only 2,000 were alive at the end of the war and many of these 2,000 were so weak that they died shortly after they were liberated.

“I realised I had no family, no community and no country anymore. I was a physical and mental wreck.”

While recovering in a hospital near Dachau, Val met fellow Holocaust survivor Ibi Davidovics.

She was born in the Hungarian town of Tokaj in 1924.

Ibi said: “It was a town about the size of Brighouse and it was a wine-growing centre. There was quite a sizeable Jewish community and relations with non-Jews were fine.

“I mixed with Christian children when I was growing up, but slowly things started to change as anti-Semitism came over from Germany.”

Ibi lived with her three younger sisters and their parents.

She said: “I wanted to go and study German in a school in Vienna, but it closed during the war so I became an apprentice tailoress.”

Compared to other countries, wartime conditions in Hungary were tolerable.

Ibi said: “The war broke out when I was 15, but I wasn’t affected because Hungary was an ally of Germany. Jews weren’t persecuted.”

But all this changed when the Nazis invaded the country in 1944.