Moshe Kravitz / Moshe Kravec (M / Lithuania, 1931), Holocaust survivor

Moshe Kravitz / Moshe Kravec (Kravetz) / Moses Gravec (M / Lithuania, 1931), Holocaust survivor.

• One of the Kovno Boys, liberated at Buchenwald.

• KEYWORDS : <Kovno Ghetto> <Dachau> <Auschwitz> <Death March> <Buchenwald> <Liberation of Buchenwald> -- <Switzerland> <Israel>

Ghetto Fighters House Archive

Moshe Kravec is the son of Ljuba nee Gill and David Kravec. His brother Zalman was born in 1927, and Moshe was born in Kovno on May 21, 1931. On 15 Aug. 1941 the Kovno ghetto was sealed. The family was together in the ghetto until 13 July 1944. On that date Moshe set out with his parents [in a transport] toward Germany, while Zalman remained in the ghetto with some eight comrades of the Zionist youth movement “Irgun Brit Zion” (Abatz) in a bunker that they had set up. Moshe had wanted to stay with his brother but their mother determined: Zalman is big and he’ll do as he sees fit. You are little and you’re coming with us.” The women, including Ljuba, were let off at Stutthof, and Moshe and his father traveled to Landsberg, a subcamp of Dachau. There Moshe was separated from his father, and after about a week was sent to a group of 131 boys to the Dachau camp. There they stayed a week, and then the group was sent to the Birkenau camp. Two boys jumped from the train; one remained alive and subsequently emigrated to [Eretz?] Israel. The transport reached Birkenau on 1 Aug. 1944, and on arrival the children did not undergo a Selektion. On the Jewish New Year, 18 Sept. 1944, the group had its first Selektion, following which 60 of the boys (the youngest) were sent to the gas chambers. On Yom Kippur (27 Sept. 1944) a second Selektion was held, in which 30 boys whose height was under 135 cm were sent for extermination. In early November Moshe alone was sent from Birkenau to the Budy labor camp, a subcamp of Auschwitz that was an agricultural farm supervised by the SS. He remained there until mid-January 1945 when the Auschwitz camp [complex] was evacuated. The inmates were sent out on a death march, walking for two and a half days and then traveling in open freight cars intended for coal. On 23 Jan. 1945 Moshe was in a group of 916 captives who arrived at the Buchenwald camp.* There his condition seriously deteriorated. Before the camp’s evacuation, realizing that he would be unable to march, he found himself a hiding place in a sewer pipe. After some two days he left his hiding place and was sent, hovering between life and death, to the “dead [men’s] barracks.” As that barracks was full, Moshe was placed outdoors on a pile of bodies. That day or the next, 11 April 1945, the camp was liberated by the American army. Moshe awoke in the hospital set up by the liberators. He contracted typhus and burned with fever. He was then sent to Switzerland for convalescence, and from there emigrated to Mandate Palestine. Ljuba, Moshe’s mother, was liberated from the Stutthof camp and returned to Kovno. There she retrieved from the bunker where she had hidden in a box: documents, family photographs, and poems Moshe had written in the Ghetto. In 1946 Moshe learned that his mother was alive. In 1955 he was able to bring her to him in Israel. Moshe’s father and brother did not survive. According to the archives of the Dachau camp, inmate David Kravec died on 6 Nov. 1944. Zalman was killed in a bunker. Chana’leh, to whom Zalman had sent a postcard, also perished, apparently in the same circumstances as he. The original postcard is held by her sister, Sara Trocki - Kuper, who lives in Israel.

• The number of inmates became known to Moshe only many years after the war, in documents sent to him from the Buchenwald camp archives.

USHMM Oral Interview

Moshe Kravitz, born in Kovno (Kaunas), Lithuania in 1931, describes his family, including his middle class parents and his older brother; attending a Hebrew-speaking school; how his parents were not very religious, not communists, nor Zionists; not experiencing antisemitism; the Germans entering in June 1941; he and his family escaping on bicycles toward the Russian border and returning after three weeks; their apartment being occupied by Germans; moving into the ghetto, where they lived for three years; Aktions in the ghetto; his family being deported and he and his father being sent to Lansdberg; being taken later to Dachau; being sent to Birkenau; being transported with 25 youth to an agricultural farm about 90 km from Auschwitz; being marched towards Buchenwald as the front began to approach; his arrival and time at Buchenwald prior to liberation; recovering in Switzerland and reconnecting with his mother; immigrating to Palestine in 1946; his early years in Israel as a member of the Youth Aliya; Mikveh Agricultural School; joining the youth Hagana organization; and in 1948, serving two years in the Israeli army. Mr. Kravitz reads from his own writings from the 1940s during the interview.

The Kovno Ghetto Website

I was born in Kovno in 1931, the second and last son of a middle-class family. My brother and I attended the Schwabe Hebrew academy, where I managed to study from the first to the third grade. After the occupation of Lithuania by the Red Army and the closing of the school, I transferred to a school whose name I can't remember. The language of instruction there was Yiddish.

When the war broke out in 1941, my family fled from Kovno in the direction of the Russian border, in an attempt to escape from the German occupation. The German army advanced faster than we could flee, so that we had no choice but to try to return to Kovno. All told we were on the road for two very difficult weeks, and at the end we reached the home of some friends, where we lived until we entered the ghetto.

We entered the ghetto in August 1941 along with the other Jews of Kovno, and I was confined there for about three years.

In July 1944, the Red Army was approaching Kovno, and those residents who didn't manage to escape or hide were taken to Germany, with my parents and me among them. My brother hid in a bunker we had dug under the house, and perished there with eight other friends when the ghetto was burned. We were taken to Germany, and on the way, in Danzig, they separated the women and children, who were sent to Stutthof camp.

The conditions were such that I was able to remain with my father. We reached Landsberg camp, not far from Dachau camp. After a week's stay there, one morning during the roll call they suddenly separated 131 boys and sent us to Dachau camp in trucks. My father remained in Landsberg camp, and according to various testimonies, he perished there in November of that year.

We remained in Dachau for a week, and we managed to learn something about the nature of a concentration camp there, something we had not known previously. Our three years in the ghetto had not prepared us for this nightmare. A week later they loaded us into three railway cars and sent us east, without our knowing our final destination, which we could only guess. On the way we learned that we were on the way to Birkenau extermination camp, and after five days of traveling, which included many stops, we arrived at the ramp in Birkenau at midnight of August 1.

I must digress from the ongoing description of events here and state that if everything had continued to develop according to the incomprehensible "logic" which prevailed then, then the description, and I, would have ended here… but that is not what happened.

For some reason unknown to us to this day, and there are different hypotheses among the survivors with regard to this, we were all taken into the camp, something completely against the logic of the time, had numbers tattooed on our left arms and became a regular part of the camp inhabitants in every way. During my stay in Birkenau, from August to November, there were two selections, one at Rosh Hashanah and one at Yom Kippur. More than a few people were selected for the crematoria during these selections. Our group was the hardest hit because there were really young children in it. It is enough for me to state that out of the 129 children who went into the camp, only about thirty children remained after the selection. After passing through the selection with a lot of luck and a bit of resourcefulness, I managed to have the measles and also to survive that. You must know that in Birkenau measles could definitely have been a fatal disease, either because of our poor physical condition, or because the sick bay was frequently "evacuated". I was sent to another camp.

Buda camp was a few kilometers from Birkenau, and among other things there was an agricultural farm there. I was sent to work in the smithy, and my job was to turn the handle of the bellows and to fan the fire, which the smiths used to repair the agricultural equipment there. That winter, 1944-1945, was an extremely harsh one compared to other winters in Poland, and the temperatures went down to 30 to 35 degrees below zero Centigrade. Looking back I think that that camp and that place of work enabled me to gather the strength for the "death march" that followed, in several ways:

First of all, working in a relatively closed hut beside the fire saved me from the terrible cold outside for most of the hours of the day.

Secondly, "ownership" of the fire enabled me to roast sugar beets that people used to bring from the field for this purpose, and I received beets from them as payment. After removing the charred parts, there remained a piece the size of two fists, white, hot, soft and sweet, that I can still taste to this day.

Apparently in other places of work in the camp it was possible to obtain food above the allotted portions, and more than once I also enjoyed this situation. In January 1945 the Red Army was drawing closer to the area, and so that Heaven forbid we would not fall into its hands, we set out on foot in the direction of Germany. This was a monstrous journey not of this world, and after walking for 120 kilometers in two and a half days and riding in open railway cars for another two days, I reached Buchenwald camp. There my physical condition quickly began to deteriorate, and at the beginning of April I came down with typhus. My condition continued to deteriorate; the American army began to approach, and in a picturesque way I can say that there was a contest between the Angel of Death and the American army. It appears that the army won, a fact that allows me to tell my story in brief. A great deal of written material and a bundle of family pictures were buried in a sealed tin box in the bunker under our house. My mother, who returned to Kovno after liberation, discovered the contents of the box and sent them to me in Israel at the end of the 1940s. I do not have the original manuscript in my possession, except for one page – this one