UC professor and Emmy-award winning journalist shares her father’s Holocaust survival story with lessons to inspire action against hatred and bigotry today
by Becky Butts
erched on the roof of the hospital
barracks at the Buchenwald concen
-
tration camp in Germany, Menachem
“Moniek” Lipszyc watched in awe as American
tanks and soldiers approached to liberate the
people held captive there. It was April 11, 1945
— a little less than a month before the Allied
powers declared victory in Europe and five
months before the official end of World War II.
He was 14 years old.
Moniek’s story of suffering and survival during the Holocaust begins with Germany’s invasion of his hometown in Czestochowa, Poland, on Sept. 3, 1939. Before the war, his family led an idyllic life. His father invented machinery that automated shoemaking, and the wealthy Jewish family lived comfortably in an apartment on the main avenue of town.
After the war, only six of about 200 of his family members survived.
The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum esti - mates that 6 million Jewish men, women and children were murdered by the Nazi regime during the Holocaust. The Nazi Party also targeted Roma people (then known as gypsies), people with disabilities, homosexuals and other groups who were persecuted for their political and ideological beliefs.
Moniek survived under the Nazi regime for five and a half years by hiding and living in sealed-off Jewish ghettos and enduring slave labor at two concentration camps, where he depended on his own quick thinking and the kindness of others to stay alive.
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