PLATTBURGH — Vladimir Munk, 94, suppressed his memories of the Holocaust for most of his life.
He didn't think about it or the names of the places — Terezin, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Gleiwitz and Blechhammer— which inhabit the unfathomable realms of his mind, where he stored man's inhumanity to man.
But today, he stands face to face with it as do other Jews like him invited to the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz Concentration and Extermination Camp in Poland.
RENDEZVOUS WITH DEATH
On Oct. 16, 1944, Vladimir, 19, was among the able-bodied people removed from Terezin, a former military installation turned concentration camp in the Czechoslovakia.
Elderly people, women and children were left behind.
“Everybody who was able to work or able to fight were sent to Auschwitz, and most of them were killed,” Vladimir, a Plattsburgh resident and retired SUNY Plattsburgh professor of microbiology, said.
Transports were stepped up from 2,000 to 3,000 people to 20,000 people.
Vladimir and his father, Karel, were in the third transport, only men.
“Later, they said the women can be transported too so they can join their husbands,” Vladimir said.
Hermina, Vladimir's mother, volunteered to help her sister-in-law with a small child.
“Women with small children were put in a special car, and they were sent to gas immediately,” he said.
“They did not go through any selection or nothing. I think that my mother ended this way."
IN THE DARK
Before arriving at Auschwitz, Vladimir and Karel did not know their destination.
They believed they were going north to the border to build another labor camp.
The prisoners were pressed tightly on a train and not permitted to get out.
When they arrived, they were forced to get out, leave all personal belongings behind and march slowly toward a trio of SS officers.
“One of them, as I was told later, was Mengele (Josef, 'Angel of Death'), who ordered the selection,” Vladimir said.
“We stayed 20 or 25 feet in front of them. Then, march to the front. We had to take off your hat, and wait for the question. He looked at you, and ask how old are you? Do you have any problems?”
Karel was told to go to the right.
“My father went to the left,” Vladimir said.
“There was a group of people out behind the railways, and these people were marched directly to the gas chambers. So, I know my father just went to the gas chambers.”
Vladimir was not asked any questions.
“They looked at me and said, 'To the left,'” he said.
“So, I went to the right, and there was a small, group of young healthy people and we were marched to Birkenau."
POSTCARD TO KITTY
Vladimir's new home, run by a couple, was another barracks with a concrete floor and bunk beds.
The next morning, the prisoners were taken to a room to write, 20 or 40 words, on postcards.
Vladimir wrote to Kitty Lowi, his girlfriend from Treplice, at Terezin.
“I am fine, and I hope the same about my father, which indicated that I was not with my father,” he said.
He told Kitty that he had met her brother, an impossibility because he perished at Auschwitz after six months.
“You are not permitted to say we are at Auschwitz,” Vladimir said.
“We could mention only say we are healthy, and we arrived in order.”
STORIED TATTOO
At another barracks, Vladimir was shaved everywhere and disinfected.
“As terrible as it was, I still remember it because it was so funny,” he said.
One by one, the line of naked guys in his transport bent their heads before a guy with a bucket of disinfectant and a paintbrush.
“He just swiped the brush over your head,” Vladimir said.
“It was soaked with disinfectant. Then, you make a step over. He dipped the brush, and you bend and open your behind. Then, it's the next guy.”
Next, the men rinsed off beneath a warm shower.
Wet, they ran to the end of the room, where striped jackets and pants were distributed.
“There were a pile of shoes,” he said.
“They said, 'Pick up some shoes there.'”
The prisoners were marched back to their barracks and lined up outside.
“There was a table there, and two guys from the office of Auschwitz were sitting there,” Vladimir said.
“One of them caught your hand, put it this way. You told them the name. The guy told the other one a number. He had a wooden stick like a pencil with a needle here. He started to prick your skin. Then, he smeared something like India ink over it. And, that was the number we got.”
“B11673," a badge of survival and all of what he lost forever, etches the inside of his left arm.
OUT THE CHIMNEY
Vladimir spent two to three weeks at Birkenau doing nothing.
Every morning, regardless of weather, the prisoners were counted outside the barracks.
Vladimir remembers the rain, cold and mud.
“There were four, high chimneys with black smoke all the day,” he said.
“The night, there was smoke and flames coming out of it. They were black flakes, oily or greasy, in the sky.
:Sometimes, falling down on you. The smell was like when you cook some meat and you burn it.”
About the third or fourth day, he stood beside a Pole, who had been there much longer.
“I said, 'Do you know what happen to the people who were sent to the other side during the selection?''” Vladimir said.
“He said, 'You see that smoke. He went out the chimney.' That was the first time I learned my father was gassed, and I didn't know anything about gas chambers. I felt in such a depression that I had no hunger. I had no appetite."
ON THE MOVE
Vladimir was among a group sent to Gleiwitz, one of 40 sub-camps of Auschwitz.
“Any industrial plant could apply to get some slaves in 1944 to work for nothing because they didn't have enough people,” Vladimir said.
“Gleiwitz had four concentration camps. We were in Gleiwitz I, which was a camp built in the spring of '44. It had about 1,400 prisoners. We worked for a company that repaired broken cattle cars.”
Vladimir worked with three Hungarian Jews, who repaired the cars with sheets of iron.
His job was to heat bolts, red hot, in a special heating oven.
In the mornings, he greased the moving parts of the cars.
Sometimes, he spied a potato or a turnip in a corner.
When there was not any SS around, he slipped into the car and hid vegetables under his shirt.
He placed the contraband in the pot where he cooled bolts and his forceps.
At the end of the 10-hour shift, he could eat the vegetables.
“So, it helped a little bit,” Vladimir said.
SLEEPING WITH CORPSES
October and November of 1944 passed.
In the middle of December, Vladimir got dysentery.
After three days, he reported his illness to the corporal in charge of his barracks.
Instead of shipping him to Auschwitz, the corporal, a longtime German political prisoner, sent him to an five-bed infirmary, manned by a medical student.
“We had to share the beds with another guy,” Vladimir said.
“The guy was terribly hot. He had an inflamed knee. But I was so weak that I fell into the bed and fell asleep. I woke in the middle of the night, and the guy next to me was cold. He was dead.”
Another patient came into the bed and died in the middle of the night.
Vladimir was kicked out after receiving medicine, which stopped his diarrhea.
“I was weak, but I was healthy,” he said.
RED ARMY ARRIVAL
Vladimir returned to work, and around Christmas time he could hear shooting.
The Red Army offensive was moving toward Poland, and the mood changed among the German guards.
Prisoners were awaken, given bread and marched out of the camp in the early morning of Jan. 18, 1945.
“This was called death marches,” Vladimir said.
“The Nazis decided not to have living prisoners captured by the Russians or the Soviet Army. They wanted all the living prisoners to move to the west.”
The prisoners streamed from all of the concentration camps.
On the third day, Vladimir was very weak, but he knew he had to keep moving or he would be shot like the others who fell behind.
He surged to the front where the strongest prisoners were pushing carts containing the Nazis' property.
“Instead of pushing the cart, I was hanging on the cart and pulled by the cart,” he said.
Eventually, they arrived at Blechhammer, a prisoner of war/forced labor camp.
There, an exhausted Vladimir collapsed into a worker's vacant bed, rolled to the wall and fell asleep.
“The next morning, the guards work up everybody and marched them away,” he said.
“Somehow, they forgot about me. Maybe, they thought I was dead or they didn't see me. I woke up, and the camp was empty.”
LUCK OF THE DRAW
Two Panzer tanks shelled the camp, and shot up the barracks on the opposite side where Vladimir hid.
After three days, he crept out and came across other prisoners who survived the shelling.
Vladimir and a Romanian ventured down from the camp on the hill to search for food.
At one house, they found fresh bread on a table.
“It was such a great smell," he said.
"I still remember it.”
They ate the bread, seized other food and civilian clothing and went back to the camp.
In the distance, the prisoners saw two soldiers.
“You couldn't see if they were German or Soviets because all of the soldiers at that time were wearing white blankets over their uniforms so they melded into the environment because there was snow everywhere,” Vladimir said.
The soldiers, Germans, waved to the prisoners.
“What bad luck,” Vladimir said.
“The first day out of the camp, and you will be shot.”
The Germans asked them if they had seen any Soviet soldiers.
“We said we didn't, so they waved us away,” Vladimir said.
“Apparently they were afraid, so they didn't shoot us.”
And, he lived to tell the tale.
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