Roman Ferber

Roman Ferber (M / Poland, 1933), Holocaust survivor

• KEYWORDS : <Krakow Ghetto> <Plaszow> <Deportees> <Gross Rosen> <Auschwitz> <Liberation of Auschwitz>

• MEMOIRS : Journey of Ashes (2014)

Biography

• Holocaust Survivor Testimonies, Poland #5401

Roman Ferber is the young boy at the center of the picture

Roman Ferber was born January 25, 1932 in Krakow, Poland.

The course of the liquidation of the ghetto in Krakow. The author, along with his parents and brother, got to the camp in Płaszów. Living conditions in the camp, executions of prisoners on the orders of the camp commandant, Amon Goeth. Transport to the camp in Auschwitz. The author managed to avoid the evacuation of the camp.

Book: Journey of Ashes (2014)

• Anna Ray-Jones and Roman Ferber, Journey of ashes : a boyhood in the Holocaust, Charleston, SC: 2014.

Journey of Ashes traverses a fine line between humor and tragedy. It presents a fascinating interpretation of a boy’s recollections of growing up in Krakow surrounded by the Holocaust. In this uplifting story we are introduced to Roman Ferber, a child whose humor, courage and sturdy sense of self outshines the sun, even in the darkest days of the Nazi era in Poland.

What differentiates this account from the immense surfeit of books published on the Shoah is its willingness to explore the striving for normalcy in the face of the unimaginable. Many people, and especially children, in the context of being terrorized, still maintained a strong semblance of what it meant to be ordinarily human. They laughed, argued, fought, feasted, and sustained each other, even as their world was eroding—all passions detailed as experienced in this book.

Roman’s tale weaves together the most positive elements of a typical middle-class childhood with the terrors of the occupation, life in the Krakow Ghetto, and being shuttled with his father from the forced labor pool at Plaszow to Schindler’s factory at Brinnlitz, and the Gross Rosen Camp. (Despite being named on Schindler’s famous list, both father and son along with a young cousin, Wilús Schnizter, finally ended up in Auschwitz-Birkenau in the winter of 1944.) Co-author, Anna Ray-Jones, who worked on the manuscript for over three years with Roman, creates a point of view that combines a child's unblemished observations with the verbal and psychological deft of an adult memoir.

On the family side, we encounter Roman’s gentle father: the spiritually inspired Leon Ferber, a man of innate optimism who, through all the arrests and atrocities, clings to his instinct for the decencies of the heart and for what is divine. Roman’s mother is a protective, if tempestuous matriarch, who, along with his older sister, Hanka, tries to hold the family together despite their numerous displacements. The oldest brother, Manek Ferber, is a resistance fighter and Roman’s constant hero with all the fierce idealism of a sixteen-year old. Picture Roman Ferber, as a child in Aushwitz, pictured in center. Throughout his journey of the war years, Roman develops cast iron survival skills while still retaining the innocence of his youth. In Plaszow, he and his young cousin, Wilús and other young boys, play hide and seek from the monstrous commandant, Amon Goeth. The kids take refuge in the barrack attic to argue their fantasies of girls and joke about the sexual intrigues of adults, real or imaginary. It’s at Plaszow that Roman briefly crosses paths with the mysterious figure of Oskar Schindler who becomes instrumental in the fate of the remaining Ferber family.

During their time in Auschwitz, Leon Ferber was eventually separated from his young son and marched with other prisoners to the Flossenburg camp near Bayreuth, Germany. He was executed by a toxic injection in April of 1945, just a few days away from the US liberation. Roman and his cousin Wilús, now aged 8, were left alone in an environment where being a child meant an automatic death sentence. As the German guards gradually departed the camp, the two boys survived through various wiles, hiding in deserted barracks and in an electrical transfer station outside Birkenau.

After the liberation, Roman and Wilús found their way back to Krakow where Roman discovered that his sister and mother were still alive. The status of the children was upgraded from nameless prisoners to displaced persons. Once reunited in Bergen-Belsen, (which had been transformed into a DP camp), Roman and his mother find the means to immigrate to the USA. They arrive in the New World to begin a resurrected life on Columbus Day, 1949.

Journey of Ashes offers up humor, grace, cunning, spirituality, treachery, friendship and betrayal as among the well honed, (if sometime dubious) tools of endurance. The transition to the death camps is shocking, yet it underlines the sustaining power of a child’s belief—facing unimaginable horrors, and holding fast to the promise made to his father that he would survive at any cost. Roman refuses to be defeated, putting all of his soul and effort into living, to eventually tell the tale.