Moshe Fiszman

Title: My Vow Never to Forget
Author: Moshe Fiszman
Publisher: Jewish Holocaust Centre
Place of publication: Elsternwick, VIC.
Year of Publication: 2019
Location of Book: Lamm Jewish Library, Melbourne Holocaust Museum, Sydney Jewish Museum, State Library of Victoria, and other public libraries.
Cities/towns/camps: Poland: Radom, Warsaw, Szkolna Street concentration camp; Germany: Vaihingen an der Enz concentration camp, Natzweiler concentration camp; Mittenwald. Italy: Livorno, Leuca; Australia: Melbourne.
Note: those cities/towns/camps underlined are those which are most central to the narrative.
Genre: Memoir
Key events/experiences: Radom ghetto; concentration camp; death march.

My Vow Never to Forget is the story of Moshe Fiszman, a Polish-Jew who survived as a slave labourer in Radom from 1939-1944, bearing witness to the liquidation of the ghetto before being forced to endure the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps.

Pages 3-15 recount the author’s childhood and adolescent years in Radom, and includes his family tree. Pages 16-34 cover the period 1939-1941 and the establishment of the Radom ghetto. Pages 35-51 detail the liquidation of the Radom ghetto in August 1942 and Moshe’s experiences as a slave labourer in Radom until March 1944. Pages 53-80 recount his internment in the various camps from March 1944 until liberation in April 1945, with pages 81-123 describing his liberation in Germany and subsequent emigration to Italy. Pages 124-51 cover his emigration to Melbourne and travels to Poland in 1993. Photographs and historical documents such as identity cards are interspersed throughout.

Moshe Fiszman was born in Radom, Poland, on 29 November 1921, the fifth child of Ephraim and Chava Fiszman. Moshe was raised in an Orthodox family and attended Jewish school. He had three sisters and one older brother. In the Jewish district of Radom the family spoke Yiddish and had limited contact with local Poles. When Moshe was 14, he moved to Warsaw for work. In 1935, Moshe’s mother passed away. With the Nazi invasion, Moshe joined an auxiliary unit supplying food and ammunition to Polish troops on the frontline. When Warsaw fell, he returned to Radom whilst his brother escaped to the Soviet Union. In Radom, the family home and their belongings were confiscated by the German authorities and Moshe went to live with his Aunt. There, he discovered two escaped Polish soldiers. Moshe and his Aunt hid the soldiers before securing them lifesaving identity papers from the Red Cross.

In early 1940, Moshe was forced to register as a labourer. As he spoke German, Moshe was given work at an SS warehouse, unloading supplies from Germany. In 1941, the Radom ghetto was established. The family was sent to the ‘main ghetto’ of Radom, sleeping ten to a room. In August 1942, mass deportations began, and the ghetto was liquidated. Moshe and his family were taken to the main square where his father and sisters were put on a transport to Treblinka. As a labourer for the SS, Moshe’s life was spared. After the ghetto was liquidated, Moshe was placed in a labour battalion tasked with the horrific job of cleaning the ghetto, disposing of belongings and bodies strewn across the streets. Moshe continued to work at the SS warehouse until March 1944 when he was deported to the Szkolna Street concentration camp, a sub-camp of Majdanek.

In July 1944, with the Soviet army approaching, Moshe was deported to Auschwitz where he spent a week before being transported to Natzweiler and then Vaihingen concentration camps in Western Germany. In Vaihingen, Moshe worked at the Messerschmidt factory digging tunnels for German aircraft storage. There, he encountered Baroness Irmgard von Neurath, the sister-in-law of prominent Nazi official Konstantin von Neurath, who was sympathetic to the plight of the Jews and gave Moshe lifesaving food. As the French army approached, Moshe witnessed the Baroness attempt to stall the evacuation of Vaihingen to prevent the prisoners from being sent on a death march. She was unsuccessful, however, and Moshe was sent to Dachau in the freezing snow. The prisoners were then sent onwards to Garmisch-Partenkirchen in Bavaria, where they were liberated by the American army in late April 1945. Moshe, weighing just 48kg, recovered in hospital at an American DP camp in Mittenwald.

Determined to leave Germany, Moshe was able to travel by train to Italy. In September 1945 he arrived in Livorno, hoping to board a ship to Israel-Palestine, but was prevented by the British blockade. He encountered a Polish soldier and a former high school classmate, who advised him to join the Polish 2nd Corps (a division of the British army) in order to emigrate to Israel as a British army soldier. However, after facing antisemitic hostility in the Polish Corps he left for a Jewish DP camp in Leuca, where he met his future wife Franka. In 1948 Moshe’s cousin, who lived in Melbourne, was able to sponsor the couple to travel to Australia. With the assistance of the Hebrew Immigration Aid Society (HIAS), they departed from Marseille, arriving in Melbourne in 1949. On arrival in Melbourne, they were met by Moshe’s cousin Edzia who arranged accommodation for the couple and gave Moshe work in his fur trade business. Soon thereafter Moshe and Franka were married, and the couple had two daughters, Anna and Lena, born in 1951 and 1955. Eventually Moshe was able to establish a successful hosiery business. In 1993 he travelled back to Poland for the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and in 2009 became a guide at the Jewish Holocaust Centre where his daughter, Lena, is a staff member.

My Vow Never to Forget is a short memoir that centres primarily on the author’s wartime and immediate post-war experiences, only briefly describing his childhood in Poland and life in Australia. The memoir recounts the author’s personal experiences chronologically but also includes broader historical and social commentary on the Holocaust and Polish antisemitism, occasionally quoting primary and secondary sources. In May 2019, Moshe passed away. His memoir was published by the Holocaust Centre in June 2019.