Moshe Shoham (M / Lithuania, 1929-2013), Holocaust survivor

Moshe Shoham (M / Lithuania, 1929-2013), Holocaust survivor

Yaakov Shoham (M / Lithuania, 1929-1945), Holocaust victim

• KEYWORDS : <Kovno Ghetto> <Dachau> <Auschwitz> <Death March> <Mauthausen> <Death March> <Gunskirchen> -- <Israel>

Biography

Moshe Shoham was born September 29, 1929. His twin brother (Yaakov) was also one of the Kovno Boys, but perished during the death march from Auschwitz to Mauthausen.

USHMM Profile

Moshe Shoham, a twin, born in 1929 in Kaunas, Lithuania, recounts his mother's dental practice; his family's affluence; attending a Hebrew school; summering in Kulautuva; participating in Hashomer Hatzair; Soviet occupation; compulsory membership in Komsomol; German invasion in June 1941; ghettoization; round-up of his father, uncle, and grandmother (they never saw them again); working as a carpenter and handyman; his mother hiding him and his twin brother during round-ups; his and his mother's assignments to factory slave labor; his mother treating patients; their deportation to Stutthof, where the women left the train, including his mother; continuing to Dachau with his twin, uncle, and cousin; transfer to Auschwitz-Birkenau ten days later; slave labor collecting corpses; a death march to Althammer; separation from his twin en route to Mauthausen (he never saw him again); assignment to the tent barrack; observing cannibalism; transfer to Gunskirchen; receiving Red Cross packages; liberation by United States troops; hospitalization in Wels; traveling with the Jewish brigade to Santa Maria di Leuca, then Naples; living in a Deror group; legal immigration to Palestine in 1945; military enlistment in 1948; his twenty-eight-year career as an army engineer; and reuniting with his mother when she immigrated to Israel in 1956.