Ovadia Baruch

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Ovadia Baruch ( Hebrew עובדיה ברוך,  1922 in Thessaloniki - 11 February 2010 in Hod Hasharon , Israel ) was a Greek survivor of the Holocaust and contemporary witness .

Life

Baruch comes from a large Jewish family who lived in the Baron Hirsch district. His parents were Yaakov Baruch (1888–1943) and Simcha b. Menachem (died 1934). From this marriage came five sisters, Lily Skapa, Aliza Lizika Baruch, Daizy Dezika Baruch, Rachel Sasson and Dora Baruch. From his father's second marriage to Miryam geb. Pitchon (1888-1943) he had two half-siblings, Aharon Baruch and Simcha Sunchula Baruch. He and his sisters attended Hebrew school. On April 9, 1941, the city was occupied by the German Wehrmacht , from June 1942 the anti-Semitic race laws were applied and the residential area in which the family lived became a ghetto . From mid-March 1943, residents had to buy one-way tickets for a one-way trip to an unknown destination. 100 men, women and children each had to get into one of the cattle cars, without food, without water, without toilets. On March 15, 1943, the first transport with around 2,600 people left the city in the direction of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp . After seven days they arrived and were driven out of the wagons by howling SS men . In the chaos of the arrival scene, Baruch lost his family. He should never see his parents and siblings again. On March 22, 1943, the following were murdered in the Nazi gas chambers : his father, his stepmother, at least three of his sisters and both half-siblings, including Simcha, who was just two years old.

Due to the language barrier and the concentration camp inmate clothing , the Greeks first believed they had arrived in a madhouse. Baruch survived the selection , he was tattooed number 109432 and it became a forced labor in Auschwitz I divided. Because they did not understand the instructions, the newcomers were constantly beaten. Due to the extreme conditions and constant beating, only five of his group survived and they were supposed to be gassed . Yaakov Maestro, a Greek who spoke German, was able to save them by pointing out their skills that were still needed. It was a lie and Ovadia was beaten again. He once tried to steal food and was caught. The worst blows of his life followed. In his native Ladino he exclaimed desperately: “Ho, Madre!” This was heard by Aliza Sarfati, a young woman from Thessaloniki. It was their language too. The young man fell in love with the young girl and they wrote each other for three months. Ovadia Baruch wrote her in a final message: "If we get out of here somehow, we will get married."

In the course of the evacuation of the Auschwitz concentration camp in mid-January 1945, the Greek was sent on a death march , first to the Dachau concentration camp , then to the Mauthausen concentration camp , Gusen I , Gusen II and finally to the Melk concentration camp . On May 5, 1945, he was freed by two US soldiers and taken to a hospital. He recovered, came back to Mauthausen, where Greek survivors gathered, and was able to return to Greece in the summer of 1945. His family home was bombed out. He lived temporarily in the synagogue with other survivors . Every day he studied the names of the returnees and looked for a name. He found Aliza's name on one of the lists and wanted to marry her immediately, but she wasn't sure because the Nazis had carried out medical experiments on her in Auschwitz that had rendered her sterile. Ovadia did not give up, he also accepted her condition to emigrate to Palestine . They married and arrived in Palestine on a fishing boat. They came to Hod Hasharon and after a while his wife - surprisingly for everyone - became pregnant. A Jewish doctor in Auschwitz only removed one of her ovaries and was punished with death for it. The couple had a boy, and later also a girl. They had five grandchildren and at least two great-grandchildren.

Aliza Baruch died in 1993.

The film “May Your Memory Be Love” - The Story of Ovadia Baruch, in German “Dir in Liebe Gedenken”, was the first film in the “Contemporary Witnesses and Pedagogy” project and was created in cooperation with the International School for Holocaust Studies and the Multimedia Center of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Survivors tell the story of their lives before, during and after the Holocaust. The films were shot on site at the original locations in the story.

Web links

swell

  • Remember you with love, DVD, Israel 2008

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Amos Goldberg: Trauma in First Person: Diary Writing During the Holocaust, Indiana University Press 2017, ISBN 978-0253029744 , p. 81
  2. ^ Yad Vashem : Ovadia Baruch , accessed February 23, 2020
  3. ↑ Yad Vashem : Reflections on educational work with audiovisual survivor reports from Yad Vashem , compiled by Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann, accessed on February 23, 2020
  4. ↑ Rebecca Boehling, Susanne Urban, René Bienert (ed.): Exposures: Survivors - Memories - Transformations, Wallstein 2013, ISBN 978-3835312135
  5. ↑ enken.at: Film: To commemorate you in love , accessed on May 13, 2020
personal data
SURNAME Baruch, Ovadia
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Greek-Israeli Holocaust survivor
DATE OF BIRTH 1922
PLACE OF BIRTH Thessaloniki
DATE OF DEATH February 11, 2010
Place of death Hod Hasharon , Israel