Perry Shulman (M / Poland, 1929-2015), Holocaust survivor
Perry Shulman (M / Poland, 1929-2015), Holocaust survivor.
- KEYWORDS : <Auschwitz> <Pionki> <Gleiwitz> <Death March> <Buchenwald> <Liberation of Buchenwald> / <United States>
Biography
Perry Shulman was born in 1929 Klimontów (Poland).
The Jewish News (15 October 2014)
Fourteen-year-old Perry Shulman was lying immobilized on April 11, 1945. He had contracted frostbite on his feet during the Death March from Auschwitz-Birkenau to Buchenwald, and a Russian prisoner, claiming to be a butcher back home, chopped off his toes with a butcher knife to prevent further infection. A young boy from Holland, lying next to him, had lost his entire foot.
Another prisoner came running into the room yelling, “I think we are free!”
Shulman hobbled to the window, where he saw tanks approaching and soldiers running with rifles, but it looked like chaos to him. The prisoners had hope, but no one knew what was happening.
“I went back and lay down, and I told my Dutch friend, ‘I think we are free,’” Shulman says. “The boy looked at me and smiled, and then he died.”
The next day, on April 12 — the day President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died — soldiers came walking through the gates of Buchenwald. Two men wove a basket with their fingers and carried Shulman to the roof so he could see.
“Everyone thought, ‘Oh, my God, the Germans are back; they are going to kill us,” Shulman says of the guards and officers who had fled the camp. But as the soldiers came closer, Shulman realized they were not German.
As a young boy in Klimontow, Poland, Shulman would sneak books — stories by Jack London and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, translated into Yiddish, were his favorites — past his mother, who would warn him that the Germans would kill him if they found a Jew reading.
“I knew from my books that in America there were people with brown skin,” Shulman says. “And I knew that the Germans would never accept a negres [French for black] into their force, so this must be the American army. When I saw him, I knew it was over. I knew I would be free.” ...
A Jewish chaplain arranged for Shulman to be transported to a hospital in Paris — along with eight of Shulman’s friends because he wouldn’t go otherwise. An uncle in Detroit sponsored him to settle here, and he arrived at an orphanage a year to the month after liberation ...
“The only reason I had to survive was to eventually be a witness,” says Shulman, now 85. “And then, to live a life worth living.”
A family portrait, circa 1929, shows Perry Shulman’s mother, Bayla, and father, Motle, standing in the center. Shulman, about a year old, sits on his grandfather’s lap. When the Nazis invaded, Motle had been shot while still in Klimontow, Poland. After being deported in October 1942 and shuffled from camp to camp, Shulman was eventually separated from Bayla and 3-year-old brother Salik (Saul), while he and 10-year-old brother Moshe Mair, along with two uncles, remained together up to Birkenau. After he was in Detroit, Shulman found out that Bayla had been liberated from Bergen-Belsen and Salik from Auschwitz, and both were living in Toronto .With the help of the Detroit-area United Jewish Appeal, Shulman found a profession as a jeweler and raised a family — his own life worth living. Between his sons Marc and Greg, and daughter Renea, Shulman has six grandchildren.
“Those children are my soul,” Shulman says ...
Perry Shulman is very cautious when telling his story. He is careful not to divulge too many details because they must be precise. He has so many thousands of memories, every day still, and it’s important to him that they mesh. His experience has been documented in lectures, newspaper articles and hours of footage by the Shoah Foundation.
Life, says Shulman, is a series of moments. Each moment, there are a million opportunities for our lives to change, for good or bad.
“There were a million times over that I could have died, that others died doing the same things I was or standing right next to me,” Shulman says. “A second later, an inch further. Everything could have been different for me.”
He marvels at this and will never understand why his moments brought him survival, while others’ did not. When he was 12, just before deportation to his first camp, Shulman appealed, miraculously, to the humanity of an Oberlieutenant, who shoved him into a shop away from the soldiers. When a Nazi came in and found Shulman, he raised his machine gun at the boy. But the Oberlieutenant, named Dormeyer, walked up behind him and knocked the firearm down. A moment later, Shulman would have been shot.
While at Buchenwald, Shulman came face-to-face with Ilse Koch, known as the Witch of Buchenwald and collector of lampshades made from prisoners’ skin. Shulman stared at her, not knowing who she was. On that day, she stared back at him and then just turned away.
After Buchenwald was liberated, the American soldiers opened the German warehouse and the ravenous prisoners who had the strength devoured the raw bacon and ham they found — many contracted dysentery and died. Shulman would have, too, had he been able to walk to the warehouse.