Erna Mandelbaum

Testimony of Erna (Keizer) Mandelbaum, born in Rybnik, 1924, regarding her experiences in a ghetto, Hannsdorf and Parschnitz camps Her father owns a large store, serves as the head of the Chevra Kadisha (burial society) and head of the community committee; language spoken at home was German; religious family; attends a German school; because of the boycott, transfer to a Polish school at the age of 10; closure of schools to Jews, dismissal from jobs, studies, and other areas of life, 1939. Entry of the Germans; confiscation of property and money; eviction of her father from his store; detention in the Zurau prison for a month; transport of Jews to Majdanek; temporary rescue of family members from the transport in exchange for ransom money; deportation of her parents and sister to the Trzebinia Ghetto, May 1940; her three brothers go to an aliya training facility in Bratislava and their deportation to Auschwitz where they perish; transfer to the Hannsdorf camp in the Sudetenland; forced labor in a spinning factory; deportation to the Parschnitz camp in Czechoslovakia, which was run by the SS; forced labor in a combat materiels factory; hunger, beatings, abuse, lice, deaths of many women from diseases, total exhaustion, and attempts to escape; deportation of sick women to Auschwitz, to the gas chambers; arrival of the Red Army, May 1945. Return to Rybnik a few days later in search of family, then to Germany; marriage in Germany, 1947; aliya to Israel, 1950.