Gross-Rosen

Abram Enzel (1916-1994)

Abram Enzel was born in Częstochowa, Poland, on June 18, 1916, to Chaim and Faigle Enzel. Chaim worked as a kosher butcher. They had five children — three boys and two girls — with Abram as the firstborn. In 1939, there were 28,500 Jews living in Częstochowa, about 124 miles (200 km) southeast of Warsaw.

The Germans entered Częstochowa on Sunday, September 3, 1939, and persecution of its Jews began immediately. More than 300 Jews were killed the following day, in what became known as “Bloody Monday.” On December 25, 1939, a second pogrom took place, and the Great Synagogue was set on fire. The family survived both pogroms.

On the morning after Yom Kippur in September 1942, Abram was separated from his family. One brother, Nathan, had previously been taken by the Germans to a concentration camp. The rest of Abram’s family was gassed and cremated three days later in Treblinka.

Abram was sent to work in a munitions plant operated by HASAG (Hugo Schneider Aktiengesellschaft-Metalwarenfabrik, Leipzig), one of the largest German industrial companies using concentration camp prisoners to manufacture armaments. HASAG was the third largest such company after I.G. Farben and the Hermann Göring Werke. It operated four camps in Częstochowa, the largest of which — HASAG-Apparatebau — held 7,000 Jewish prisoners. The wages of these forced laborers were paid directly to the SS. Those unfit for work were killed under the policy of Vernichtung durch Arbeit (“extermination through work”). From July 1944 to early 1945, HASAG moved most of its equipment and Jewish workers to Germany. No HASAG personnel were tried by the Allies at Nuremberg.

In 1944, Abram was transferred from HASAG to Gross-Rosen, then to Flossenbürg, and finally to Dachau. One of his most haunting memories was the transfer from Flossenbürg to Dachau with 500 prisoners. In a 1973 Pittsburgh Press interview, Abram recalled: “They made us march at first. But later they herded us like cattle on some old freight cars.” Only 18 of the 500 survived to reach Dachau — Abram among them.

On April 29, 1945, the 42nd and 45th Infantry Divisions and the 20th Armored Division of the U.S. Army liberated Dachau. The next day, Adolf Hitler committed suicide. Abram weighed just 78 pounds at liberation, compared to a healthy 130 pounds before the war.

By June 1946, 2,167 Jews had returned to Częstochowa, but Abram chose not to. He recovered in Germany, ran a grocery store in Bayreuth, and emigrated to the United States in 1951, settling in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

In Pittsburgh, Abram met Dora Weiss, a survivor from Munkács, Czechoslovakia (now Mukačevo, Ukraine). Her parents were murdered in Auschwitz. They married on June 8, 1952, and had one son, David, born January 21, 1955.

Dora died of cancer on July 30, 1958, at age 35. Abram never remarried. He worked at H.J. Heinz before joining the Concordia Club, where he rose from busboy to maître d’. He considered his 30 years there the happiest of his life.

David moved to Washington, D.C., in 1979. Abram retired in 1981 and soon followed. He died on May 10, 1994, in Washington, the capital of the country that had liberated him.

Abram’s oral history is available from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the American Jewish Committee Oral History Collection at the New York Public Library, part of the Dorot Jewish Division’s archive of over 6,000 hours of interviews.

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