On a Friday in 1939, the day before the German’s came into my town, the Polish Army told everyone to leave.  Our family walked to a small town fifteen miles away.  We went to a farmer to see if they could stay the night.  We were traveling with a mixed group of people.  The farmer said okay and we went to sleep in the barn.  My mother took the youngest two children outside to wash while I stayed in the barn with my father and my sister.  At that moment, the Germans bombed a bridge that was only a block away.  The kids ran into the nearby farmhouse and a bomb hit the home also.  My sister was also hit with shrapnel.  The Polish army chased us all, away from the barn.  

 

My mother was very upset because the boys were gone and my sister was taken to the hospital in Czestochowa. It was a Jewish hospital.  We walked into town and a nurse came over and told my mother that my sister did not make it.  She was fourteen years old.  We stayed a few nights with my grandmother in town (my grandfather had passed away before the war, was buried in Czestochowa).  My mother spent the next few weeks frantically looking for the two missing boys.  She followed every lead but could not find them.  My father was heavy and could not walk so well.  

 

I was sixteen years old and the Germans sent me to a camp called Swansh Arbeliger to build the Autobahn.  The job was not too bad at the beginning.  I could write letters home.  I tried to please the German’s as much as possible, in order to stay on their good side- that was my personality.  I was then transferred to a camp called Klain Mangesdort where I stayed there about one year tearing up forests for the Autobahn.  I was then sent to a camp called Aichtal where we continued the same thing for another year or so.  

 

Then the 250 of us in the work detail were moved to a camp called Gras Maslovitz and from there shipped by train to Oston Ain Sats in Russia.  It was 450 KM from Stalingrad and 600 KM from Moscow.  Our job was to narrow the railway tracks because the Russian tracks were one foot wider than German and European tracks.  It was the wintertime and so cold that we had to watch each other to make sure our noses and ears did not freeze.

 

All the while, the Russian underground was sabotaging the railroads.  As we completed the track, a sign would be posted indicating that the train could travel up to this point.  One night the underground moved that sign farther down the track.  We were on the train but thankfully I was a few cars back because the first three cars fell off the tracks.

 

People started to get sick.  The food was okay but most of the water was used for the engines and was very oily.  The Germans also made us sleep in small un-heated rooms about seven feet x twelve feet with people lying side by side.  If you had to go to the bathroom, you had to wake everyone up to get out.  And then you’d just relieve yourself outside on the ground.  Sometimes you had to be careful not to step on frozen waste.  At some point I contracted Typhus myself.  

 

The Germans then sent the work detail back to Gras Maslovitz and as people died, they were just tossed off the train.  About ten to fifteen of us were healthy.  Since the Germans didn’t want sick people coming back into Germany, we were put into a hospital.  We were only given soup to eat and I was not getting better.  There was a nurse named Tamara and I asked her if I could clean the floor for more soup. She said no at first, but I pleaded so she said yes.  My first attempt to get out of bed, I fell into an open waste bucket but on my second try, I was able to stand and I started to get more soup.  I got better in three to five weeks.  

 

I then traveled to a camp called Graditz, which was near a town called Foulbrik.  It was a small town of about 3,000 people and it had a brick factory and a flour mill.  We took the mill apart and made barracks.  I would go back and forth from Graditz to Foulbrik.  My job was a carpenter and I did whatever the Germans wanted me to.    

 

One Friday, I was in Foulbrik and a German officer named Kittle asked me if I could make a fire for a bath.  I cleaned the tub very well and made him an excellent bath.  He was so happy that he gave me three slices of bread and three or four cigarettes. It was the happiest day of my life. A friend of mine kept my bread and portioned it to me so I didn’t eat it all at once.

 

The next week, Officer Kittle tells the head Kapo how a worker prepared a great bath for him and he’d like to find him. The Kapo had no idea who it could be so both the officer and Kapo take the time to walk the four levels of the barracks looking for me.  I’m on the fourth floor and when we jump to Achtung, he points me out immediately.  I had NO idea what he wanted of me so I was pretty scared.  

 

From then on, I made a bath for him every week and shined his shoes.  Life was completely different for me from then on.  I became very famous in Graditz.  I could go anywhere in camp any time I wanted and the Germans asked me to be their middleman with Jewish inmates who wanted to trade jewelry for food.  Each officer used me in this way.  

 

Over time, dead bodies were piling up because of Typhus so the Germans had to close the camp.  We were sent to Sport Shule.  While there, I asked Officer Kittle for more food.  He gave me a whole loaf of bread.  The head Kapo happened to be looking out of his office window and saw what happened and couldn’t believe it – an anti-Semitic German officer giving this Jew a whole loaf of bread.  The head Kapo thought that I may have been a spy.  The head Kapo asked his assistant if he knew who I was and the assistant told him the story of me in Graditz.  The head Kapo then asked his assistant what job I had been assigned to and the assistant told him (by chance) “you gave him the hardest work in the camp”.  That job was dynamiting mountains with a small group of inmates.  At that moment, the Kapo called me in and asked if I wanted to work in the kitchen.  Of course I said yes.  

 

In 1945, the Russians came and liberated the camp and told us to leave.  I was so naive, that I wouldn’t even leave the camp and even kept my pajamas on.  I eventually left with that same head Kapo and another five to six people.  We went to a German farmer, who was very afraid of us and we took his horse and cart in order to ride back to Poland.  It was a very skinny horse and we knew right away, we wouldn’t make it so we went to another farm and got a fat horse.  Well, the skinny horse ended up pulling the fat horse.

 

Along the way, some Russian soldiers stopped us and wanted to take our horses and cart.  We argued that we just survived the camps and we only want to go home and now you want to take our horses and cart.  So the soldiers said we’ll take one horse and of course they took the fat horse.  

 

We entered Krakow and everyone split up.  I tried to find anyone I knew but found no one.  With one other person, we jumped from train to train until we arrived at my home town of Klobucko.  There was not one Jew left.  We stopped at a farmer to see if we could stay the night.  These people knew my entire life – my neighbors – and they were surprised to see me alive and didn’t even offer me anything to eat. We were scared and decided to get back on the train.  My friend and I split and I headed to Spoltzlantz.

I was told at some point to go to Israel but I didn’t have any profession or know anyone so I was reluctant. There were thousands of refugees in Spoltzlantz and I ran into my friend Yossle and told him he was lucky because he had family and I had no one.  He pointed to the UN building across the yard and told me my aunt was working there.  I told him he was lying, but I went and when I saw my aunt, I fainted away.  She was either six weeks older or six weeks younger than I was.  I also heard that Yehuda Lieb was alive. I stayed with my aunt and uncle and in one to three weeks, we left and moved to the city where the concentration camp Bergen-Belsen was located.  

 

My uncle worked on the black market and dealt with gypsies a lot.  My aunt was also very aggressive and would do whatever needed to be done.  Many times they tried to push me to get out there and start working the black market, but it was not in my nature.  I am not aggressive.  One night, my uncle took me with him to meet some gypsies who had stolen papers out of some government offices.  I was loaded down with money and we went to meet them in a forest.  My uncle told me to wait for him while he met the gypsies.  As I was standing there, I thought to myself that I survived the camps to be killed in the woods by gypsies.  Even my uncle could have been killed.  That night I told my Aunt Shydle that I couldn’t do this and that I was leaving.  I had decided to go to Israel.  

 

I went to Dusseldorf where there were organizers for the Haganah.  I was twenty-one years old.  With the help of the Jewish Brigade group in Germany, we were smuggled through Holland through Amsterdam to a military camp in Bristol.  Other Israeli soldiers were waiting for us.  They trained us in English and we changed identities with real Israelis in the Jewish Brigade.  We took their passports and uniforms and I became Moshe Scruber.  After two to three weeks, we were put on trains and mixed in with real soldiers.  I felt so at home with the Israelis in the camp.  

 

From Belgium we boarded a British military ship to Alexandria to a desert army camp.  I had a relative in the Israeli army that I met there and we both took a train to Rehovot.  We were then sent to Pikve Tikuah. On the way however, our bus was stopped by Haganah and we were told to crawl through the brush to a close by Kibbutz.  This was because the British army was close by and would search the bus.  

 

My relative in the army had told an uncle of mine who lived in Pikve Tikuah (the sister of my aunt Shydle) that I had arrived.  This uncle drove to Rehovot on two occasions looking for Mordechai Mertz.  Of course that was not the name I was traveling under so they said they did not know of me and told him to go back home and to wait for me to arrive.  

 

Finally and this was 1946, I arrived in Pikve Tikuah.  My aunt had been looking out of the window for my arrival for days.  They didn’t know what I looked like but they knew me when they saw me.  They took me in and raised me like a son.  I got jobs in bakeries in the surrounding cities.  After working six months, I was starting to get crazy.  I had money and bought myself a motorcycle.  Unfortunately, I got in an accident, broke my leg and spent the next six months in a full body cast.  I was in the hospital that entire time.  

 

After I healed, I worked as a baker again.  In 1950, the owner, Mr. Nuesbaum asked me to be his partner.  It was once in a lifetime chance and I took it.  That same year I was married.

 

In 1953, we built a brand new bakery but that same year, my life was turned upside down.  The income tax authorities claimed that I had been working since 1946 but had not paid any income taxes. Even though I only worked on and off, they told me I was a full time worker.  I had to get loans against the bakery just to pay off my debts.

 

At that time, an uncle of mine came from the USA to visit Israel.  He told me that he would get me papers if I wanted to move to the USA.  A few years later, in 1956, after seeing my one year old son sitting outside in the baking sun in a soiled diaper while my wife locked herself in the house for fear of the government taking our home furnishings, I decided enough was enough.  I called that uncle and arranged to come to the USA.  I paid off every cent I owed to the government before leaving.  Many people left Israel at this time because of the government harassment.

 

We arrived in New York and stayed with family for a few days before moving to Detroit.