20/04/2020
Holocaust Remembrance Day - Yom HaShoah has begun this evening. The Fashion Photographer had the privilege in February 2020 to photograph a survivor, Mr. Gershon Klein on behalf of thelonkaproject.com
Mr. Klein's story:
Gershon Klein was born in 1932 in Poland. After the N**i German invasion of Poland and the decree against Jews, Gershon and his parents were given shelter by a Polish farmer in a barn outside their city Piotrków Trybunalski. ‘The Polish farmer, for no financial gain, looked after us and fed us at nights,' but Gershon's family had to return to the Piotrków Trybunalski Ghetto, the first Jewish ghetto established by the N**is before it was closed to the outside world in October 1939. Jews were sent as slave labor to factories taken over by the Germans and Gershon was sent to work at the Hortensja Glassworks. The ghetto liquidation action began on the night of October 13, 1942. Some 22,000 Jews were herded onto the synagogue square and underwent a "selection." Men and women were separated and were marched in columns to the railway station and loaded onto freight trains to their death. Gershon remembers the most painful moment in his life, when he watched his mother lined up with other women along the opposite train tracks. ‘I heard my mother calling me, and I cannot remember what happened next, how we separated from each other, I can’t remember, or I chose to erase this pain from my memory.’ His mother was taken to Ravensbrück camp, never to return. By the end of 1944 Gershon, 12, was shipped with his father to Czestochowa labor camp where the majority of Jewish forced laborers either died of starvation or were sent to death when they fell ill or weak from work. Gershon and his father were shipped to Buchenwald camp where prisoners only had the choice between slave labor or inevitable ex*****on. ‘They took from me my father, I was left with my cousin Ben (Helfgott) and sent to the children’s block.’ When they began to hear the canons of the allied forces, Gershon and Ben were loaded with others onto open cattle trains to Theresienstadt. ‘For one month we ate potato peels and grass.’ In Theresienstadt Gershon, then 13, was looked after by his cousin Ben Helfgott, age 15, until they were liberated by the Soviet army in 1945. In 1952 Gershon immigrated to Israel. He was not able to tell his story of survival until he turned 65 years old.
The Association of Photographers The British Journal of Photography Daily Telegraph Ynetnews
