By Dr. Samuel Kassow

Abram Merczynski was born on June 15, 1923, in Lodz, Poland, in the rundown Baluty neighborhood, which would later become the site of the Lodz ghetto. He was the third of six children—five boys and a sister who died in childhood. His parents, Shia and Etl, made a living selling animal feed.

When Abram was still a young boy, the family decided to move to a better section of town, and they set about building a new house on the outskirts of Lodz. No sooner had they started than the Great Depression began in 1929. Because they could not afford windows to keep out the cold, the family slept in the basement, which they shared with their horse. Hard times almost forced Shia to close his business and lose his new house. But he persevered and by the late 1930s, the family’s economic position had stabilized.

Abram’s parents followed Jewish tradition. The family observed the Sabbath and Jewish holidays. Like many other Jewish children in Lodz, Abram attended a Polish public school in the mornings and a Jewish religious school, or cheder, in the afternoons. (After the war, Abram admitted that he questioned his faith and the existence of God. But like many other survivors, he still insisted that his children receive a Jewish education; both his son and daughter attended the Flatbush Yeshiva in Brooklyn.)

Before the war, Lodz was the second biggest city in Poland—a sprawling, bare-knuckled industrial town of about 600,000 inhabitants, according to the 1931 census. It was a multinational city of Poles (59 percent), Jews (32 percent), and Germans (9 percent). Known as the “Polish Manchester” because of its large textile industry, Lodz was a city of contrasts, with huge palaces and appalling slums.

Lodz was a town that inspired important novels—Wladyslaw Reymont’s Promised Land in Polish, I.J. Singer’s The Brothers Ashkenazi in Yiddish—whose themes were strikingly similar: class friction, ethnic strife, the raw tension of unsparing capitalism. Both Reymont and Singer described the Lodzhermensch, a word that was the same in German and Yiddish. The Lodzhermenschen were the mostly German and Jewish entrepreneurs and hustlers who drove Lodz’s growth in the 19th century, who made and lost huge fortunes, started big factories, and sometimes burned them down to collect insurance. Some of the Lodzhermenschen turned into legendary businessmen, like Karl Scheibler—who was German—and Izrael Poznanski—who was Jewish—who endowed hospitals and churches and supported the arts.

Over time, Lodz also became a major cultural center, the home of great Yiddish and Hebrew writers, actors, and artists like Moshe Broderson, Yisroel Rabon, Shimon Dzigan, and Yitzhak Katzenelson. Julian Tuwim, a Lodz Jew who wrote in Polish, is remembered as one of Poland’s greatest poets of the last century. Artur Rubinstein was born in the city. Many Lodz intellectuals and artists came to love their raw, unfinished town. They took a perverse pride in its newness and lack of tradition.

The Germans captured Lodz on September 8, 1939, and immediately began a reign of terror, with the avid participation of much of the city’s large German population, who immediately turned on their Polish and Jewish neighbors. There were roundups and shootings of the Jewish and Polish intelligentsia. German soldiers and civilians barged into Jewish homes and businesses and looted to their heart’s content. The city’s most beautiful synagogues went up in smoke. Nonetheless, right up until the final deportation in 1944, Abram’s father refused to believe that the “civilized” Germans he remembered from the First World War could be capable of planned mass murder.

In November 1939, the Nazis annexed Lodz and the surrounding region to the German Reich, as part of the Warthegau province headed by the notorious Gauleiter Arthur Greiser. The SS made immediate plans to deport all of Lodz’s 160,000 Jews to the Generalgouvernement, the administrative entity for German-occupied central Poland run by Hans Frank. However, soon after these deportations began in late 1939, Frank loudly protested to Hitler that he did not want his turf to turn into a dumping ground for Jews. Hitler sided with Frank, and for the time being the Jews stayed in Lodz, where they were forced to enter a ghetto that was sealed on April 30, 1940.

The Germans assumed that the ghetto would be a temporary arrangement, and that with the fall of France in June 1940, they would be able to ship all the Lodz Jews to Madagascar. But when Britain stayed in the war, those plans fell through. Ironically, the Lodz ghetto, one of the first to be established, was the last ghetto to be liquidated; it lasted until August 1944.

A key reason why the ghetto survived as long as it did is that its Nazi-appointed Jewish boss, Chaim Rumkowski, succeeded in convincing key Germans that Lodz, with its large reservoir of skilled workers, could become a major center of war production for the German economy. Indeed, by 1943 (by which time the ghetto’s population had been culled to 70,000), there were 117 factories and enterprises in the ghetto, including the communications equipment shop where Abram worked. The ghetto generated enormous profits, and many Nazi officials eagerly lined their pockets. SS plans to liquidate the ghetto in 1943 ran aground against the opposition of Greiser and Albert Speer, Hitler’s armaments czar.

Meanwhile, plans were underway to rid the ghetto of those who did not contribute. Deportations to Chelmno, the first death camp that the Nazis established, began in January 1942, when 20,000 Jews—mostly welfare cases and people whom Rumkowski did not like—were sent to die in Chelmno’s gas vans. The ghetto’s remaining German and Czech Jews were deported in May of that year, by which time Rumkowski probably knew what awaited deportees to Chelmno.

One of the most traumatic weeks in the Lodz ghetto’s existence occurred in September 1942, when all the Jews were forced into a multi-day lockdown while the Germans seized all children under the age of 10, elderly Jews, and those deemed too weak to work. (The children of Jewish police and high ghetto officials were exempt.) Rumkowski, in a tearful speech, told the Jews to “hand over your children.” Only by sacrificing the children and the weak was it possible to buy time, he warned. If they did not cooperate, the Germans would destroy the entire ghetto. Parents looked on in helpless despair as the Germans went from building to building, armed with lists, and took away their young sons and daughters. Unlike some other major ghettos, such as the one in Warsaw, the Lodz ghetto was largely sealed off from the outside world. Over the course of four long years, not one pistol was smuggled into the ghetto, and not one messenger from the outside managed to penetrate the German cordon. There were no recorded incidents of armed resistance, despite Lodz’s proud tradition of revolutionary defiance against Russian rule before 1914.

Whereas about 90 percent of the food consumed in the Warsaw ghetto was smuggled in, the Jews in Lodz depended entirely on the German food allocations. Those who worked in a shop might receive 1,400 calories a day. Those who did not work got considerably less. Food, therefore, became the major obsession in the ghetto. People starved—some slowly, some more quickly. Parents went hungry to save food for their children;  others became so demoralized that they began to steal food from their loved ones.

Over time, about a quarter of the Jews in the Lodz ghetto succumbed to starvation or disease. On the other hand, there were ways of getting by, as Abram’s testimony shows. The Merczynski family serves as a key example of how family solidarity and hustle could make it possible to survive. Abram cultivated a small plot of land, a privilege probably obtained through personal connections. The family traded their rations for sugar, which they used to distill alcohol, and then sold the home brew for a profit, which they exchanged for food.

It was no surprise that power in the ghetto flowed into the hands of those who distributed food and decided on who got what. As a result, Lodz, unlike Warsaw, was a highly regimented ghetto. There were hardly any private shops and there was no network of autonomous social institutions. Rumkowski, along with his minions, ruled the ghetto like a dictatorship, favoring those he liked and brutally punishing those who crossed him. He enjoyed the trappings of power, and many, perhaps most, Jews in the ghetto hated him. Even so, they respected his ability to negotiate with the Germans, to set up new factories, and, above all, to buy time.

Like most Judenrat leaders, Rumkowski was a tragic figure. He saw himself as a messianic savior, with a God-given mission to rescue as many Jews as possible, even if he had to sacrifice others to do so. When he could, he helped the ghetto’s children, procured extra food rations for them, set up schools, and handed out small welfare stipends to the neediest Jews. But when the Germans demanded victims, he went along, arguing that there was no other choice. One virtue of Abram’s testimony is that he understood the complexity of judging Rumkowski and the fraught game that he was trying to play. Like many other survivors of the Lodz ghetto, Abram wondered if he would have remained alive had it not been for Rumkowski.

The end of the Lodz ghetto came in August 1944. Lodz was by now the last ghetto standing and the Russians were only 60 miles away. The wily German chief of the ghetto, Hans Biebow, assured all the Jews, including Rumkowski, that they would be deported for labor in Germany.  But the trains all went to Auschwitz. One of Abram’s brothers suffocated on the journey there. At Auschwitz, about two-thirds of the surviving Jews, including Rumkowski and Abram’s mother, were sent to the gas chambers. The remaining Jews—including Abram, his surviving brothers, and his father—were sent to concentration camps in Germany.

Because Lodz was the last ghetto to be liquidated, it had the most Jewish survivors. A total of 200,000 Jews passed through the ghetto, including refugees deported from the Reich, the Protectorate, and the provincial towns that surrounded Lodz. About 43,000 died of disease and starvation, and 80,000 were deported to Chelmno. During the final liquidation, 70,000 were deported to Auschwitz, of whom 20,000 were selected for labor. Of these, between 7,000 and 10,000 survived the war.The worst time for Abram came at Kaufering, the concentration camp where he, his father, and brothers were deported from Auschwitz. Kaufering was part of the Dachau camp system and consisted of 11 different Lagers set up near Landsberg in 1944 to build bomb-proof tunnels for the manufacture of fighter planes. Most of the 30,000 prisoners who passed through the Kaufering camps were Jews from Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, and elsewhere. Only 50 percent lived to see the liberation. It was a measure of the Reich’s growing desperation that Hitler himself approved the introduction of Jewish slave laborers into Germany, just two years after the Nazis proudly proclaimed that the Reich was judenrein. As Abram mentioned in his testimony, the backbreaking labor that killed so many of the Jewish prisoners was all for naught. Not one plane was ever built at Kaufering.

Abram also described the terrible conditions in the camp. Some of the worst sadists of the SS were assigned to Kaufering at the end of the war, as their previous camps closed down in the face of the Russian advance. Disease spared no one. Abram himself contracted typhus and dysentery. He also mentioned the brutality of the Kapos, the Jewish prisoners who were empowered by the Germans to keep order in the camp. He ran into one after the war in America but realized that vengeance would give him no satisfaction; as with Rumkowski, he again noted that the battle for survival leads people to do things that defy easy judgment.

Life in Kaufering was so intolerable that one of Abram’s brothers tried to hang himself and survived only because another prisoner cut him down at the last minute. Meanwhile, Abram tried to help his father, but they were in different barracks and he could only watch helplessly as his father wasted away and died. As was the case in many other Nazi camps in April 1945, many prisoners died in the final week before liberation—the victims of death marches, train bombings, and last-minute SS killing sprees. At Kaufering, Max Blanke, the head SS doctor, set alight barracks that housed sick inmates, and many were burned alive just before the Americans arrived.

But Abram survived, as did three of his four brothers. After the war, while living in Munich, he immediately began his journey back to life. He set his sights on a visa to the United States. And he also fulfilled a long-held wish to study the violin—a yearning that began in the Lodz ghetto, where one of his brothers had organized an orchestra that provided a small measure of pleasure and beauty for the beleaguered Jews. Abram got himself a violin, found a teacher, and devoted himself to learning to play the instrument. It was a passion that he cultivated until the end of his life.

Abram arrived in the United States in 1949. One brother went to Israel, another to France, and a third, Izzy, followed Abram to the U.S. Together with Izzy and some other survivors, Abram started a successful company called A.M. Knitwear that sold women’s sweaters to major department store chains.

In 1961 Abram went to Israel for his nephew’s bar mitzvah and met Miriam, a native of Vilna who had survived the war in Russia. They fell in love and married in November 1961. They had a daughter, Eleanor, born in 1963, and a son, Steven, born in 1966.

Abram shared his love of music with his children and his four grandchildren. For a long time he was bothered by nightmares about the camps. But as time went on, he became convinced that he had a sacred obligation to let others know about what he and his family had endured.

 ———

Additional readings and information

Abram’s unedited testimony at the Fortunoff Video Archive (available at access sites worldwide): https://fortunoff.aviaryplatform.com/collections/5/collection_resources/1787.

Dobroszycki, Lucjan, ed. The Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto, 1941-1944. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984.

Kassow, Samuel, ed. In Those Nightmarish Days: The Ghetto Reportage of Peretz Opoczynski and Josef Zelkowicz. Translated and co-edited by David Suchoff. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015.

Rosenfarb, Chava. The Tree of Life: A Trilogy of Life in the Lodz Ghetto. Translated by the author in collaboration with Goldie Morgentaler. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005.

Trunk, Isaiah. Lodz Ghetto: A History. Translated and edited by Robert Moses Shapiro. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006.

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Abram Merczynski: My father was always, and my mother, very charitable people. Even when we had little, we used to share. He used to give each child—you bring a few pounds of potatoes, you bring a bread, … to the people that were poorer than we were. I will always remember my parents for being good. That’s all. And, and I like to be the same. That’s all. Because they were the best in the world.

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Eleanor Reissa: You’re listening to “Those Who Were There: Voices from the Holocaust,” a podcast that draws on recorded interviews from Yale University’s Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. I’m Eleanor Reissa.

Abram Merczynski was born on June 15, 1923, in Lodz, Poland. He was the third of six children—five boys and a girl who died in childhood. His mother owned a grocery store and his father sold feed for farm animals. During the worst of the Depression, they spent winters in their basement because they couldn’t afford to buy windows for the new house they had just built. Their horse, which was lame, slept with the family so it wouldn’t freeze.

It is now December 2, 1990, and Abram Merczynski is sharing his memories with interviewer Devorah Mann at the Museum of Jewish Heritage office in Midtown Manhattan. Abram sits against a black backdrop. He’s dressed in a dark suit, white shirt, and a wine-colored tie. He’s mostly bald, his silver hair combed neatly back at the sides. His black eyebrows and cleft chin punctuate his expressive, full face.

———

AM: The only thing what I told you that I didn’t like in Poland is just, you know, that we knew that they don’t love us. They don’t like us. I don’t say that there were not exception, but that a lot, a lot antisemites. There’s no question about it. That’s all I have to say.

Devorah Mann: Do you remember any instances, an example?

AM: The example? Did I tell you this one with the policeman? Like, eh, I went to school. They used to throw stones at me, you know. I went over to a policeman. He said, he said, “They didn’t kill you yet.” This was my protector. So this is one instant. I don’t think you need a better instant than something like this.

DM: Can you tell us what…

AM: That the policeman that is supposed to protect you said, “They didn’t kill you yet.” There were very, very few—believe me—that were nice. I don’t say that were not exception. There were some nice ones. But in comparison with the percentage, it was very little. That’s why I really have never a desire to go back to my country, where I was born. I have no feeling whatsoever.

And then, uh, I don’t have to tell you what happened. All of a sudden, uh, you know, Hitler started, you know, the war with Poland, you know, in 1939. And it only took, uh, two, three days, they were in Lodz.

DM: When the bro—when the war broke, where have you been?

AM: We have been in our house, uh, for a few months. When the ghetto started, we had to leave, because our section was not considered the ghetto. So we used to live, uh, there was a street, uh, Marynarska 16. Marynarska 16, we got an apartment. And that’s where we lived, the little small apartment. If you want to call it living, you know.

DM: This, this was in the ghetto.

AM: In the ghetto, yeah. And I was working where they used to make, uh, telephones, fixing telephones for the Germans. And then, uh, they gave to each of these groups a little bit of ground, you know, to, to grow things. And I knew about this, you know, from the farms, you know, what I used to live there.

DM: Where, in the ghetto itself?

AM: In the ghetto itself, you know.

DM: Mm-hmm.

AM: So I used to work with this. So we used to get, uh, a little bit, uh, more than others. And I used to share. And I used to give, and used to help, whatever I could—you know what I mean. Because the potato, people would give you a diamond, if they had, to get a couple of potatoes. The hunger was very great.

What you used to d-do, we used to take the peel of the potatoes and, and, you know, from the coffee what remains, we used to make cake out of this—from the peel of the potatoes and the coffee ersatz. From this, we used to make cake. And you can imagine what kind of a cake. But we licked the fingers from, from a cake like that.

We didn’t have wood to cook. We used to chop up everything, whatever we had, the furniture, t-till, till you were left with the bare walls, you know, just on the mattress, you know. You know, everybody tried as, as hard as they could. We even took a chance, and we used to—we, we, we had a brewery in the house.

DM: What?

AM: We used—a brewery. We used to make whiskey out of sugar. To be able to make some money—who was buying the police, you know, the one that could afford.

And then my older brother, you know, he rem—uh, remembered his friend, you know, that, uh, uh, great violinist. You know, he was supposed already to give a concert. So my brother, the oldest one, and one younger one, uh, we tried to get together all the great musicians in, in the ghetto. And, and he formed an orchestra, to give a little bit life to the people whoever, you know, uh, still wanted to live. The people still have the yearning for, uh, you know, for something good in life.

DM: So you were, the whole family were together in the, in the ghetto.

AM: Yes, we were together in the, in the ghetto, you know. And, uh, and then, in 19—uh, we struggled, you know. They sent away… I had a uncle, and, uh, many relatives. They, they, half of the families were taken away. They used to grab them in the street, you know. Every day, every few days, they used to grab people, and send out with transports, which you—we never knew.

DM: When, when did it start, the grabbing people?

AM: It started already, like, in ’41.

DM: What did you think where they were taken to?

AM: We thought they were being taken to work, you know. They always wrote, “Arbeit macht frei.” Work makes you free, you know. They always talked that we’re taking to work.

DM: You believed in this.

AM: Yeah, we believed. We believed. Nobody really, in their right mind, could imagine that, uh, that they could do, uh, things like this—just take innocent people, and murder, and put to gas chambers or something. Uh, nobody could imagine.

They took everybody, you know. They took everybody to send out, who went, uh, to the, to the trains. And they took us to Auschwitz.

DM: The whole family?

AM: The whole family. They, uh, took us to Auschwitz, and then started the segregation. You know, my mother, they took her to the left, which, right away, uh, went to the, to the—yah, to the ovens, you know.

Once, we did not see her no more. And we s—and we saw the ovens and the smoke every day. You know what I mean? They told us what happened. That’s all.

My father was with me in camp. And mine, uh, two brothers, they were in a different camp. They separated us. But, uh, we were in camp, we were in Auschwitz about three days. And after this, they sent us to, uh, sent us to other camps.

DM: Where?

AM: I, I went to Kaufering, and, or Landsberg, uh… Lager 4, Lager 11—that was the two camps I was. We didn’t do any productive work in the concentration camp.

DM: What did you—

AM: Only just to kill you and to, uh, and to bother you. Either chopping wood, or cutting down wood, or carrying stones from one place to the next. I’m telling you—just plainly, just to kill you slowly. You know what I mean? That’s all.

You just cannot imagine what they did to the people, you know. You—i-it’s unimaginable. You, you lost, completely, uh, human, human feelings. You know what I mean?

DM: In what way?

AM: Y-y-y-y-you—i-i-in every way. You know what I’m talking about? It would not bother you to see a dead person. It didn’t make any impression on you. You could sit on dead people, and it would not bother you. Absolutely no, no feeling inside anymore. They made you inhuman—plain simply inhuman.

DM: You were with your father all this time?

AM: Not in one barrack. He was separated from me. I wish I would, he would have been with me in one. I don’t know if that would have helped or not, you know. But, you know, you like to be with your father together, but they separated us, just like they had separated my two brothers.

Whenever I could see my father, I tried. They didn’t allow. Whenever I could, uh, uh, walk over to him and see, to help with something, with a little food, I, I tried.

What happened—one day, I did not feel good. So I went, uh, to the doctor, you know. So what they did, they threw a cold pail of water on me. And then I did not know what happened. I woke up eight days later. I had typhus. After they threw that cold water on me, I must have fainted. And then they took me into that room—no medicine, not anything. It’s a miracle how I survived. I was so hungry—because after this sickness, you feel so hungry—that nothing bothered me. I would eat mice I would eat. That’s how hungry I was.

And then they told me I am ready to work already. When I went down, I put in my foot in the ground. I couldn’t take it out. So I tried to do my best to hide, uh, not to go to work, you know.

And then I got there, also, the dysentery. And that nobody should know from it. This is the worst thing what can be. You’re burn up. And, uh, and you can, and you want to drink. And you w—and you don’t want to live. It, it’s plainly unbelievable.

And, uh, my father—sorry to say—two months before the liberation, he died from dysentery, you know, you know.

Before the liberation, you know, they, they said, they didn’t say nothing. They just said now we have to leave the camp. But a day before, I had decided with another friend, a Hungarian fellow, I said, you know, “I don’t want to leave the camp anymore. I don’t care what happen.” And I was hiding with him, among—they were laying a few dead people in the barrack. So I was hiding amongst the dead, you know, and covered myself up.

And then, uh, and then, all of a sudden, it was, like, 5:00 or 6:00 in the morning. I heard a big commotion. And then I saw a lot of people coming, bandaged and injured, and this. So I walked out. And they told me, “Oh, you were lucky you was hiding. You could have been dead.” Because the Americans were bombing these, uh, these, uh, trains, you know. And a lot of people got killed. And a lot of people got injured.

So then they—uh, we were there for one more day. And then they said, again, we are leaving. And every barrack is gonna be burned down. So then, uh, we decided to leave. We were riding, back and forth, for three days. They used to bomb. We used to run down to the woods, with some, with the Germans, you know.

And one town, we were so hungry, so we broke open a wagon to take out the bread. So a German came over to me with a gun, and, and, and grabbed that bread out from my hands. I thought for sure he’s gonna kill me.

And then, we were going on, hungry and thirsty, for three days, you know, till we came to Dachau. We came into Dachau, and then they said to get undressed. And we were all undressed. For a few hours, we were standing, maybe till about 11:00 or 12:00 at night. And then they said, now we’re gonna go to the shower. I’ll be honest with you, honestly and sincerely, I thought that the shower is going to the gas. But thanks God, we really went to the shower.

And after the shower, they gave, uh, they gave us a blanket. And we walked for about two miles to the barracks. And when I came into the barracks, I must have weighed maybe 80 pounds. I could hardly walk already.

So there was, like, uh, two beds—you know, uh, bunk beds. I said to my friend, “You climb on top, you are stronger. I can’t walk on top.” So I laid down. For the first time, I felt clean, after so many months. I said to myself, you know, I have enough. Like this, I wanna die. I really don’t wanna live anymore. I don’t want anymore.

And then they called out, “If anybody’s hungry, to—we’re giving out the soup.” But I did not even wanna go down for the soup anymore. I had no more the strength. I had no more feeling. I, it just felt so good to be clean.

And then, around 7 o’clock in the morning, somebody came in. He said, “I have news. We are liberated.” You know, which I, I really—it did not really penetrate, you know, that we are free people.

It’s not that I forgot. You forget? You never forget. But I had constant these, uh, these dreams. And, like—

DM: You would—

AM: I would wake up, uh, thinking, you know, that I’m, I’m still in camp. My, my heart was beating. And I was thinking, oh, they are waking us up, you know, to come out, to be counted, and this. You can’t imagine the feeling. And then, when I woke up, my heart was almost jumping out of my body. That’s how I felt. And then, oh, thank God, I am in my bed, you know?

And, and these nightmares, you know, was going on for a long time. And I even went to the doctors. And I told them about it. And they said, “It’s gonna go away. It’s gonna go away.” But for so many years, I had these nightmares.

I, I even did not wanna tell the children. And I didn’t wanna tell my wife about it. But many times it happened, you know, that I felt, uch, you know. I, I don’t think, uh, uh—forget, forget about. We can never forget.

And I n—I never told the children because, if I would start, I would start right away, I would start crying. I, I did not want to give them the heaviness of my heart on them.

But no—then, now—then we started already that we, we should tell, and that people should know, and the second generation should take over, which my daughter will take. She’s so int—interested in this. And my son. So I, I feel it’s the right thing that… When are we gonna tell? When we are dead? There’s not many left of us.

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ER: Three of Abram’s four brothers survived the war. They reunited and settled in Munich while making plans for where to go next. While he waited for a visa to the United States, Abram remembered how much he had loved the violin when he heard his brother’s orchestra back in the Lodz ghetto.

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AM: I promised myself, if I survive, I’m gonna learn to play the violin. And, and that’s what I did. When I saw a German man walking with a violin, I went—

DM: Where? In Munich?

AM: In Munich. Yeah. I bought a violin. And then, the next sign I see “Teacher” I went up to. And the, and the teacher said, you know, “You’re crazy. At 22, 23 you want to start to play the violin?” I couldn’t convince him, until I told him, “Give me one hour. If you see I have no talent, forget about.” So then, after that one hour went into three hours, and he accepted me as a student. And I used to be crazy with that violin. Six, seven hours I used to practice every day. I played Bach violin concerto in six months for two violins.

DM: D-did you bring this, the same violin that you bought then?

AM: Yes. I, I, I still have the same violin over here.

DM: May you, you’ll play something for us.

AM: First, I’m gonna play for you, uh, uh, “Yerushalayim.” I feel that’s appropriate.

[Plays the violin.]

DM: Thank you very much. So…

AM: I know I’m not Itzhak Perlman. I wish I would have given away everything I own, I have, to be able to play like he does.

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ER: Abram Merczynski and his brother Izzy arrived in the United States in 1949. His two other brothers immigrated to Israel and France. Abram met his wife Miriam on a trip to Israel in 1961, and they settled in Flatbush, Brooklyn.

Abram went into the garment business with his brother and three other survivors from Poland. Their Brooklyn-based company manufactured women’s sweaters.

Abram Merczynski died on July 26, 2011, in Cedarhurst, New York. He was survived by his wife, Miriam; his children, Steven and Eleanor; and four grandchildren. Abram’s love of music inspired all his children and grandchildren to take lessons. Abram’s granddaughter Hannah founded an all-girl band at her high school. And his granddaughter Esther plays the violin. She fell in love with the instrument from the many times her grandfather played her “Happy Birthday” on his own treasured violin.

To learn more about Abram Merczynski, please visit our companion website at thosewhowerethere.org. It includes episode notes, a full transcript, and archival photographs. That’s where you can also find our previous episodes and background information on the Fortunoff Video Archive and the Museum of Jewish Heritage.

“Those Who Were There” is a production of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, which is housed at the Yale University Library’s Manuscripts and Archives Department in New Haven, Connecticut. This second season is a co-production with the Museum of Jewish Heritage—A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, New York’s contribution to the global responsibility to never forget. The museum is committed to the crucial mission of educating diverse visitors about Jewish life before, during, and after the Holocaust.

This podcast is produced by Nahanni Rous; Eric Marcus; the Fortunoff Archive’s director, Stephen Naron; and Treva Walsh, collections project manager at the Museum of Jewish Heritage.

Thank you to audio engineer Jon Gordon. Thanks, as well, to Christy Bailey-Tomecek, Joana Arruda, Noa Gutow-Ellis, and Inge De Taeye for their assistance. And thank you to Sam Kassow for historical oversight, and to photo editor Michael Green, genealogist Michael Leclerc, and our social media team, including Cristiana Peña, Nick Porter, and Sara Barber. Ljova Zhurbin composed our theme music. Thank you, as well, to Steven Merczynski for providing family photographs and background information about his father.

Special thanks to the Fortunoff family and other donors to the archive for their financial support.

I’m Eleanor Reissa. Thank you for listening.

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