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

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

• 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.