Jack Mandelbaum: A Holocaust Survivor

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Jack Mandelbaum: A Holocaust Survivor

Around 6 million jews were massacred in an event called the Holocaust. The Holocaust was a horrible time of slaughter of innocent people. Not many survived to be able to live on telling their stories. Of those people to survive the Holocaust was Jack Mandelbaum.

Jack Mandelbaum was born on April 10 1927 in Gdansk. Among his mother and father, he lived with a younger brother and an older sister. Since his father owned a fish cannery, they had enough wealth to be considered in the upper class of society. They had a lovely apartment and a housemaid to go along with their apartment. In Gdynia, Poland, there was not a large Jewish population, nor were his parents very religious. According to Jack, he had a rather pleasant childhood and was not treated very differently by the other children in school or any other place in the town. That all changed in August 1939
The Nazis were separating people, (mostly Jews) those on the left were sent to Auschwitz to be gassed, while the people sent to the right were sent to a forced Labor Camp. While Jack went to the side going to a Labor Camp, his mother and brother were sent to Auschwitz to be gassed. “To the Nazis, he became prisoner 16013 and spent the next three years at seven concentration camps.”(npr.org) In the first camp, the prisoners worked in a granite quarry. Jack mentioned the camp having no beds and the food as soup made out of grass. Then came the last concentration camp, and then finally liberation. "We didn't know anything, only on the morning when we woke up and the Nazi flag wasn't flying and the guards weren't there." (npr.org) Once realizing they could leave, Jack and a friend grabbed an abandoned military wagon and started on their journey of

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