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101 pages

English

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If you enjoyed Kevin Larson's Garden of the Beasts, the true nature of the beasts are revealed in this text.
Chronicles the experiences of Sigmund Weiss as a teenager trying to survive during the turbulence of Hitler’s mad aggression on Poland and the Jews. A story about an escape that was almost impossible, and totally unlikely without luck, courage and miracles happening together.

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Biography

Autobiography

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Publié par	Archway Publishing
Date de parution	19 janvier 2023
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781665732611
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0200€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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LUCK, COURAGE, & MIRACLES
Surviving the Jewish Ghettos of Poland and Escaping the Nazi Death Camps

SIGMUND WEISS

Copyright © 2023 Sigmund Weiss.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Archway Publishing
1663 Liberty Drive
Bloomington, IN 47403
www.archwaypublishing.com
844-669-3957

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

A blank map of World War II Europe from www.historicalmapchart.net served as template for the illustration of Sigmund Weiss’ journeys.

ISBN: 978-1-6657-3260-4 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-6657-3259-8 (hc)
ISBN: 978-1-6657-3261-1 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022919884

Archway Publishing rev. date: 02/07/2023

This book is dedicated to Sigmund Weiss’s grandchildren, Michael, David, and Jonny. As children and young adults, they learned of his experiences firsthand, thus becoming “third-generation survivors.” To those who deny that the Holocaust ever happened, they will be able to carry on telling the story and truth as witnesses of its devastating effect on their grandfather. Hopefully, they will pass this book down to the next generation: Maggie, Peter, Iris, Genevieve, Hazel, and Albert. My father’s great-grandchildren will verify the authenticity of the Holocaust from his stories and videos retelling his third-generation grandsons about the hardships, killings, and tragedies of World War II. Remembrance of the Holocaust is more important now than ever, as Russia’s unprovoked attack on Ukraine has raised the terrifying specter of a third world war.
I also dedicate this book to a dear friend, Maitland DeLand, MD, without whom this book would not have happened. My father’s history would have remained incomplete, hidden in a 1998 German-language booklet published by the White Rose Society in partnership with the Deutsch-Israelische Gesellschaft. After learning of this condensed version, Dr. DeLand insisted that it be completed. She funded several months of professional interviews with my father over Skype. After enlisting editing assistance from her son Andrew, who is also very interested in the history and atrocities of WWII, she sent the transcript of the interviews to a professional editor. I extend my heartfelt thanks to them.
The final dedication is to my wife, Margaret Weiss, who was such a superb mother to our three sons and a substitute daughter to my father Sigmund. Her assistance was invaluable in his final years, allowing him to live out his life as he wished in the same Rego Park apartment where I grew up, below the landing pattern of jets flying into New York’s LaGuardia Airport. I also want to thank Judy Steven and Sergio Rivera, whose wonderful care helped my father to live until the age of ninety-six. Not even COVID-19 could kill “Sigi” in March of 2020. He died peacefully in his sleep on the evening of January 31, 2022, my sixty-ninth birthday.
Robert A. Weiss, M.D.
CONTENTS
Preface
Map of Sigmund’s Journeys 1938 - 1 945
Foreword
Chapter 1There’s No Place like Home—Life before Hitler
Chapter 2Sharp Stones in My Skin—Nazism Comes to Barsinghausen
Chapter 3Shattered Glass, Broken Family—Kristallnacht and My Deportation
Chapter 4Game of Hot Potato—Being an Unwanted Jew in Poland
Chapter 5Sheltering in Place—the War Comes to Town
Chapter 6Walking to Warsaw—Our Doomed Search for Safety
Chapter 7Cutting in Line—Surviving the Ghetto
Chapter 8Cutting Loose: Escaping the Ghetto
Chapter 9A Gun to My Head and Typhus—More Brushes with Death
Chapter 101942—Our Bleakest Year Yet
Chapter 11Saved by a Sewing Machine—Escape to Germany as Forced Labor
Chapter 12Reunited with My Mother—Back in Barsinghausen
Chapter 13Hiding in Plain Sight—an Invisible Jew in Nazi Germany
Chapter 14Pedaling for Freedom—Escaping the Country
Chapter 15A Dutchman in a German Prison—Becoming Theo Vandenberg
Chapter 16Escape from a Concentration Camp—My Lucky Encounter with the Dutch Resistance
Chapter 17Liberation at Last … but I Am Mistaken for a German Collaborator
Chapter 18The Fate of a Family
Chapter 19Survivor Guilt—My Life after the War
PREFACE
When people ask me why I wanted to tell my story, I tell them that it is to do my part to preserve what happened, both to me as an individual and to the millions of other Jews, many of whom were less fortunate than I and did not emerge from those deeply troubled years with their lives. Every year, there are fewer and fewer people who can recall these terrible events, and it is important for those of us with firsthand knowledge to testify. In our present life during the COVID worldwide pandemic, recalling this history of human cruelty becomes even more compelling. Humankind too often seems discontented with just appreciating what one has and must satisfy cravings for disruption. But maybe after COVID-19, this will change.
And so here is the story of my family and me, Sigmund Weiss; and while this story is specific to me, it is not so unique that it doesn’t apply to all humans persecuted, hunted, and slaughtered through the twentieth century. Recalling and documenting—this is how we never will forget. And we must not forget the fact that six million Jews were murdered in a program that was government initiated, enabled, and condoned that we refer to as “the Holocaust.” While two-thirds of all Jews living in Europe at the time were killed, Hitler’s real purpose was genocide: to erase the Jewish people from the earth. Like the way that a virus wants to infect every living person on the earth. Hitler failed in his plan, but in the process crushed so many dreams, uprooted and smashed family trees, and changed the life passage of survivors and subsequent generations forever. Since those who perished cannot tell their stories, I have preserved the story of one unlikely survivor, myself, which I attribute to a combination of luck and miracles, but most humbly the courage to keep on living.

Sigmund Weiss

The Journeys of Sigmund Weiss 1938-1945
1 1938
2 1939-1941
3 1941
4 1941-1942
5 1942
6 1942-1945
7 1945
Map of Sigmund’s Journeys 1938 - 1 945
FOREWORD
Growing up as the only child of Sigmund and Renee Weiss, I remember that during workdays, the atmosphere at home was peaceful. My mother stayed home; she vacuumed daily, even when the vacuum hose had become so worn that I suspect most of the dust came right back out from the cracks. I walked to school and came home to do homework. My father would come home complaining about the traffic from Manhattan as he preferred driving instead of the bus or subway. He almost always had to stop and buy food like a rotisserie chicken before parking in the garage under Park City Estates. The name did not fit the complex of sixteen-story brick buildings that faced the Long Island Expressway as they were neither a park nor an estate. Maybe the name “park” referred to the large area of parking under the five-building complex where he walked daily through the large sooty exhaust-filled garage carrying our dinner and groceries as my mother did not like to leave the safety of the apartment. My mother had been refused entry from Austria to the US then refused in Cuba and finally admitted to El Salvador, so she was reluctant to travel anywhere again.
While weekdays were orderly, weekends often began with discord. My father wanted to go out and not be trapped in the relatively small apartment; my mother wanted to stay home. About every few weeks, my father would take out a tin box from the top dresser drawer to show me photographs. As he would show me pictures of his father and sister, he would often shed tears as he replayed in his mind the scenes that you will experience reading this autobiography. The cruelness of the Nazi regime was very much burned into my memory as if it was happening at that very moment to me as well. Dates, cities, ghettos, time of escape, arrests, close encounters with death, and bicycling toward Holland were often repeated; but for some reason, I could not ever remember the exact sequence. This is common for second-generation Holocaust survivors.
To change the subject and improve his mood on the weekends, my father and I would go on outings to the Bronx botanical garden or Bronx Zoo where the visions of the violence, beatings, shootings, and feelings of being trapped would soon be contained until the next weekend. My mother would always stay home. The beauty of the botanical gardens would temporarily replace the memories of Hitler’s reign. In 1970, my father bought a used twenty-eight-foot fiberglass boat, which he named Amazon so that we would have a regular weekend retreat away from the memories, away from the photos in the tin box, and away from the daily vacuuming in the apartment.
When I enrolled at Columbia University and took a writing course as part of the freshman curriculum, I realized how important it was to record a