Willy Lermer

From Hell to Salvation recounts Willy Lermer’s Holocaust experiences from the onset of the Second World War in September 1939 until his liberation on 29 April 1945. Born in Krakow in 1923, Willy was just 19 years old when he was sent to the notorious Plaszow forced labour camp. He survived the horrors of the Nazi concentration camp system only to discover that his entire family had been murdered in the death camp Belzec.

The memoir is 123 pages in length. Pages 1-5 details the author’s upbringing in Poland and family tree, with family photographs. Pages 6-29 covers the onset of the war and the author’s confinement in the Krakow ghetto – September 1939 to June 1942. Pages 30-56 recount his incarceration in the Plaszow and Ostrowiec forced labour camps from June 1942 until July 1944. Pages 57-82 describe Willy’s deportation to Auschwitz in July 1944 and eventually to Dachau and the sub-camp Kaufering in the winter 1944. Pages 83-112 recall his experiences in Kaufering, the forced march to Dachau and his liberation by the American army in April 1945. Pages 113-23 provide a brief “epilogue” on the author’s family in Melbourne and an appendix with photos and descriptions of the family that perished in the Holocaust.

Wilhem Lermer was born on 24 September 1923 in Krakow, the first-born child of Channa and Herschel Lermer. Willy was raised in a middle-class, observant Jewish home. When he was three years old, his sister Dusia was born. During the depression, the family business was forced to close and Dusia was sent to live with her grandmother in a small town, Myslenice, 30 kilometres from Krakow. In September 1939, the German army occupied large parts of Poland. Rumours circulated that Jewish men were being beaten and shot. At his mother’s urging, Willy and his father walked nearly 100km to the Tarnow army barracks to register themselves as labourers, fearing they might otherwise become targets of antisemitic violence, but soon returned to Krakow. In December 1939, Willy and his family were forced to register as Jews for work allocation by the German army. For more than a year, Willy endured hard physical labour and witnessed brutal attacks against the local Jewish population. He narrowly avoided deportation to the forced labour camps.

In March 1941, when Willy was seventeen, the Krakow ghetto was established. To avoid interment in the ghetto, the family was able to arrange for transportation to Myslenice to move in with Willy’s grandmother. Again they were forced to register as Jews and Willy was allocated work for the German Military Police. Luckily, he secured work as an assistant engineer in the town of Dobczyce. In June 1942, Willy was deported to the Plaszow forced labour camp. Under the command of the vicious Nazi Amon Göth, Willy endured back-breaking labour, illness and starvation. In November 1943, he was deported to the Ostrowiec forced labour camp where he again toiled in brutal conditions until July 1944, when he was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. There, he worked as a slave labourer for four gruelling months in the “Mexico” compound alongside the gas chambers and crematoria, surviving on a diet of clear soup. In November 1944, Willy was transferred to Sachsenhausen, where he stayed for three weeks before being transferred to Kaufering Camp 11 in Bavaria, one of the many sub-camps of Dachau. In April 1945, Willy was marched to Kaufering Camp 1 and then to Dachau. On 29 April 1945, Dachau was liberated by the American army. Barely alive, Willy weighed just 38 kilos and spent several weeks recovering in a hospital run by the Americans. Tragically, he learnt from the UNRRA that his family had been murdered in Belzec.

Without family, or a reason to return to Poland, Willy worked as a barber for the American forces in Germany. In December 1946, he began working for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee as a transport officer in the American zone. During this time he met his wife, Eva, and the couple were married on 5 December 1948 in Munich. On 10 January 1950 they emigrated to Melbourne, where Willy found work in the automobile industry. In 1991, Willy became active at the Jewish Holocaust Centre where he volunteered as a survivor-guide for 25 years.

From Hell to Salvation is a short but detailed memoir which centres on the author’s wartime experiences. The details of his migration and life in Australia are not provided. The memoir is interspersed with family photographs and personal documents. In the introduction, the author recounts that his reluctance to write his memoir was overcome by the encouragement of the Jewish Holocaust Centre (now Melbourne Holocaust Museum), which published his memoir in 2017. A shorter version titled, My Story, was written in 2004 and can be found at the Melbourne Holocaust Museum as an unpublished manuscript. This manuscript was also translated into German by Sabine Zur and published in Germany by Amazon in 2013.