Ralph Codikow

Ralph Codikow (M / Lithuania, 1930-1995), Holocaust survivor.

• One of the Kovno Boys. Got separated from the rest of the group at Auschwitz, being sent to Buchenwald

• KEYWORDS : <Kovno Ghetto> <Dachau> <Auschwitz> <Buchenwald> <Liberation of Buchenwald> -- <OSE Orphanage> <United States>

Biography

Ralph Codikow, born in 1930, in Kaunas, Lithuania, describes his family; the German occupation of Lithuania in 1941 and his brother shortly thereafter being shot at the Seventh Fort; his and his mother’s confinement to the Kaunas ghetto, where his mother saved them by pretending to be married to a male friend; his mother using her husband’s Lithuanian military service papers to forgo deportation to the Ninth Fort; being saved by his work in a ceramics factory when the children’s Aktions were decreasing the number of children in the ghetto; his and his mother’s deportation to Stutthof, where they were separated; his transfer to Landsberg, a sub-camp of Dachau in Germany, and then to Dachau and Auschwitz-Birkenau; contracting measles but being considered healthy enough to go on a forced march to Buchenwald, a concentration camp in Germany, in the winter; his liberation at Buchenwald in April 1945; moving to France after the war; and immigrating to the United States in 1948.