On 30 August 1944, a deportation train left the Łódź ghetto bound for Auschwitz-Birkenau. Among the passengers were head of the Judenrat in Łódź, Haim Rumkowski, his family and some of the ghetto's senior personnel. This was the last transport from Łódź to Auschwitz. Avraham Benkel and his 14-year-old son were also on the train.
In 1928, Hinda Hillman and Avraham Benkel got married in Turek, Poland. After the wedding, they moved to Łódź. Avraham made a good living in textiles, and supported his widowed mother and brothers and sisters who had remained in Turek. Hinda and Avraham's son, Shmuel, was born in 1930, followed by another baby boy, Israel-Meir, two years later. The Germans invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, and occupied Łódź approximately one week later. A ghetto was established in the city in 1940. The Benkels left their home and moved to a room in the ghetto, where Avraham managed a fur workshop for the German Army. Hinda fell ill and died in the ghetto in 1942. Two months later, 10-year-old Israel-Meir was abducted during the "Sperre" Aktion, while Avraham was waiting in line for potatoes. Avraham relates:
My cousin, who worked for the fire brigade and could therefore roam the ghetto freely during the curfew, came and delivered the sad tidings. My younger son Israel-Meir had been seized from the house. He had no idea where he had been taken, and promised me he would try and find out, and rescue the child. I returned home to my second son, who was 12 at the time, with the potatoes that had lost all their flavor for me. He told me that they had imposed a curfew on the street and taken people, including my younger son… I broke curfew and went out to look for my cousin. I promised him that I would do anything, and pay whatever it took, but that he should bring my son back to me… At night he told me that he reached the former hospital, where they had gathered the children, and called out my son's name, but no one answered him… I don't know if that's true. That cousin was murdered later on in a German camp… I was broken. My pain was indescribable. But I carried on living in the hope that…. Perhaps…. Perhaps…. Some Jews consoled themselves, saying that there were special departments for child labor, where they packed matches and cotton wool, and did work that children were capable of. [I dreamed that] the war would end and that my son would return to me. Unfortunately, this did not happen.
In the course of the "Sperre", from 1-12 September 1942 some 15,000 people were deported to the Chelmno extermination camp, about one third of them children under the age of 15, including Israel-Meir Benkel. Avraham and Shmuel remained in the ghetto for another two years until it was liquidated, at which point they were deported to Auschwitz on the last transport from the Łódź ghetto.
In early August, 1944, approximately 68,500 Jews were left in the Łódź ghetto, out of the 204,000 who had lived there in the course of the 4.5 years of its existence. During the month of August 1944, some 67,000 Jews were deported from the ghetto to Auschwitz-Birkenau, on the pretext that they were being evacuated to work in Germany, together with their workshop machinery. The Jews were brutally rounded up and loaded onto cattle cars. Upon arrival at Auschwitz, most of the deportees were sent straight to the gas chambers. The others became forced laborers at Auschwitz-Birkenau, sub-camps of Auschwitz and other labor and concentration camps. The registration of prisoners who arrived from Łódź in August and passed the selection, was sometimes carried out days or weeks after their arrival at the camp. For this reason, there are no accurate statistics from any of the August deportations, of the number of Jews who were murdered and those who passed the selections. Most of the forced laborers who passed the first selection were murdered by liberation. With the wave of deportations, the Łódź ghetto was emptied of its inhabitants, and by September 1944, approximately 1,000 Jews remained there, who were forced to clear up the ghetto and to gather the remaining belongings for delivery to Germany. The last ghetto on Polish soil had been liquidated. According to historians' estimates, less than 5% of the Jews living in the Łódź ghetto survived: Between 7,000-10,000 people.
Avraham and Shmuel were on the last deportation to Auschwitz, on the same train as Rumkowski. Yaakov Poznanski, one of the Jews left inside the ghetto, wrote in his diary:
Biebow [Hans Biebow, head of the German administration of thr ghetto] brought Rumkowski to the train himself, organized a separate car for him, and loaded just 12 people into it with the president [Rumkowski]. He also parted from him warmly, but after Biebow turned around, SiPo [German security] policemen started – presumably on Biebow's specific orders – directing deportees who had arrived at the station to that car, and in the end, there were over 80 people inside. According to "experts", this constituted maximum capacity.
Avraham described the arrival at Auschwitz:
I was on the same train as Rumkowski, and my son was with me. The Germans addressed us, and said that in Germany too, they would establish a fur workshop and that we would work there in the same way we worked here. Later on, it became clear that this was false, and that they were sending us to Auschwitz, not to Germany… As soon as we arrived at Auschwitz, we heard from the Jews unloading us from the cars that here, people were sent to the crematoria. Those who could still work had a chance of staying alive; those who couldn't work, or children, were doomed… they separated me from my son… I saw him standing on the other side, waving to me. I waved back. I never saw him again.
Rumkowski was on the same side as me. He approached a German and showed him a piece of paper that he held in his hand. The letter he got from Biebow. The German instructed him to sit on the side… Behind Rumkowski stood his wife, her parents, brothers and sisters-in-law, they told them to sit on the side… They took us to a place where Moshe Hassid, one of Łódź's shady characters, was manager… He told us that our Rumkowski had already been taken to the crematoria.
After a few weeks in quarantine in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Avraham was transferred to the Kaltwasser labor camp in Lower Silesia. From there he was sent to various other camps, until he was finally liberated at Terezin by the Red Army on 7 May 1945.
After liberation, Avraham returned to Łódź to search for his family. His hopes of finding anyone alive were shattered. His children, siblings, sisters and their families had all been murdered. Avraham went into the apartment where he had lived with his family during the ghetto period, to check if any of their belongings remained – perhaps some photographs. He found nothing. The apartment had been looted before he got there, the floor had been ripped up and the oven dismantled. In the adjacent building, in an apartment that had also been ransacked, he found a book lying on the floor. It was a French novel, in the margins of which someone had written a diary in four languages (Hebrew, English, Polish and Yiddish) during the last months of the ghetto's existence, from May to August 1944. "I picked up the book and began to read," relates Avraham. "I saw that the author was a cultured person… and I thought: either this book will continue to lie here in the garbage, or I can take it and save it… The diary describes what we experienced in the ghetto… I came to the conclusion that while for me it was a memoir, it also had value as a history of the Polish Jews in the ghetto, and so, after many years I decided to donated it to Yad Vashem."
Avraham immigrated to Israel in 1949, and took the anonymous diary he had found with him. In 1970, he donated it to Yad Vashem. Later on, it transpired that the diary had been written by Avraham Laski. Laski was presumably on one of the deportations in August 1944 from the Łódź ghetto to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where he was murdered. One of the pages from the diary is displayed in this exhibition. Avraham Benkel's testimony is preserved in the Yad Vashem Archives.
In 1955, Avraham Benkel submitted Pages of Testimony to Yad Vashem in memory of his wife Hinda, his sons Shmuel and Israel-Meir and other relatives.
