Zundel Gordon (M / Lithuania, 1929), Holocaust survivor

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Zundel Gordon (M / Lithuania, 1929), Holocaust survivor

Biography

Zundel Gordon was one of the Kovno Boys, liberated at Gunskirchen.

USHMM Oral Interview

Zundel Gordon, born in 1929 in Kaunas, Lithuania, discusses being the youngest of five siblings; attending a Jewish school; participating in Hashomer Hatzair; Soviet occupation in 1940; participating in Komsomol; visiting relatives in Alytus; German invasion; returning to Kaunas; fleeing with his family to Ukmergė, then Jonava; arrest; bribing a policeman to release them; returning home; their Lithuanian neighbor saving them from a round-up; ghettoization; one brother fleeing to Soviet territory; transfer to a labor camp; working in a munitions factory; brief hospitalization; returning to the ghetto; evacuation of the ghetto in summer 1944; hiding with his family in a bunker; capture; deportation to Stutthof; transfer with a brother and his father to Dachau; assignment to a children's group; transfer of the group to Birkenau; a death march to Althammer in early 1944; transfer to Mauthausen; observing cannibalism; transfer to Gunskirchen in April 1945; receiving Red Cross packages; liberation by United States troops; traveling to Vienna; being sent to a Soviet hospital; returning to Kaunas via L'viv; learning one brother and his father did not survive; reunion with his mother and sister in Vilnius; hospitalization; draft into the Soviet Army in 1950; serving in Kazanʹ; release from the military in 1953; working in Vilnius; marriage; the births of two children; immigration to Israel in 1969; attending annual reunions with the children's group; recently receiving German reparations; and sharing his experiences with his children.

Kovno Stories

I was born in Kovno on October 25, 1929. I had three brothers and one sister. My father was self-employed and my mother was a housewife.

I attended Jewish Elementary School #7 in Kovno.

In 1941, with the outbreak of World War II, we were taken to the Kovno ghetto, where we remained until 1944. Afterwards we were transferred to various camps – Dachau, Landsberg, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Mauthausen, Gunskirchen – until 1945. We were a group of 131 boys.

After the war ended in 1945, I returned to Kovno. I learned that my father and two brothers had been murdered by the Germans. My mother, older brother, sister and I remained alive, and we met in Vilna.

I finished high school and was drafted into the Red Army. I was discharged three and a half years later and returned to Vilna.

I married Sarah Leper in 1955, and we had two children, Dov and Mira. We immigrated to Israel in 1969.

At present I live in Bat Yam.

External links