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

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

• KEYWORDS : <Lithuania> <Kovno Ghetto> <Dachau> <Kovno Boys> <Auschwitz> <Death March> <Mauthausen> <Death March> <Gunskirchen>

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.