Natan's Story

Arriving at Mr. and Mrs. Gipsman’s Home

I made sure to get to Mr. Gipsman’s house with plenty of time. On the phone the night before, he had given very clear directions for reaching the home he shares with his wife, Fela, but I was still nervous about being late. I already felt bad about contacting him so late to find out his address, I was determined to be there with plenty of time to spare.

When I pulled up to the house, I noticed how quiet and calm the street was. I waited in my car and watched a family of five leave the house across the street from Mr. Gipsman’s home. I don’t know if they were headed to church or just headed on a walk down the street, but I enjoyed the sight regardless. Mr. and Mrs. Gipsman had made their home in a very peaceful place.

When Michael and I met up, we spoke briefly about how we wanted to begin the interview. We both decided that the best experience for all of us would be if Mr. Gipsman told us his story without a lot of interference or direction from us. He had told his story before, and we didn’t want to seem impatient or clinical. We wanted to learn from him, and the best way to do that was to respect his memories and his story and to take it all in.

We rang the doorbell. Mr. and Mrs. Gipsman answered the door together with smiles and handshakes, welcoming us into their home. The first thing I noticed was the wide array of framed photographs displayed throughout the house. On the piano alone was a miniature history of their lives – wedding portraits and family photos from every decade looked back at Michael and me as we made our way to the kitchen. There were several framed cross-stitch pictures that reminded me of my grandma, and I wondered if Mrs. Gipsman had made them.

They immediately offered us coffee and cream cheese pastry, both of which put me at ease. Their hospitality was perhaps from another time, and it made me instantly comfortable. We asked if Mr. Gipsman if taking notes would bother him at all. He said “No,” and said he was even open to recordings. I wish I had brought a tape recorder, but I didn’t. Instead, I just took out my yellow legal pad and pen and Michael and I settled into our seats at the kitchen table.


Before the War

Natan was born in 1925 in Hindenberg and was raised in Bedzin, Poland. His father owned a produce store in Hindenberg which supported himself, his wife, Natan, and Natan’s sister until Adolf Hitler came to power and stole it from the Gipsman family. Natan’s father opened a new store in Poland and sent Natan to grammar school and then Jewish school for his early education. Natan explained that most of his friends were Jewish and that he spoke fluent Polish and Yiddish.

In 1939, Germans marches with tanks and soldiers into Natan’s town. At first, no one thought much of it and didn’t expect them to be dangerous. But as days passed, the soldiers’ demands grew more and more strict. They put up signs for everyone in Natan’s Jewish community to forfeit their weapons, jewelry, and radios. The Jewish people were then forced to move out of their section of the street and made to wear white armbands with the Star of David on them. When that was no longer satisfactory to the Nazi soldiers, the Jewish people were ordered to sew the Star of David itself into their finest articles of clothing to ensure they would never be mistaken.

Natan saw people arrested for such minor offenses as jaywalking – and they were never seen again.

Natan told us that trucks of SS officers would drive in a walk around the town, choosing young people to send to labor camps to assist the German army. Finally, Jews were forced to the very far end of the city and made to carry work papers with them at all times. According to Natan, the colored work cards acted as a hierarchy of importance to the German soldiers. Purple was the best color to have, because it meant that the holder was working for the Nazi war effort. Orange was the worst. Natan’s father had an orange work card. Because of this, he was one of the first to be taken away to the labor camps, leaving Natan, his mother, and his sister alone.
Young Natan had a blue card. This meant that he supplied electric material necessary for German industry. Natan explained to us how he got this valuable job. Curfew being at 7:00 pm, neighbors would often get together to discuss their daily lives, politics, religion, and a wide variety of other topics. During one of these get-togethers, Natan was able to secure his job from the Jewish owner of an electric business.

One day, the Nazi soldiers informed all of the Jews in the city to meet at the stadium where they would get their cards stamped. When Natan arrived, however, it was clear that more was in store. Soldiers with machine guns lined the entrance to the stadium and began to sort the Jews inside. Natan was sent to the left side of the stadium with his mother and the other families. His mother was able to secretly send Natan over to the right side where he would be safe. Once he was safe, Natan used bribery to save his mother and sister.

This did not go unnoticed, however. Jewish police were sent to arrest Natan. He quickly hid before they could find him, but they took his mother as a hostage in his place. According to Natan, they told his mother that if she didn’t deliver Natan to the authorities in 2 hours, she would be sent to Auschwitz. Upon hearing of this, Natan turned himself in to save his mother. The police, however, tore him away from his mother and he never saw her again.


Luck and Survival

After being taken into custody, Natan was sent to his first labor camp where he was forced to cut down trees all day long. He was then transferred to Sachsenheim. Upon arriving, Natan told the soldiers he was an electrician and he was given a job. He would march back and forth from the camp to work every day, coming back to the camp at night for soup and bread to sustain him. On top of this, he was soon forced to unload gravel from nearby boxcars after an entire day of work. Despite this heavy labor, Natan says he would’ve preferred to work all week long, including Saturdays, because even this was better than the camp.

This wish was granted, luckily, and his supervisor allowed him to work Saturdays, sometimes completing such menial tasks as cleaning bicycles. For this, Natan was grateful. According to him, the supervisor was only abusive towards him once, slapping him so hard across the face that his hand print was left on his cheek. This, Natan says, was the only instance of abuse he encountered from this supervisor.
Soon, however, Natan was sent with other prisoners to Blechammer, a concentration camp very near Auschwitz. Prisoners declared "unable to work" were sent by the camp administration to Auschwitz to be murdered while other "healthy" workers are sent to Blechammer instead.

At Blechammer, Natan was tattooed, shaved, showered, and given a pair of uncomfortable wooden shoes. According to Natan, Blechammer was far stricter than the previous camps he had been kept prisoner at. He and the other prisoners were forced to wake up at 3 in the morning and stand there in the bitter cold until sunrise. At sunrise, 20 rows of 5 linked prisoners – Natan included – were made to march to a distant factory to work. Every 50 feet would be a Nazi soldier keeping guard of the prisoners and ensuring that no one could escape.

In the factory, Natan came into contact with many different prisoners of war – English, French, Polish prisoners. It was at these factories that a series of horrific air raids would send people into a panic. Bombs would shower from the sky and Natan and the other prisoners would be forced to run for their lives to avoid the deadly blasts. He could feel the ground vibrating and one day he and another boy ran towards to woods to escape the barrage of bombs hailing from the American airplanes. A bomb hit the ground so close by, Natan and the boy were completely buried with dirt. Upon emerging, Natan witnessed with horror the dismembered and gored bodies of the bombing victims. There was blood everywhere. At that point, Natan says, he was more afraid of the Americans for bombing the factories than the Germans for keeping them there.

While he was imprisoned, Natan recounted two separate moments of horrific punishment he suffered at the hands of his Nazi tormentors. One instance he remembers is when he and another Jewish prisoner were accosted for supposedly laughing at a Nazi. Natan and the other boy vehemently denied it, that they were only talking and smiling about something completely unrelated. The guards did not believe them. That night, two SS men took Natan and the other boy out of the barracks and whipped them so hard that Natan was unable to walk. His only recollection of the beatings is that the whip only hurt on fresh flesh – his other cuts and bruises were numbed from abuse.

Natan survived this beating. Others were not as lucky. Natan told us about two men who were overheard complaining about their soup being too watery. The Nazi guards overheard this and took them out of the barracks and beat them with whips. One Nazi broke the leg off of a table and beat one of the men with it until his body stopped moving entirely. They guards poured ice water on the corpse of the man they had just murdered.

Natan remembers vividly the hanging parties that would take place at the camp. Jewish prisoners were brutally hanged for anything the guards deemed “sabotage,” which could be something as little as failing to remove his hat for a Nazi guard.
On January 20, 1945, everyone emptied the barracks and the death march began.
If a prisoner was too weak to march, he or she would be shot on the spot. Natan recalls a time when he almost collapsed on this death march. Someone held him up and he came to before any soldier noticed.

The march was torturous. With only their wooden shoes to protect them from the gluey snow, the prisoners dreaded the ice cold walk. Natan’s own toes became frost bitten from the ice. At night, the prisoners were forced to sleep on the icy floor of a barn and to drink watery soup as their only nourishment. Natan remembers how sharply cold the ground was on which he tried to sleep. He would wake every few minutes to switch sides before the stinging frost bite could settle into his body.
Natan and those few 1500 out of the initial 5000 Jewish prisoners, after 3 weeks of marching, made their way to the Gross-Rosen concentration camp. Upon arriving, the Nazis forced massive amounts of prisoners into the same barracks, whipping the backs and shoulders of those who could not fit until they climbed and crawled their way to the top of the others inside. Natan remembers at one point he did not even have his two feet on the ground – the pressure in the barracks was so enormous that people we literally piled upon one another.

In the morning, the Nazis hanged 10 random prisoners to make more room.
Natan and the other surviving prisoners were then sent to a camp called Buchenwald in open boxcars with no access to water. In order to survive, Natan and the others were forced to eat snow to live. When they finally arrived, they were made to wait for a week until enough people to be murdered that room could be made for them.
Upon entering Buchenwald, Natan and the other prisoners were sent to the basement. Natan was sure he was going to die, but in the basement the Nazi soldiers only shaved them again. Natan was then sent to a large pool of some kind of stinging sanitizer and then to ice cold showers with a tiny chip of soap. As the shower ended, the prisoners were blasted with a second of near-boiling hot water and then pushed by guards through the basement window out onto the grounds. They were naked in the piercing cold, waiting in line to receive pajamas.

He was next placed – along with hundreds of other prisoners – in a building for labor. Natan says that the sheer number of people caused the entire floor to shatter. The hundreds of prisoners were falling and being trampled to death, but Natan miraculously survived – something he cannot explain.

Natan eventually discovered that a cousin – an upholsterer – of his was being held at this very same camp. In an attempt to stay with his cousin, Natan told the guards that he too was an upholsterer. After asking several specific questions on the subject, the Nazi soldiers discovered that Natan was lying and sent him back to the barracks.

Later that day, his number was called and he was told he and the other electricians were needed to fix an airplane. Natan didn’t want to leave his cousin, but he didn’t have a choice.

But the soldiers had lied. Natan was not going to fix anything. He and some other prisoners were being sent to another camp.

After almost a month at this camp, Natan and the others were given the evacuation order, and a second death march began in April of 1945.


Natan’s Escape

After one day on the death march, Natan saw his chance. Rounding a corner, the prisoners in his row were for a split second out of the eyesight of both the Nazi guard in front and behind them. Natan grasped this tiny moment and slipped out of line, ducking below a gate and sneaking into a farm.

As he hurried silently across the yard towards the barn, a dog began to bark. Terrified that he would be discovered and shot for attempting to escape, Natan didn’t even look back. He bolted into the barn and lay down beside the pigs, hiding beneath mounds of hay. The farmer who owned the land heard the dog barking and came in to check but couldn’t see the hidden Natan. The Nazi guards, upon hearing the barking dog, asked the farmer what was going on. The farmer replied that the dog was barking at the people walking by his farm. Apparently the soldiers believed the man – as the man believed himself – and they kept marching.

Natan had escaped.

When the farmer went to go milk the cows out in his field the next morning, Natan snuck into another building on the property and found a Polish workers jacket and some rubber boots. He donned both and fled the farm.

He ran into another Polish worker and begged him to hide him. He hid the fact that he was a Jew, instead telling the Polish worker that he too was a “Pollack.” Because of this, the Polish worker hid him for a whole week.

After this, Natan began to make his way towards the English front. On the way, he was caught by a police officer. Natan lied and said he was evacuated from a Polish camp. The policeman told him that he wasn’t fooling him. He knew Natan was a Jew. But thankfully Natan knew enough German that the policeman finally believed that he was a Polish man and let him go.

Wandering through the countryside, Natan found a barn and slept with the cow inside for shelter for an entire month until liberation by the Russian army.


After Liberation

Natan finally made it back to his hometown, but almost everyone was gone. There were only a few Jews left. Without a home or family to go to, he slept in City Hall until several of his grammar school friends – also survivors – found him.

With them was their cousin, Fela. Two years later, Natan married her.

In 1949, President Truman let in 400 displaced Jewish refugees. Natan and Fela said they expected it was misleading or a joke, but they registered to come to America anyway. It worked and that same year they moved to America.


Life in America

They first came to New York, and then straight to Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Natan worked at a cigar factory to make some money because he didn’t know the language and had no connections in this new country. But he soon found employment at the Dodge/Chrystler factory in Detroit. He passed the test to become a metal finisher.
In February of 1950, Natan and Fela had their first son in Detroit.

In 1953, the couple moved to Los Angeles where Natan got a job as an electrician, making $2.00 per hour. Because he was afraid to join the union, his boss gave him regular raises every six months to help him out. The union found out, however, and he was fired. It took some time, but Natan finally joined the union and became a contractor.

In 1955, their second son was born. They now have 7 grandchildren and one great granddaughter.


A Renewed Life

When Michael and I asked Mr. Gipsman how he thinks he survived those years of torture, he replies with a simple, “Luck.” He never believed he would survive, but he refused to give up hope at the same time. Through the horrible hunger, the freezing cold, and the mindless carnage around him, he kept his faith and made it out alive.

He is the only survivor in his family. So is Fela. And together they rose above the horrors they were forced to endure and they created a beautiful extension of their life in the United States.

- Erin Moore