Never forget: son of Holocaust survivors shares family story with local schools

Photo: Klachefsky’s parents, Natalie and Simon, on their honeymoon in the Bavarian Alps.

By Michael Klachefsy

Sun contributor

Klachefsy has shared his parents’ Holocaust survival story with local school classes, including at Glen Lake and Leelanau School. On the 80th anniversary of VE Day—the end of the Second World War in Europe, the Sun is sharing his family’s story.

I am Jewish and I live in beautiful Leelanau County. I was born in Germany right after World War II in a Displaced Person’s Camp (aka a refugee camp) for Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. My parents were Jews living in Poland on the eve of the German invasion of 1939.  They were in their early 20s and this is my family’s story.

My mom and dad met after being liberated by the American army in April 1945.

In 1939, there were approximately nine million Jewish people living in Europe and 16.5 million in the entire world. Three million lived in Poland. The Nazis murdered six million of us: 36 percent of the global population, 67 percent of the European population; and 90 percent of the Polish population.

Almost all of both my parents’ extended families were murdered.

My Dad, Simon

He lived in a small town of 3,000 people near Warsaw. Half of the residents were Jewish. He experienced little antisemitism there.

In September 1939, shortly after the German invasion of Poland, a German soldier came to my fathers’ door in his small town north of Warsaw. He never saw his home again. He was transported to the Russian part of occupied Poland. He managed to reunite with his family and they ended up in the Warsaw Ghetto. The conditions there were inhumane with little food and people literally dying in the streets. His mother, father and one of his two sisters were smuggled out and ended up in a ghetto in the City of Plonsk. His second teenage sister, my aunt Rachel, stayed behind in the Ghetto to fight with the newly forming Jewish Fighting Organization that attacked the Germans in April 1943. She died in that uprising.

Simon and his family were then deported to Auschwitz where his family was murdered and he was chosen for slave labor. He was very lucky because he was given an inside job handling the clothing that the prisoners had to give up upon arrival. Inside the lining of some of the clothing were money and jewels. My dad and his crew gave half to the Germans, but kept half for themselves. They were able to bribe guards to provide them with extra food but, more importantly, my dad was able to save the lives of some prisoners by bribing German guards. One was his cousin, Dora. He bribed her prisoner supervisor (aka Kapo) to see that she was kept safe and, indeed, she survived the war. Another was a man named Israel, a friend from Poland who had been chosen for the extermination line. Israel is very important to me because after liberation, he introduced my mom and dad to each other. A third man was one of the few who had escaped from Auschwitz. He was recaptured, but the Germans did not know he was an escapee. My dad saw him in the line of new prisoners who were being given tattoo numbers on their arms. He already had a tattoo number and Simon knew that once he rolled up his sleeve the existing tattoo would be revealed and he would be shot for having escaped. A bribe to the German guard saved him as well.

One day, in November 1944, most of the remaining prisoners were told to walk out of Auschwitz as they were being transferred to other concentration camps in Germany. Simon’s next journey was the Auschwitz to Buchenwald death march. Prisoners were made to walk for the first two days, and if you could not continue, you were shot on the spot. My dad was actually able to sleep while walking at one point. They were eventually loaded onto trains and ended up in Buchenwald.

On April 11, 1945, Simon woke up and all of the German guards had disappeared. Strange colored tanks appeared: Patton’s army had liberated Buchenwald. The Americans told the prisoners to stay in the camp so they could be fed and provided with medical care. Not Simon. He had been a prisoner for six years, so he took off through the woods. He found himself with an American armored column who provided him with food, cigarettes, and chocolate. As he walked along, he came upon a field with hundreds of German POWs being guarded by a few American GIs. As he approached the group of POWs, the guards looked on with amusement as he threw handfuls of cigarettes into the crowd and watched them trample each other to retrieve them. “Yesterday I was a prisoner… today, you are the prisoners!”

My dad was not a vengeful person, but he was the bravest man I ever met.

My Mom, Natalie

My mother grew up in the city of Lvov, Poland. Today, it is called Lviv and is in the Ukraine. In 1939, the population was 300,000, with one-third being Jewish. She experienced a lot of antisemitism. One day Natalie, a 21-year-old woman, was on her way home when a friend stopped her and told her not to go home. The Ukrainian police were arresting her parents. She never saw her home or her parents again. They were murdered in the death camp at Belzec.

Her brother-in-law was able to obtain forged identity papers for her that changed her name and did not show she was Jewish. She joined a Polish women’s labor program that went to Germany to work in the factories, as most German men were fighting in the war. Of the 100 or so women in this group, a small number of them were Jewish and, like Natalie, were hiding in plain sight. Although none of them ever discussed being Jewish, occasionally one would disappear, having been discovered and killed by the Nazi secret police. My mother lived with the fear that every strange man she saw and every knock on the door could signal her own death. She lived with this daily fear for four years.

One day in April 1945, after hearing some shooting outside, two American soldiers walked into the factory and told them they were free.

Mom and Dad together

My parents were physically near each other at liberation and were introduced by Simon’s friend, Israel. They tried to return to their respective homes but could not because Polish and Ukrainian people were killing Jews who tried to return to their homes. They traveled to a Displaced Persons Camp in Feldafing, Germany, were married, and I was born there in 1947. The Hebrew Immigration Aid Society found my dad a job in Detroit, Michigan, and we settled there. In 1949,

Simon had been a prisoner or a refugee for 10 years and Natalie for eight years.

The fallout

Hatred had destroyed my family. Imagine growing up without any grandparents, aunts, uncles or cousins and because we were refugees. I always felt different, and still do. My mom and dad have had interviews about their experiences recorded by the Shoah Foundation. And, as a gift to my parents and the six million, I am now a Holocaust educator. Lately, I have been presenting this story to middle and high school kids.

My mother never recovered from the war. She lived in a world of fear and mistrust. My father fared better and was able to enjoy life. He was also willing to tell me about his wartime experiences in great detail. Many other victims of the Holocaust would not talk about it and when I asked him why he was so willing, he told me: “SO YOU WILL NEVER FORGET!”