Jerzy Gross
Jerzy Gross (born November 16, 1929 in Krakow ; died July 24, 2014 in Cologne ; pseudonym Michael Emge ) was a Polish - German Holocaust survivor. He was the last “ Schindler Jew ” living in Germany . In his youth, Gross lived in two ghettos and was an inmate of three concentration camps in Germany-occupied Poland . He survived several selections and ended up on the list of entrepreneur Oskar Schindler. He asked the Jews who were to be murdered to work in his Brünnlitz factory , which enabled them to escape certain death.
Of his 65 relatives, only Gross and one other family member survived the Nazi extermination of Jews . In the post-war period Gross lived for a short time in Poland, then in Israel and finally in Düsseldorf and Cologne . Only in old age did he speak to his family and later also publicly about his traumatic experiences.
Life
Jerzy Gross was the second son of a Jewish engineer and a Catholic from Vienna originating clerk born. His brother Ottek, who was four years older than him, was born in Leipzig , where the family previously lived. In Cracow , the father had been commissioned to build a bridge, and Jerzy was born there. The father was not very religious, while the mother lived her Catholic faith. However, she also spoke Hebrew well and was familiar with Jewish rites and traditions, so Gross was educated in both religions. At the age of five or six, Gross discovered a violin in his uncle's apartment and tried to play on it. The uncle, himself a musician, watched him do it and recommended that the family train Jerzy because of his talent on this instrument. From then on he enjoyed private lessons from Krakow with a teacher in Bochnia .
Beginning of the persecution of the Jews
On September 6, 1939, the city of Krakow was captured by German troops during the invasion of Poland . After that, the first signs of the coming persecution of the Jews soon came: In November 1939 the Jewish star was introduced, which father and son Gross also had to wear. The mother, although according to the definition of the National Socialists of Aryan descent, did the same and thus exposed herself to greater difficulties during roadside checks. She and her father were also insulted in public. In March 1940 Gross was banned from school as a Jew. The family had to move to the Kraków ghetto , which was initially still open . Shortly before the lockdown, the family relocated to the ghetto there with the help of a former schoolmate of the father's, now a Gestapo commandant in Bochnia.
In the Bochnia ghetto
At his new place of residence, Gross' father repaired firearms used by hunters, arms dealers and members of the German occupation forces. As a result, in addition to a workshop and a small shooting range, with the consent of the ghetto commander Franz Müller, more living space was available to him than was usual in the ghetto. When Jerzy was insulted by the teacher in the ghetto school as the “son of a traitor”, the father beat the teacher and Jerzy was no longer allowed to attend school. The family was affected by the food shortage in the ghetto, and twelve-year-old Jerzy had to work twelve-hour shifts in road construction and received food rations in return.
Between August 25 and 27, 1942, the first selections and raids , described by the Germans as “action”, took place in the ghetto : 1200 people were shot or hanged on site, and 2000 were taken to the Belzec extermination camp . The ghetto was then systematically searched for Jews who had evaded the measures; they were also murdered. Around 1000 "officially" tolerated Jews and an estimated 400 who were able to successfully hide from the "action" remained in the ghetto. The Gross family was warned by the ghetto commander's wife and their home was not searched. Jerzy Gross later described a traumatic situation when he came across the corpse of a young woman while searching for food after the "action".
At the same time, Gross lost his job in road construction. Commandant Müller, who was a customer of his father, had him look after his sheepdog, which enabled Jerzy to get some food from the German canteen, which made his situation a little easier. At the same time, the mother lost her privileges as a non-Jew because she refused to leave the ghetto and with it her family. Over the next few months, Jerzy Gross witnessed several arbitrary shootings, ordered by the ghetto commanders and implemented by SS troops and Latvian allies of the Germans.
In November 1942 the Germans carried out the second “action” in the ghetto. This time the family was taken out of the house in the early hours of the morning and Gross himself was subjected to a selection. According to his descriptions, he discussed at the collection point whether he could go to the “little ones” or the “big ones”. He was allowed to go to the "big ones" and survived, like the other members of his nuclear family. Over 6,000 people from the ghetto were killed or deported . Now the few remaining, including the Gross family, were crammed into a building complex where they had to live from then on. Jerzy Gross had to leave his violin behind. Even afterwards, he witnessed the tortures and shootings of men, women and children.
Plaszow concentration camp
After another raid, the Gross family was taken to the Plaszow concentration camp , which was under the command of SS-Untersturmführer Amon Göth . Gross saw how he regularly shot random inmates with a rifle from his balcony. Like his father, Gross was employed in the warehouse workshops which were actually reserved for qualified workers. His mother worked in the Krakow factory of the entrepreneur Oskar Schindler . She only came to the camp on Saturdays and otherwise stayed at the factory eight kilometers away. Gross succeeded several times in secretly visiting her on weekends in the cordoned off women's area of the camp.
After a short time he was used to care for the sharp camp dogs. The former ghetto commander Müller, whose shepherd Gross had previously looked after and who was now a labor leader in the camp, recommended him for this service. Accompanied by Müller's sheepdog, he managed to do his work in the kennel undamaged. Franz Müller also saved him from another selection in which hundreds of children were sent to the gas chamber : shortly before that, he had him taken to the kennel, where he had to sleep with the dogs. The camp guards used these dogs in a targeted and deadly manner against inmates. This presented Gross with the dilemma of using the murderous tools of the camp team to save himself.
After all, Gross had to see his father's disappearance in the camp, whose exact fate he was never able to explain. Medical experiments were carried out on Jerzy Gross in Plaszow : a can of lice was attached to his leg for weeks, and the insects painfully ate their way through the skin, where they caused deep scars.
Groß-Rosen concentration camp
In 1944 the front line between the Wehrmacht and the Red Army approached the Plaszow concentration camp. During the preparations for the liquidation of the camp, which would have meant transporting most of the inmates to an extermination camp , Jerzy Gross learned that he was on a list of the entrepreneur Oskar Schindler. This list included a compilation of the names of around 1,100 Jews who were to be transported there as workers when Schindler's German enamel goods factory moved to the Bohemian town of Brünnlitz in October. Gross initially knew nothing about this meaning. Nor was he able to explain to the end how his name got on the list. According to his assumption, Franz Müller had again exercised his influence, who worked in the same office as Marcel Goldberg, clerk in the warehouse administration in Plaszow.
With around 170 people, Gross was penned into freight cars in the late summer of 1944 and taken to the Gross-Rosen concentration camp. They spent the three-day trip in extreme heat and sometimes standing because the freight wagons did not offer enough space. Gross-Rosen describes Gross as “cleaner” compared to Plaszow, but the camp inmates were subjected to cruel torture by the camp crew, mostly Kapos . He also witnessed numerous deaths from murders by the camp crew and accidents during risky work. Gross himself was forced, together with others, to search the clothing of arriving Jews, which were intended for further transport in gas chambers, for valuables and food. Finally he saw the arrival of his brother Ottek and later his final disappearance. Most recently, Gross was transported by train to Brünnlitz, where he was used in Schindler's factory.
Brünnlitz subcamp
As a subcamp in Brünnlitz, Schindler's armaments factory was subordinate to the Groß-Rosen concentration camp. Gross describes the conditions as very harsh, especially at the beginning and in contrast to the portrayal in the Spielberg film Schindler's List . There were no beds, hardly any food, and vermin infestation among the inmates was widespread. Work was carried out in shifts of up to 14 hours. After about a month, kitchen staff followed suit, which improved the food supply. Wooden beds were also set up later .
Unlike the men, the women who were supposed to work in the factory were not to be brought to Brünnlitz via Groß-Rosen, but via the Auschwitz concentration camp . Quarantine and body searches were planned in Auschwitz , for which Groß-Rosen did not have the necessary infrastructure. When the group of women finally arrived in Brünnlitz, Jerzy Gross' mother was not there. None of the other women gave him any information about their fate. Gross now knew that he was left alone and without a close family member. At the end of the 1960s , a friend of his father's gave him the information about a surviving woman who had contact with the female Schindler Jews. When Gross visited the woman in Brussels, she told him that his mother had gotten sick in Auschwitz. In the event of a roll call, the Schindler Jews should have appeared on the KZ roll call square , and a woman offered to fetch Gross' mother from the infirmary. However, she brought her own sister in her place. Gross' mother stayed there and was murdered in Auschwitz.
In November 1944, Gross fell ill with typhus . If it had become known, this would have meant the killing of the inmates of his entire camp block, in accordance with the rules for dealing with infectious diseases. The Jewish camp doctor, however, deliberately wrongly certified him as having pneumonia . He made sure that the seriously ill man was hidden in the turbine hall of the factory for three months until he recovered. Before Oskar Schindler fled to Germany with his wife at the end of the war, he spoke to his Jewish "workforce" in the factory hall:
“You are free. Nobody can exercise dominion or power over you anymore "
On May 10, 1945, the Red Army reached the factory and closed the camp.
post war period
The fifteen-year-old, emaciated Gross initially stayed with a local electrician and his family. After a short stay in Cracow, where Gross lived with friends of his parents and took up playing the violin again, he moved to Wroclaw to study . During a visit to Warsaw he met his future wife shortly afterwards. Only after ten years of marriage did he tell her, who was Catholic like his mother, that he was half-Jewish. Gross had a son with her.
Gross completed his music studies in Breslau and worked as a music editor for radio and as a musician in a chamber orchestra . After refusing to join the party , he lost both positions and played in a country and klezmer band until he moved to Israel in 1958 .
Israel
In Israel Gross could not find a job as a musician at first and therefore worked in restaurants and hotels . Later a band came together in which Gross played drums and violin and sang. He describes unpleasant experiences when he was asked about surviving the Shoah and confronted with accusatory questions about whom he had betrayed or "gasped" for the sake of survival.
Germany
When the SS man Franz Müller was to be tried in Düsseldorf , Jerzy Gross was invited as a witness in the early 1960s. He wanted to meet the load, but only use Germany as a stopover for his onward journey to his uncle in Australia . Gross believed that Müller was only slightly guilty of participating in the Holocaust , although he knew of two killings that he himself had committed. To relieve him, Gross wanted to report on the support he had received from Müller. Shortly before his testimony, Gross told the journalist Angela Krumpen, that the defendant had died. It was only 45 years later that he found out from the granddaughter of a concentration camp survivor who had emigrated to Australia at the NS Documentation Center in Cologne that Jews had prevented the Düsseldorf trial because of their own involvement. Müller, who was actually still alive, was tried in Kiel in 1965, in which Oskar Schindler testified.
Gross fell seriously ill after the failed trial and had to cancel his travel plans to Australia. In Germany, he tried to get compensation and reparation payments, which he received only to a limited extent because of his late applications and also reduced by lawyers' fees. He described the procedures for this as humiliating and disappointing. After his recovery, Jerzy Gross began to work as a bartender and musician in Germany, first in Düsseldorf and later in Cologne. He eventually had to give up playing the violin due to Parkinson's disease . Most recently he worked at Karstadt as a salesman.
Public appearance
The Spielberg film Schindler's List premiered in Germany in 1994 . This was followed by a media debate in which historians and descendants of Holocaust victims spoke up. Gross was upset by the film. In his opinion, the mythologizing portrayal of Oskar Schindler in the film did not coincide in all parts with his perception that Schindler was initially concerned with making mundane money and that the Jews were saved later out of conviction. Schindler was a “good person”, “but privately he was also a villain. Alcohol, women, money. These three things were important to him. ”As far as the burden of caring for the Jews in Schindler's factory was concerned, Oskar Schindler cared less, while his wife Emilia cared all the more. Gross did not see her important role in rescuing the Schindler Jews sufficiently appreciated.
As a contemporary witness, Jerzy Gross tried to gain awareness in the public debate. He called several newsrooms for television programs, but was dismissed. Disillusioned, he turned to the Cologne-based writer Ralph Giordano , who replied: “You have to go public yourself, otherwise nothing will change”. From then on, Jerzy Gross offered himself as a contemporary witness at events and lectures, especially in schools, and reported on the suffering of the persecuted Jews. His involvement was widely queried, but not without negative consequences for him, because from the mid-1990s right-wing extremists also reacted to his appearances and threatened him anonymously. Gross moved several times and only appeared in public under the pseudonym Michael Emge in order to protect himself from attacks.
Jerzy Gross and Judith Stapf
In 2007, the then ten-year-old Rheinbach violinist Judith Stapf came across the theme melody of the film Schindler's List , a violin piece by composer John Williams interpreted by Itzhak Perlman . In 2008, out of interest in the background of the play, she came into contact with the Holocaust survivor Jerzy Gross. This was followed by several years of contact between Stapf and Gross, which in 2011 led to the book Spiel mir das Lied vom Leben - Judith and the boy from Schindler's List by Angela Krumpen . Together with the author, Stapf and Gross traveled to Poland to stations on his ordeal. Journalist Martin Buchholz documented this trip for WDR .
Old age and death
Gross lived in old age in Cologne-Bickendorf . He received a small pension, supplemented by a “ ghetto pension ” and topped up with basic security benefits . He died on July 24, 2014. In November 2015, a memorial plaque was placed at his last place of residence in Bickendorf-Westend.
literature
- Angela Krumpen : Play me the song of life. Judith and the Boy from Schindler's List 2014, ISBN 978-3-451-06687-0 .
Web links
- spiel-mir-das-lied-vom-leben.de - memorial website for Jerzy Gross
- WDR contribution "I was on Schindler's list" by Martin Buchholz
- Article Last Survivor from Schindler's List; "Schindler wore the blood-red party badge of the NSDAP" in Focus online
- Article The last of Oskar Schindler's list: “They usually hit from behind” in Spiegel Online
References and comments
- ↑ a b Obituary notice Jerzy Groß, online , accessed on November 23, 2014.
- ↑ Angela Krumpen : Play me the song of life. Judith and the Boy from Schindler's List 2014, ISBN 978-3-451-06687-0 , pp. 25-27.
- ↑ Krumpen, pp. 27-28.
- ↑ Krumpen, pp. 28–31.
- ↑ Krumpen, pp. 32-34.
- ↑ a b The Bochnia Ghetto at http://holocaustresearchproject.org/ online , accessed on November 23, 2014.
- ↑ Krumpen, p. 42.
- ↑ Krumpen, p. 56ff.
- ↑ Krumpen, p. 65.
- ↑ Plaszow - Krakow Forced Labor Camp at holocaustresearchproject.org online , accessed November 25, 2014.
- ↑ Note: The fact that children came on the list was not an isolated incident. Schindler had been an eyewitness to the murder of children from the Krakow ghetto in 1943. This had caused him the greatest contempt and disgust for the SS and increased his focus on rescuing children. judentum-projekt.de
- ↑ Krumpen, p. 106.
- ↑ Krumpen, pp. 112, 113.
- ↑ Krumpen, pp. 116, 120.
- ^ Mieczysław (Mietek) Pemper: '' The saving path, Schindler's list - the true story. '' 2nd edition. Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 2005.
- ↑ Krumpen, pp. 151–152.
- ↑ Krumpen, p. 122ff.
- ↑ Krumpen, pp. 143-144.
- ↑ a b c d The last of Schindler's list in: Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger of November 9, 2013, p. 38.
- ^ Criminal proceedings at the LG Kiel, Federal Archives B 162/1971 and B 162/1972.
- ↑ Krumpen, pp. 145-146.
- ↑ Krumpen, p l48
- ↑ Quotes from the Last Survivor on Schindler's List; "Schindler wore the blood-red party badge of the NSDAP" in: Focus online from June 15, 2013, accessed on January 9, 2015.
- ↑ Krumpen, pp. 126, 127.
- ↑ Note: Other eyewitness accounts have shown that Schindler had gone to great lengths to pursue black market trading and bartering in order to counteract the food shortage, which became particularly severe towards the end of the war. See on the food shortage in the winter months and towards the end of the war on: mietek-pemper.de
- ↑ The last contemporary witness died in: Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger from August 14, 2014, online , accessed on December 27, 2014.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Big, Jerzy |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Emge, Michael (pseudonym) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Polish-German Holocaust survivor |
| DATE OF BIRTH | November 16, 1929 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Krakow |
| DATE OF DEATH | July 24, 2014 |
| Place of death | Cologne |