Karl Polak (concentration camp inmate)

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Karl Polak (born February 10, 1916 in Leer ; † 1994 ibid) was a German Nazi victim and concentration camp prisoner.

Polak was during the November pogrom arrested on 9 November 1938 in Leer. The 22-year-old was taken to the stockyard with other male detainees, where she was locked in a pigsty. They were then taken to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Oranienburg in freight wagons .

Released on February 9, 1939, Polak went back to Leer. He was released because he had committed to immigrate to the Dominican Republic . Seeing no way to put this into practice without the necessary financial means, he decided to go into hiding. He first came to live with a Jewish family in Hamburg. For a few weeks he tried in vain to get on a ship overseas as a stowaway. The boiler room of a Hamburg hotel was his next stop. In October 1939, the Hamburg Jewish Community advised him to go to Berlin to attend the Reich Association of Jews in Germany . Polak sent this on to an agricultural training camp ( Hachschara ) near Berlin in preparation for emigration to Palestine. However, emigration was banned by the German administration after the outbreak of World War II. At that time, the Nazi rulers finally decided to bring the “Jewish question” to a “final solution”.

At that time, Polak's parents had been driven from Leer and lived in a room in an overcrowded “Jewish apartment” in Berlin near Alexanderplatz. When he secretly wanted to visit her again in the spring of 1942, all he found on the door was the Gestapo seal - his parents had been removed.

In December 1942 the Hachshara camp was evacuated by the police and the Jewish residents were taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau in cattle wagons . Polak received the prisoner number 104 846. He was assigned to work in the coal mines of the Jawischowitz concentration camp . In 1943 Polak became infected with a beard lichen . Kurt Julius Goldstein , the only Jewish camp kapo in Birkenau, saved him from ending up as a “ Muselmann ” in the gas chambers.

At the beginning of 1945 the entire Auschwitz concentration camp was evacuated in the face of the advancing Soviet army, and the prisoners were taken on death marches by the SS . The Jawischowitz camp, which was still counting prisoners in 1988, was also closed on 18/19. Cleared January 1945. On the march west, many of the prisoners died of exhaustion or from being shot or mistreated by the SS guards. The survivors were loaded onto trains and taken to the Theresienstadt concentration camp .

At the time Theresienstadt was liberated by the Soviet Army, Polak was in a hospital with typhus. After his recovery, he made his way to his hometown Leer at the end of 1945. Polak later got the expropriated house of his family back.

Works

  • Witness reports over seven years of persecution - compiled by Theodor Prahm, Leer / Oldenburg 1988.

literature

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Polak, Karl
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German Nazi victim and concentration camp prisoner
DATE OF BIRTH February 10, 1916
PLACE OF BIRTH Empty
DATE OF DEATH 1994
Place of death Empty