My Uncle’s Story: Love During War

I think it’s about time to tell the story of my Uncle.  I think this will turn into multiple posts. I hope you enjoy it.

Part 1: Being Taken Away to the Slave Labor Camp

Just over 5 years ago, my dear uncle died of cancer at the age of 84. If I could choose one word to describe him, it would be that he was a survivor.  A little known fact that most people don’t know about the war is when the Nazi’s occupied Poland, the general belief was that Jewish people paid the ultimate price with their lives, but Catholics were spared. I won’t turn this into a history lesson, but although Jewish people were by far the biggest minority that was massacred during the war, there were others that were also sent to their deaths.  Gypsies, Homosexuals, Scholars, Handicap people, people with mental illness, etc.   For Catholics we faired a little better.  We weren’t issued instant death sentences, but it was a requirement that every family send one child, usually the eldest son, to work in a slave labor camp.  If you’ve seen schindler’s list or sophie’s choice, these types of situations really happened. 

My uncle was the one chosen from my mother’s family to go.  From the get go, this guy had the odds of survival stacked against him.  He was only 14.   This was controversial because he had an older brother that was 19 and although he was older, stronger and more mature, he was spared because it was believed he had more potential than my uncle.  My uncle spent the next 5 years in Germany as a slave laborer until the war ended. 

Can you imagine what he must have been feeling as a young teenage kid all charged up with teen angst and emotion?   Back in 1940, the Nazis were taking over the world and for all he knew, he just got a life sentence of slavery. I think I would have been thinking.  “Thanks mom and dad for picking me, your least favorite child.”

My uncle always seemed tough as nails.  He was roofing houses until his late 70’s.  The optimist in me thinks that maybe they picked him because they knew his was tougher than his big brother and had a better chance of survival.  As far as slave labor assignments, my uncle actually did pretty well. Since he was a farmer and had experience in that area, they assigned him to a farm in Germany.   Farmer and Chef were by far the best job assignments one could have. This was already the life he knew and most importantly he could steal extra food and keep himself strong and healthy.  I believe the easiest thing to steal was raw eggs when he was collecting them from the chickens in the morning.

My aunt didn’t fare as well.   Her family took a different approach.  I think her closest sibling was a toddler.  At first they tried to put her in hiding.  That didn’t work very well.  The nazi’s told the family if they didn’t produce her immediately, the whole family was going to be sent to the work camp.  That meant the decrepid grandmother, the toddler, everyone…and if you can’t work, you get shot.   They conceded that she had to go. Off she went to work in a German factory at age 15.  She was also there for 5 years.

The most famous story of my aunt was the day she decided to trade her food ration with someone for a pair of shoes.   That day, she collapsed.   That was almost the last day of her life.  Luckily, one of the chefs saw what she did, helped her get up and snuck her a little food.  He told her that if she wanted to live, she could never ever to do that again or she’ll be shot.  You see, the Nazi’s did all kinds of horrible experiments on people for the sake of science.  One of those experiments was figuring out the minimum amount of food and rest a person needs to be able to work non-stop but without killing them in the process.  They essentially optimized slave labor into maximum labor for minimum cost.  By giving up her food that day, she dipped below the point where she could still work and collapsed.

Thankfully the war did end and the Nazi’s did not win.   All the slave laborers were taken to big red cross camps and given relocation assistance.  They offered to either help send people back to their home country and they were also given the opportunity to go to a few other places that were sponsoring immigrants.   My uncle wanted no part of Poland after what happened to him and he never stepped foot into the country again.  That’s how he came to be in America.   My aunt wanted to go to Australia, but she found out she had some relatives in the states, so she ended up in the states as well. 

My aunt and uncle met at the red cross camp after the war and then after they both camp to America, he courted her and they eventually got married.  Oh what a time it must have been at that red cross camp.  The war was finally over, these young kids still had much of their lives ahead of them and love was in the air everywhere.

The lesson today is to never ever give up. Even if something seems grim, like being sentenced to a life of slavery, don’t give up hope. The people who gave up I’m sure didn’t last a year before they got a bullet in the head.  Make the most of the life you’ve been given and look for opportunities to better it.  For my uncle that opportunity was the US of A.

More to come…..

Tagged as: Story of Survival