Photo By Scott Sturkol | Holocaust survivor Nathan Taffel shares his story during the Fort McCoy Days of...... read more read more
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Holocaust survivor Nathan Taffel shared his story with Fort McCoy community members during the Holocaust Days of Remembrance observance April 30 at building 905.
Taffel was born Naftali Taffel to a farming family in Poland in 1928. They moved to Radomysl Wielki when he was young to provide a chance for his seven sisters to get married.
His early childhood was a happy one, Taffel said. “I had the most wonderful family I could ever dream of. I was spoiled rotten because I was the youngest of the family.”
He was 12 years old when the Nazis invaded his town. He said his family did their best to shield him from anti-Semitism and the approaching war, but that all changed very soon.
He said he remembers hiding in the basement with his mother and some of this sisters while his father was beaten by a German soldier upon greeting him. He remembered watching men being loaded into trucks with glass backs and not understanding until he was older that the men were being poisoned by the truck exhaust. When one of his older brothers was summoned to a meeting for Jewish men, Taffel said he followed on his bike and was threatened by soldiers.
“Two men in leather coats took their guns out and tried to shoot me,” Taffel said. His brother came out of the building and told him to go home, and the soldiers let him go.
Shortly afterward, Taffel’s family began separating. Four of his siblings stayed in Radomysl, thinking they’d be used for labor instead of being killed because they were young. The family had already lost contact with two married sisters. Taffel, his parents, and his youngest sister relocated to the Tarnow ghetto shortly afterward to stay with a third married sister.
One night, Taffel and his youngest sister were smuggled out of the ghetto and taken to a camp at Smoczka, where they were reunited with the three sisters who’d stayed in Radomysl. After the war, he learned that his parents had been shot at the Tarnow ghetto, while his sister and nephew had been sent to the gas chambers. His brother-in-law survived in a labor camp.
Taffel said he focused on survival in the camps. As a teenager, he ran errands for the Germans and did whatever labor he was given. He worked construction, cleaned offices, and worked on repairing airplanes. Through it all, the Jewish prisoners were given little to no food, received no medical attention, were beaten for not working hard enough or any perceived mistakes, and were executed as an example to those who thought of rebelling or escaping.
“To this day, it’s hard to imagine how much pain you can endure if you have no choice,” Taffel said.
Taffel was separated from his sisters but reunited with his brother Leon in Mielec and stayed with him when they were transferred to Flossenburg. From Flossenburg, they were put on a train to be transferred, but warplanes destroyed two locomotives.
The Germans instead forced the Jewish prisoners off the train and started them marching.
Taffel said the German soldiers had three wagons: one with food and water, which the Jewish prisoners didn’t get, and two empty wagons. Those who fell behind were shot and put into the wagons.
Eventually, those who were left were ordered to stop and line up. “We thought they were going to shoot us, but the German officer … whispered something to them, and we stood there and didn’t know what happened because they all disappeared.”
After realizing the soldiers weren’t coming back, a group of the survivors set out for a nearby farm, eating food that had been left out for the pigs and sleeping in hay. They set out for a nearby town and met American soldiers, who gave them food and clothing and pointed them on to Schwandorf, where a refugee camp had been set up.
Telling his story is difficult, Taffel said, but it’s important to educate people about his experiences and the Holocaust.
“It’s my duty. I promised myself that as long as I live, I will tell the people what they did to my family,” he said. Out of his nine siblings, only his two brothers survived, one of whom had immigrated to Argentina when Taffel was an infant.
More about Taffel’s story can be read in the book “Stolen Childhood: Coming of Age While Surviving the Holocaust,” written by his niece Keri Guten Cohen.
The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of 6 million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. The Nazis also targeted other groups they deemed unacceptable or inferior, such as LGBTQ individuals, the physically and mentally disabled, Roma (gypsies), Poles and other Slavic peoples, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and members of political opposition groups.
The observance also included a candle-lighting ceremony in remembrance of the victims of the Holocaust and a prayer by Rabbi Simcha Prombaum of the Sons of Abraham Congregation in La Crosse.
| Date Taken: | 05.10.2019 |
| Date Posted: | 05.10.2019 14:29 |
| Story ID: | 321925 |
| Location: | FORT MCCOY, WI, US |
| Web Views: | 93 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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