Roman Spompolinski

My name at birth was Riven Sompolinski. I was born on January 3, 1923 in Zgierz, Poland, and we lived at 1 Zieloma. Our town was a business town and 40% German, 55% Polish, and 5% Jews.

My father was Jacob Joseph Sompolinski and he was born in Ozrkow, Poland. He had four sisters and four brothers. Zgierz was known for having textile factories and was a little north of the city of Lodz. My father was a businessman who owned a textile factory and flour mill. He had about a dozen employees. I loved going to my dad’s work with him. I was always interested in textiles and machines. As a young boy, I would take apart bicycles and machines to see how they would work and then reassemble them.

My mother was Sura Jached Brumbaun. She was born in Zgierz and she had one brother who lived in Lodz. Her brother owned a hotel where Rabbis from all over the world came to stay at. My mother was a housewife. She loved learning and would always read Jewish texts. She loved going to the movie theater and had a married friend with no children who owned the two movie theaters in town. Her friend treated me like a son, and they let me work at the theater projecting the films. By age 11 I knew how to operate the camera. The names of the theaters were Luna and Venus. My mom’s friend told me she would give me the theaters when I grew up.

I had a sister named Bella. She was an attractive girl. She was born around 1910 in Zgierz. She had three children. Bella and her family did not survive.

I had four brothers. The oldest was Benjamin, then Baruch, then Slomo and then Abraham. Benjamin was born around 1912, Baruch was born about 1916 and then Slomo was about 1919 and then Abraham was born in 1925. None of my brothers survived.

We were modern orthodox and had a Rabbi in the family. We went to the mikvah before Shabbos. We had a famous Rabbi for our town and for the high holidays some other Rabbis came to be with our Rabbi. I had a Bar-Mitzvah with a Kiddush in the Shul with sponge cake and wine. It was a very happy time.

We belonged to the Macabee- a beautiful place in the city of Zgeirz. We swam, biked, hiked, and played soccer. Growing up I learned Polish, German, and Yiddish.

We had a nice life before the war.

Anti-Semitism significantly increased in 1937. Pritzger, a local politician, introduced a bill to make kashrut criminal, but it did not pass. One of the Polish newspapers took pictures of Poles who bought goods at Jewish stores and published it for all to see and try to have them not buy from Jewish stores. Some Jews got beaten up for being Jewish—I was one of them. They were breaking the windows of Jewish stores. They slaughtered the cows on Jewish farms. We were very worried. We couldn’t get visas to emigrate. They was no place to turn to for help.

When the Germans came in to our town, the ethnic Germans living in Zgierz slaughtered the Jews, cut off the beards of the religious Jews, and stole everyone’s belongings. Our textile company was taken away. We were chased out of the town. They told us if we didn’t leave we would be executed. We went to Lodz where the Jewish ghetto was being built. We couldn’t bring our furniture, possessions, or money. Just a bag with a couple clothes and shoes. They tried to erase our entire existence.

Upon arriving in Lodz, Jews were arriving from all over the country. It was a big Jewish city. The Germans were deliberately concentrating the Jews there and made it a ghetto. We had no heat and no running water in the place we had to live. I didn’t have the opportunity to work, we just tried to survive one day at a time.

One day in December 1940, I was walking in the street and the Nazis took me and shipped me to Germany to work. My family did not know what happened to me. I never got the chance to say goodbye to my family.

The Nazis put me in a railcar. After about a 12 hour ride, we got off the train and had a march to the camp – Britz. When we marched into the camp we were assigned to a barrack. It was a working camp. The Nazis were building the Berlin-Warsaw-Moscow Autobahn, and we were to build this super highway. We were cutting the trees from the woods. We walked far to do this work everyday and then walked back. I was working on the super highway for over two years: 1940-1942.

At the end of 1942 the Nazis wanted us to build an electric dam. They moved us to Frankfurt an der Oder which is located on the German-Poland border. We saw American Prisoners of War that were caught in Africa. The American POWs were treated better than we were. They received packages from the Red Cross. They saw our condition and tried to give us some of their aid packages.

Our food rations were a little bread and coffee, with some soup and bread for lunch. We spent 11 hours a day each and every day building a dam. It was hard work. We left this camp when Auschwitz needed young people to work in May of 1943. We were shipped there in railroad cars.

We arrived in Auschwitz in the morning. At the arrival platform, there was about 30,000 people all converging at once. I saw two of my brothers at the platform. It was 2½ years since I last saw them when the Nazis grabbed me on the street from the Lodz Ghetto. We saw each other in the distance and waved to one another, but we couldn’t get close to each other. My brothers Baruch and Slomo were both sent to the other side to the gas chambers. I never saw them again.

We had to stay with the group we came in with as they were counting everyone. We then had to go to the selection to see who would go to work and who would be gassed to death. I had to walk in front of the doctor who in that brief moment had the power to decide who would live and who would die. I was sent to work.

When I was selected to live, they brought me into Auschwitz. This was in the time period before the gas chambers and crematorium were operational. So, the Nazis would put people in trucks and gassed them to death in the trucks.

I had to undress the dead from the trucks and take their valuables off. The Nazis wanted everything. They even made us remove the gold teeth from the mouths of the dead. This work made me cry and feel awful. The Nazis would kill you if you showed any emotion, so we just had to do the work. There was no humanity here.

One day 80,000 people were burnt and put in ditches. We were put on a work detail to bury the remains. We would work, have a short break for some food, and then back to work. This work went on for four weeks.

After four weeks I was sent to Buna IG Farben (which is now split into the constituent companies of BASF, Bayer and Hoechst). There I was tattooed on my left arm. My number is 142506. I was in Barrack 8. We had about 180 men in the barrack. Our block elder in charge of the Barrack was Hans who was a German with a red triangle- he was a political prisoner. He was a good guy. In fact, after the war, this man became a mayor in a town next to Hanover, Germany. He gave away everything to the Survivors, this bankrupted the town and they took the mayoral job away from him.

At IG Farben, I would wake up at 5:00AM, and then at 6:00AM I got coffee and bread and then you had to find your commander. I worked for a year on electrical outlets and wiring, but the plant manufactured other materials such as tires for the Nazi military. There were also British POWs, Italians, and Russians forced to work in the factory. There was a German engineer who supervised us and he would leave food for us secretively. We had about 100,000 people working in this plant.

In 1944 they wanted to check your tattoo. The Kapo told me to redo my tattoo because the number was fading. I didn’t do it because I wanted to try to escape. They saw that I didn’t fix my tattoo and they beat me so badly that they broke my ribs and I had to go to the hospital. The doctor was a German Jew and he told me at night they sent everyone here to the gas chamber. When I didn’t show up for work, the German engineer who supervised us went looking for me. I was working on something important that needed to get done. He eventually found me at the hospital. I wasn’t able to walk out on my own, and he told the Nazi who beat me up that he had no right to do this to me, because the company was paying good money to the Nazis for prisoner labor and that I was a critical employee. He told the Nazis that I was needed and that they were paying the Nazis for me, and that I must be taken care of. He checked on me everyday. He saved my life. I wish I could remember his name.

After two weeks in the hospital I was able to go back to work. The German engineer gave me camp money that was meant to be given to non-Jews only. This money allowed you to buy food and other provisions from the canteen. I was the only Jew who could buy food. The German engineer gave a great gift. I shared it with the others.

Later in 1944, they had me work in another part of the factory for aircraft manufacturing. The Allied planes finally came and bombed the IG Farben factory at this time. We prayed that the Allies would bomb the concentration camp-- but they never did. We prayed that the Allies would bomb the railroad tracks leading to the concentration camp-- but they never did.

The Germans were smart and they exhausted fumes to fog up the areas over factories so it created a cloud to make it as difficult as possible for the planes to target their bombs. We stayed in Buna Monowitz. There were 48 barracks there. We had triple bunk beds that were made out of wood. They treated us a little better than other camps because they needed us to work. That being said, the Nazis were cruel and erratic and there were a lot of executions. One Saturday morning there must have been 100 Allied planes that came straight down and knocked out all 24 barracks. We lost about 80% of our prisoners. We were brought back to Auschwitz.

You could smell death when we arrived back at Auschwitz. I will never forget the terrible smell that was so bad from the gas chambers. The Nazis would take opportunities to mentally torture us as well. At the end of 1944, a German officer came to me and showed me the newspaper and said look the Jewish President FDR just sent back a ship from Cuba, because even he doesn’t want to help the Jews. Some people could not take it, but I never gave up hope.

In Auschwitz, we had a lot of jobs. If the Allies bombed the area, we not only cleaned up the debris, but had the risky job of cleaning up the live bombs that didn’t explode. We had to rebuild anything that was destroyed. The Winter of 1944-45 was very cold. One day I was on a work detail with a 16 year old kid from Poland. We saw some straw bags and put some of the straw under our thin clothes to keep warm. He was caught with the straw under his clothes and they hung him to death. Thankfully, they somehow did not catch me.

The Russian troops were approaching Poland from the East. On January 17, 1945 the Nazis retreated and made us walk a death march. They gave us a single piece of bread, assembled us in a line of five, and we started to march out of Auschwitz. They told all 70,000 of us that we were marching to another camp. We did not know how far we had to march. The march took about 3 days. When we arrived at Glewitz, only about 15,000 of the original 70,000 were still alive. Many could not keep up. If you stopped for too long or fell, the Nazis would finish you off. There were four Germans who walked with our group, but they had the opportunity to take breaks and get in a car—we did not.

In Glewitz, we came into a factory where they were making bricks. We stayed overnight there. Many were executed there for no reason. When we came into Glewitz, we didn’t see the SS, we were just by ourselves. We didn’t know what to do because if we ran away, the Poles would kill us if the Germans didn’t. They eventually rounded us up and put us on open cattle cars. The conditions were horrible- it was just to kill us. It was snowing and we were without any food, and they started transporting us. This trip took over two and a half weeks. Every couple days they threw in some bread and whoever grabbed it got it. There was never enough. Traveling on this open train we went to Buchenwald, Dachau, Mathausen and many camps, but no one wanted us because these death camps were already overloaded. Finally, they decided to take us to Bergen-Belsen. We arrived at Bergen Belsen. The 70,000 people who left Auschwitz became 15,000 at Glewitz and were now only about 1500 still alive at Bergen Belsen.

We passed through all the cities on the way to the camp and people saw us as we passed. When we walked into Bergen Belsen in February 1945, we saw dead bodies all over the camp. We were assigned to barracks, and I was assigned to Barrack 12. There were four hundred people in our barrack-- no room to even sit, let alone to lie down. All the windows were taken out. There was a pile of 100 dead bodies. Everyday there were more people dying. We were assigned to start taking the bodies out and dig mass graves. My health was deteriorating. I was starting to get weak. We didn’t get food for several weeks. Our hands and face were cracked from blisters and frost bite. We had to carry corpses to the mass graves for weeks and weeks.

Three days before the liberation, I went with three guys to the kitchen and saw rotten potatoes on the ground. What was garbage to the Germans was food for the barracks. Commandant Josef Kramer, the butcher of Bergen Belsen, saw us and took out his gun. He bent down and shot the other two boys to death. Then he said to me, I know you were at Auschwitz and he shot me in the hand as punishment for picking up the potatoes. I blacked out from being shot. When I woke up I was in a clean bed with white sheets. My hand was bandaged and I was being given food. Led by Brigadier General Glyn Hughes, the British Army liberated us on April 15, 1945. When the British found me, I was in a bed and was conscious. Apparently, Kramer didn’t want to kill me, but wanted to punish me and teach everyone a lesson. When I was shot, it was discovered that I had typhoid, so they took me to quarantine and I was discovered there when the British liberated Bergen Belsen.

Upon liberation, many survivors died because the British inadvertently gave people food that was too rich for people who were malnourished for years. I was 22 years old at liberation and weighed only 69 pounds. My eyes must have been an inch deep in my head. I was like a living skeleton. They tried to help us as much as they could.

The British asked me how I got shot in my hand and I told them- Josef Kramer. The British brought me so many pictures and asked me to show in the pictures who shot me. They asked me many times before they decided to use me as a witness for the trial for the butcher of Belsen.

As part of my participation in the Belsen Trial, I had the opportunity to meet many people from the United States and the United Kingdom, including having tea with General Montgomery, the most senior general in the British Army.

During my many meetings, they wanted to know why I was shot and what was my opinion about it. The military officials and lawyers asked me why I didn’t fight back. I said when someone has a machine gun, we can’t fight back with bare hands. I asked why didn’t the Americans bomb the railroads and try to save our lives—they didn’t have an answer. They didn’t have answers, but wanted to firsthand meet someone who was going to testify against the German Reich. HIAS, Joint distribution all came in to help around June or July 1945. The British established a displaced person camp in Bergen and set up barracks to use as a hospital. We organized a Jewish committee to run the displaced camp.

When the Belsen trial was about to start, the British wanted to make sure that we knew the SS. They notified us a week before the trial that they would bring us to the court. It started on September 15, 1945. We got acquainted with the lawyers. They said tell the truth about what you went through. It started at 9:30 am in the morning and they showed movies about what the SS did. It took five days. I never saw one of those tapes since the trial. They were originals and so disturbing. I testified on October 1, 1945. In preparation for my testimony I had a metal Jewish Star made which I proudly wore throughout my time on the witness stand. I testified for three days. The defense lawyer tried to confuse me and say that what I said was a lie. I was on that stand for three days and I testified to all the things from the beginning of what happened to me. I mentioned what Josef Kramer did. He was the butcher from Bergen Belsen. Kramer was sitting in the courtroom when I testified, along with others. Kramer was given the death sentence. I was invited to his hanging, but I didn’t want to go- I saw enough death and torture when I was in the camps. During the trial, I looked him right in the face when I testified. After the trial ended, we went back to Bergen Belsen.

Years later, in 1960, my friend Robert who was also an inmate with me in the camps, decided to sue IG Farben. When I registered as part of the lawsuit, I initially received a letter from Frankfurt, Germany saying that my story was false and that I was never at that camp. Imagine having your family murdered, beaten almost to death, and then being called a liar. The truth soon came out, and about four weeks later I received a written apology that the Red Cross found out that I was in fact there and they documented my beating and hospital stay.

During the War, I once saw a young girl crying so badly because she was so sick. She said she had two brothers and a father who were coming to get her. Her name was Jean Bader. I helped her and got the Red Cross to help her. Her brother and father were sick and passed away in Belsen. She survived and her brother survived and the British helped her. Sometime later I was walking with a friend named David and I heard someone shouting my name. I wondered who could this be? It was the girl Jean and she had survived! She looked like a movie star.

David and I walked over to Jean and there were close to thirty girls with her. Then, in the corner I see a girl with dark blond hair and deep blue eyes washing clothes. I said to David, “I‘m going to marry her.” He told me I was crazy. Slowly, I tried to approach her and asked her about herself. She told me she knew my whole family. I had four uncles and aunts in her town and she knew them all. It took months and then slowly we dated. For three months I did not kiss her. We started to talk about getting engaged. We got engaged and we went to the Rabbi and set the wedding date for January 27, 1946.

My wife was born Masza Kurpatwa on August 4, 1923. She had 3 sisters and 3 brothers. Because of Masza’s bravery and quick thinking, she was able to save her sister Figa from certain death. When they first arrived at the camps she saw her sister being put on a line with the elderly and sick, and grabbed her sister to the living line before the Nazis noticed and the lines separated. Near the end, but before liberation, Figa became sick. The Nazis called for a medical inspection which required each person to be physically inspected by the Nazi doctor to see if they would live or die. Masza risked her life by being inspected twice—once as Masza and once as Figa. Many in the camp knew of her bravery.

I started arranging for my wedding. We had 150 people at our wedding and an orchestra. I went to a German farm at a lake and asked for fish. I went to a solider and traded him cigarettes for liquor. I went to a German bakery and asked for a cake and he gave me 100 pound of flour and his workers and he didn’t charge me. We had a wonderful wedding. My wife had a dress sent from London that someone made for her. I had a suit that lots of guys used for their wedding.

After the wedding, the Hagganah came in and started recruiting young guys like me and started talking about creating Israel. We started stealing stuff to get to Palestine. We had problems with the British. They locked up the camp and didn’t let us go out. We protested and even blew up a British Army Jeep which attracted the attention of senior British leadership. A British General came in and chastised the soldiers and said that we are not criminals. From that point on, the gates remained open and we had freedom of movement.

My daughter Sara was born in Bergen Belsen in February of 1947 in the displaced persons camp hospital. After the war we searched for relatives. My mother did not survive and Sara was named after her. We stayed in Bergen Belsen until we could determine the next phase of our lives. I didn’t go back to my hometown because several people I knew did and they got killed by the Poles. Masza wanted to leave Europe permanently, and we both wanted to go to the United States of America. In all of our future travel, Masza never returned to Europe again.

It was not easy coming to the United States. We were now about 30 couples who had been together since liberation and we wanted to try to go at the same time to the same place. We registered together. After a while, an intelligence agent met with me and ask me why I wanted to come to the United States and not go back to Poland. He insisted that I go back to Poland. I said I am a man without a country. Poland would have done to us what Hitler did if Hitler never came. Before the war, they did terrible stuff to the Jews. I will not go back to Poland. I didn’t hear anything for a while.

An agent from Australia came in and asked me to move there. They were giving away free land and were trying to attract people. But we grew up in cities with a tight knit community and this was a world away. My wife and I said no.

We waited for the United States. We almost registered again to move to Israel. It was close to the time when the United Nations established the country, and I had one cousin Benjamin Sompolinski, who was a Survivor, that was living in Haifa. I spoke to him and he said not to come to Israel right now. Life was hard and we would be leaving a former warzone to go to a warzone. He said to go to the United States. So we waited.

It was a long 4 years since liberation. Then, in 1949 we prepared to leave Germany for America. Eight days before departing Germany for the United States, my daughter Sara got very sick with Rubella. On October 1, 1949 we left for the United States and arrived in New York on October 11, 1949. It was 11:00 in the morning when they let us off the boat. I saw the Statue of liberty and the Hudson drive and so many cars and the skyscrapers. When we got off the boat there were reporters asking us questions. They asked do you know what tomorrow’s holiday is? I said it is Columbus Day, and I discovered America a day before him!

They took us to a hotel at 123rd Street in Manhattan as we prepared for the next phase of our journey. We then went to Rhode Island and we met up with all of our friends. The people in Rhode Island took us in with open arms. I worked in textiles in Rhode Island. They got us an apartment, and gave me transportation to and from the factory. They paid me 75 cents an hour. I worked there starting in November 1949. The manager asked me to assemble the machinery, and saw that I was capable. I then receive a raise to $1.25 per hour. I bought a car and worked six days a week, 12 hours a day. I first paid back the town, because I didn’t want any charity. The town said we cannot take the money, so I told them to give it to charity.

They came to interview me and invited me to their TV studios to give my testimony. I had already given an interview and was featured in a prominent Rhode Island newspaper. At the time, my wife was in the hospital. I agreed to go to the TV studio. The Rabbi from Providence, Rhode Island came over and said I heard you will be going on TV. He said you already did enough damage in the newspaper. If you go on TV and talk about the Holocaust, you need to know we have enemies in our town and you have a child. You might create a problem for yourself and you should forget it. I told him I just want to tell the truth so the world will know what happened. I explained to the TV station that I was being warned that something might happen to me. I did get some harassing phone calls and messages. With them, it did scare me a little bit. I told the studio, I am very sorry but I cannot do it. I felt badly.

When my daughter went to Hebrew day school they held a grandparents day. At age six she asked me why don’t I have grandparents or uncles and aunts? I couldn’t answer her. I said they are far away. She asked me a few times and I tried to convince her that they are very far away. One day you will find out and when she was thirteen, we told her the story.

We left Rhode Island in 1964. My wife found a cousin in New York and we visited them a lot, and our cousin found me a job in Patterson, New Jersey in the textile industry. I found a friend who owned a house in New Jersey and my wife had saved this friend’s baby. When she had the baby in 1947, who was also a girl named Sara and was born on the exact same day, the lady could not breastfeed her baby and the baby girl was very sick. Masza volunteered to nurse her daughter as well as our daughter and gave the baby milk for nine months and this baby survived. She gave us her apartment.

In 1968, my daughter met a young man named Marvin Ebert and they quickly got engaged. They got married in a marvelous wedding in February 1969. My son-in-law came to visit me one day at work at the textile factory. It was a very busy factory and we had many clients. I did a lot of work at the Patterson factory, and I even designed drapes for the White House. However, when my son-in-law visited, he saw firsthand the terrible working conditions at the factory. In order to manufacture the high-quality threads, the looms needed 95 degree heat with high levels of humidity so the threads would not break when they were threaded on the spools. He wanted me to quit immediately, but I said I would give the company a year to train my replacement before I left. I taught a new person the job during that time.

In 1971, my daughter bought a house in Great Neck and wanted us to come closer to them. In 1975 I left Patterson and moved to New York and worked for my son-in-law as the manager of his medical practice in New York City. I worked there for almost 20 years.

I love to make parties and enjoy life. I loved to get together with other Holocaust survivors. We never skipped a day of making parties together. I am a member of a lot of survivor groups. The Shoah Project at the University of Southern California has a video interview of my testimony. In addition, The Museum of Jewish Heritage and Temple Israel made a recording of my oral history too.

If you live for the day you have a chance for tomorrow. That is the way I lived for the two and half years in Auschwitz and all the other camps and during forced labor.

My message to the world is that the world could have done better. I don’t think that the United States and the other countries really tried to save the Jews. We should be careful because it can happen again. We have to fight and always be alert. We need to give support organizations that stand for justice. We always need to support the State of Israel.

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Sara Ebert is the only child of Roman and Masza Sompolinski. Sara has two children, Steven and Rhonda. Steven Ebert and Karen Scott (children Matthew, Natalie and Paige) are members of Bet Torah.