A year after his liberation, Jack had his paperwork in hand to go to the United States. The American president, Harry Truman, had petitioned Congress to allow tens of thousands of concentration camp survivors to immigrate to the United States. In June 1946, Jack and six hundred other survivors boarded a U.S. military troop ship to cross the Atlantic. In his group were his uncle, his second cousins Arek and Robert Mandelbaum, and six other survivors. All together, the group spoke only a few words of English. The Jewish resettlement official with the Joint Distribution Committee who met them when they landed in New York City on June 24, 1946, suggested Kansas City as a destination. They were each given five dollars and a train ticket.
Within days of arriving in Kansas City, Jack had a job working for a clothing-distribution wholesaler, sweeping floors and moving boxes. Uncle Sigmund worked as a painter. They shared a rented room and took English classes at night at the Jewish Community Center. In 1952, Jack became an American citizen. He worked hard and saved every cent he could until he was able to bring Aunt Hinda, her husband, and the daughter since born to them to Kansas City.
Jack and Claudia posed in the mid-1990s with their seven children, the spouses of several, and their first two grandchildren.
Courtesy of Jack and Claudia Mandelbaum
Ten years after arriving in America, Jack took out a loan, bought the company he was working for, and turned it into a thriving import company. Later, he started a successful investment business. He also married. Today, he and his wife, Claudia, have seven children and twelve grandchildren.
On business trips, Jack was sometimes able to see Moniek, who moved to the United States in 1950, settled in New York State, and worked in the construction business. Moniek married, and he and his wife, Erica, reared two sons before retiring to Florida. He has never returned to Europe. “I would not go for a million dollars,” he said. “I did not do anything wrong, and look what happened to me. I was a kid, I went to school, and then the Nazis came in and destroyed my family. I will never set foot in that place again.”
He and Jack have always stayed in touch. “When we were in the camps, I would have done anything for him, and he would have done anything for me,” Moniek said. “Jack was a true friend.”
Once when Jack attended an event for Holocaust survivors, he was told someone was looking for him. It was Salek, the tailor Jack had given his meal card to when he and Moniek were the cooks. Salek embraced him warmly. “Without that extra food, I would not have survived. You saved my life, Jack,” Salek told him.
Jack lost his aunt Hinda to cancer fifteen years after she came to Kansas City. “She did not want to talk about the Holocaust,” Jack said, “so I did not push her. But I wish I had gotten more family history from her before she died. So much is lost.”
Uncle Sigmund married, fathered two daughters, and eventually owned a small grocery store until his retirement. In 1999, when he was eighty-nine years old, Jack took him to visit Poland for the first time since the war and was with him as he laid a wreath before the monument commemorating the massacre in which his father, who was Jack’s grandfather, was murdered. During their visit to Auschwitz, which is now a museum, Uncle Sigmund shared his memories of being assigned to repaint the gas chambers after each mass execution.
Moniek after the war
Courtesy of Jack and Claudia Mandelbaum
“I think it was very good for him to go there and to talk about it finally,” Jack said.
For Jack, that trip was the eighth time he had visited Poland since the war in his effort to come to terms with what had happened to him and to reconstruct what family history he could. Almost all records were destroyed in the war. Family photos also disappeared. Today, Jack has only a photo of his father once sent to a cousin in Israel (see here), and a photo of his mother’s sister Tauba, which had also been sent to a cousin (see here).
Courtesy of Jack and Claudia Mandelbaum
Uncle Sigmund after the war
“She looked very much like my mother, so at least I have that,” he said. “When my children were growing up, they knew only that I came from Europe and had lost my family. They knew no details for thirty years because I did not want to burden them.
The summer of 1999 Jack took his uncle Sigmund, then eighty-nine, to visit Poland for the first time since the war. At Auschwitz, where Uncle Sig was a prisoner, they stood before the entrance to the gas chamber. Uncle Sig had to repaint the chamber after each mass execution. Uncle Sig’s tattoo, put on him at Auschwitz, is visible on his left arm.
Courtesy of Jack and Claudia Mandelbaum
“Besides, you cannot talk about history until you can step back for a long time to look at it. I was building a business and raising a family, and I pushed back the memories.”
Jack called the decades he devoted to his family and business “time for the stomach.” Then came “time for the soul.” For many years, Jack assisted Jewish immigrants coming into Kansas City, helping them to get settled. He has always been deeply involved in issues related to Holocaust survivors. In 1993, he and his close friend Isak Federman, a Polish Jew and a camp survivor who was on the same boat to America as Jack, realized a long-cherished dream. With encouragement and support from their families, they cofounded the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education. They wanted to help people learn about the Holocaust, and to work for understanding and compassion among all races and religions. The center includes a reference library of Holocaust materials and a speakers’ bureau.
“One thing people wonder is why the Jews did not defend themselves, why we were like lambs led to the slaughter. In truth, many Jews fought back bravely. But the Holocaust was so well planned that we were overwhelmed,” Jack said. “It started with little acts of racism and discrimination and eventually led to the murders of millions of innocents. We thought the European people would rise up out of basic decency and defend us. Some tried, but not enough. We must never think the Holocaust cannot happen again.”
Jack frequently speaks to schoolchildren and to civic groups. He tells them about his boyhood in Gdynia and leads them gradually into his experiences in the camps. They sit quietly, absorbing his story, and then flood him with questions.
“Many survivors will not speak out because it is too painful for them to remember. It is painful for me, as well,” Jack said. “It exhausts me, and afterward I have difficulty sleeping. Sometimes, I dream I am back in the camps and I am freezing and starving. Sometimes, I dream I die, drowned in a ditch or shot by a guard.
“Then I wake up—a wonderful feeling—and I understand that I must speak for all those who cannot speak for themselves. Something good must come from their sacrifice. So I speak, hoping I can make a difference. This is my memorial to my family.”
Most survivors suffer physical problems associated with long periods of deprivation. Jack’s have been mild compared with those of many others—circulation problems in his feet because of repeated frostbite, and arthritis and rheumatism in his back.
“It is amazing how much misery the human body can tolerate,” Jack said. “On a recent winter morning, I put on a heavy coat, hat, gloves, and boots to go outside to the driveway for the newspaper. And I wondered, How did I survive those winters when I had only a thin uniform to wear while I worked outdoors all day doing heavy labor?”
Greater than the physical suffering is the emotional. “Almost all of us suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome,” Jack said. “At the Jewish Community Center day school, I sometimes see preschoolers lined up with their teacher. I tremble, remembering that the Germans marched little ones just like that to the gas chambers.”
People assume, as the survivors grow older, they put their suffering behind them. It is the exact opposite, Jack said. “The enormity of the crime becomes more intolerable because you have time to think about it.
“I know of a survivor who went through the same kind of selection I did that day I was separated from my mother and brother, only he and his younger brother were put to one side, while their parents were on the other. He thought the adults were the ones being taken to work, while the younger ones would be killed. He told his brother to try to sneak back to their parents. The boy did—and he and his parents went to the gas chambers. This man has never forgiven himself. There are a million stories like that.
“In spite of all the terrible things that happened to me, I did not allow Hitler to make me feel less than human. I had been raised well and I knew who I was. My strategy was not to allow myself to hate. I knew I could be consumed by such hate.
“I have known many survivors for whom the Holocaust is the central theme of their lives. They have no other. I have tried to live with tolerance and forgiveness as the themes of my life.
“God gave us the power to be good or evil. This is our choice. Because some pick evil, we must work together to recognize and stop it. But while we survivors may lead the charge, we cannot do this alone. It must be the goal of all people.
“If we will join in this goal, then there is hope for humanity.”
A testament to the dead at Auschwitz
“There are many lessons one can learn from my father’s story. But for me, one of the most important lessons has always been that extraordinary people are simply ordinary people, like my father, who rose to the challenge in an extraordinary crisis.”
—John Mandelbaum
Jack’s son