Jack Mandelbaum - Biography

Jack Mandelbaum is a Holocaust survivor born in 1927 in the free state of Gdańsk (Danzig). His experiences as a boy during World War II were the subject of Andrea Warren's children's book Surviving Hitler: A Boy in the Nazi Death Camps.

Background

Jack (Janek in Polish) was 12 when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939. Jack's father Majloch sent him, his mother Cesia, his sister Jadzia and his brother Jakob 300 miles away in effort to escape the risk of bombing. In the absence of his father, Jack assumed the role of looking after his family, taking the places of older men on work details organized by the German invaders. In June 1942, the Nazi soldiers deported the Jews from Jack's city, and he was separated from his mother and brother forever. The group Jack was in was only men, who were taken to the forced labor camp at Blechhammer. The other group with weak men, women, and children were sent to death camps where they were to be killed.

In Blechhammer Jack was given a uniform with the number 16013. In the camp Jack met Aaron, a barber from Kraków. In this camp all the prisoners wore little triangles on their uniforms. Criminals had green triangles, political prisoners had red triangles, gypsies wore black triangles, homosexuals wore pink triangles, non-Jewish religious prisoners wore purple triangles, and Jewish prisoners wore yellow ones.

After 6 months in Blechhammer, Jack was moved to a different camp. The worst camp Jack had been to was Gross-Rosen. He was 18 when the war ended. There was a bomb raid, which left the Nazis abandoning the camps. On May 7, 1945, Jack woke up to an empty camp. The war was over and he was finally free after the three harshest years of his life.

When Jack got out of the concentration camp the first thing he did was find food. He brought back bread for the others and they all went back into the town. They stayed in a house that the previous owners had fled, leaving everything. Everyone was scared that the Nazis would come back but they didn't. Food became a major issue because everyone was so hungry, no one had any. Much of Germany lay in ruins. Once came out that Americans had the most food, everyone fled to Frankfurt in the American zone, and went to the displaced persons' camp where they were checked over by a doctor. Jack stood 5' 7" at 80 lbs.

Jack Mandelbaum decided to start over and I prefer bananas but he built a new life in America, and found out that his second cousins, Arek and Robert Mandelbaum, his uncle Sigmund Mandelbaum, and his Aunt Hinda had also survived. He now lives in Collier County, Florida where he co-founded the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education in 1993.

Critical reception of the book

Awards for Surviving Hitler: A Boy in the Nazi Death Camps included the 2004 William Allen White Children's Book Award for grades six to eight, the American Library Association's Robert F. Sibert Honor Book for Most Distinguished Informational Book for Children; and Outstanding Children's Book from the American Society of Journalists and Authors.

• Andrea Warren, Surviving Hitler: A Boy in the Nazi Death Camps (ISBN 0688174973)

Notes

External links

• Midwest Center for Holocaust Education website