Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Henry Dorfman - August 11 & 25, 1989

When you went back with your wife--your wife was, was she at Auschwitz?

No. She was uh, in uh, in Treblinka, I mean, what do you call it, in, in Czestochowa, she was liberated in Czestochowa. It was a working camp [pause] it was a working camp.

But she had family in Auschwitz.

She had, I mean--Auschwitz, yeah, her sisters, you know. Frank...Franka and Rosa was over there, they were in Auschwitz.

What was it like for her to go back?

Listen there is--any survivor that goes back to those atrocities, if he goes back to any camp or any place--like I said before, he goes back to remind himself because he cannot believe that he could live this through himself or herself. Everybody is in the same way heart, the, the few what we survived, we just can't understand how. It's like a dream, we don't know how the heck we survived. Like here. Here was like, here, here lived a baron, you know and this is, this was his house...

The mayor?

...his castle. No. You see that, like in England, what do you call, the lords?

What was his name, Meyer?

Meyer.

So that was his...

No. The name of, of Meyer was like a general manager of, of that uh, uh, uh, baron's uh, or lord's uh, uh...

Estate?

The estate was, was probably worth billions of dollars before the war. I mean, you're, you're not talking about millions because they owned hundreds of thousands of acres of uh, and uh, you know. Everything, I mean uh, like, like you take over here a, a quarter of Michigan state and the land and the farm and everything else. They had cattle, they had--and they fed uh, probably four or five thousand people because they moved in the fields, they milked the cows, they, they, they, they grow grains and everything else. And that everything's, and he was--belonged to Javiar Zamorski was the name. He was very well known. Javiar is like a lord. And this was his castle. I went back.

It looks like it was bombed out.

Not bombed out. That's the way it stayed after, because the Russians took that, that, that whole, thousands of acres and gave every worker four or five acres or ten acres and that's the way it is, that's uh, They made it like you see it, like a Kolkhoz. That's exactly what they did. But I went, I knew exactly where it was. I went, you know, and I went to look at it and see it and believe me it really broke my heart too. It was a very substantial uh, noble names. He was a nobleman.

And he knew he was helping Jews, I mean, that Meyer, his Volksdeutsch.

Meyer, absolutely.

But the baron knew that he was doing this, you think?

The baron was away, but his wife--the baron was, was taken by the Germans, the Germans took him right away, you know. But is wife, his wife, not that she knew but uh, she happens to be Jewish. So in the wartime she happened to be Jewish. We didn't know until after the war that she was Jewish. But after the war we found out because she was hiding in that castle. She had a few Jewish doctors there.

And she survived the war?

She survived.

Now who is this man?

This is my cousin from Israel. He came because he was the same thing. He, he survived with us.

This is the nine year old who survived?

Yes, this is the nine year old who survived.

Joseph, is that it?

Yeah.

So this was a sort of family reunion...

Yes.

...at the same time.

I see him every, I, I'm in Israel every year. So I see him. I see him about, he went. He came--I send him a ticket and he came from Israel to Warsaw and we went around all over. This is, this is in Łódź. This is Łódź.