Samuel Sherron (M / Lithuania, 1932), Holocaust survivor

Samuel Sherron (M / Lithuania, 1932), Holocaust survivor

• Labor camps <Auschwitz> Other camps

USHMM Oral Interview

Samuel Sherron, born March 27, 1932 in Skuodas, Lithuania, describes living in Schweksna; his father, who was a merchant; being educated in both public school and a Cheder; life under the Russian occupation from 1940 until the German invasion; the roundup and torture of local Jews by SS troops and Lithuanians; the eyewitness accounts of the murder of all remaining Jews, mostly women and children; being taken with his father to a labor camp in Heydekrug, Germany (Silute, Lithuania) in 1941; experiencing beatings, atrocities, and frequent selections; the shooting of selected inmates; being sent in 1943 at the age of 11 to Auschwitz-Birkenau; surviving the initial selection; inmates being forced to build tracks so transports could go directly to the crematoria; conditions at Auschwitz, the Appels (roll calls), the constant hunger, and an encounter he had with Dr. Mengele; witnessing sadism and torture; Lithuanian and Ukrainian guards killing Jewish prisoners; being sent with 5000 non-Polish Jewish volunteers to Pawiak prison to build barracks and crematoria in what had been the Warsaw Ghetto; how in the summer of 1944, most of the prisoners from “Camp Warsaw” were evacuated on a death march to Kovno (Kaunas, Lithuania), then by cattle train to Dachau, with a group of Greek Jews; the eyewitness accounts of mass murders of Jews by Einsatzgruppen under Operation Barbarossa; going to a labor camp in Muhldorf, Germany to do construction work for the Luftwaffe; being put on cattle trains guarded by SS in April 1945 and the intervention of the mayor of Pocking, Bavaria, who kept the Luftwaffe from killing the inmates; being liberated along with his father by America troops in Seeshaupt on April 28, 1945; and being transferred to Munich, Germany after some medical treatment.