John (Szaja) Chaskiel was born in Wielun, Poland in 1929. He was the fifth of seven children. His father, Sandel, owned a clothing factory, and his mother, Rajzla, kept a traditional and kosher home.
John went to a public school within the town. He remembers playing with both Jewish and Polish children growing up.
John and his family in Wielun, Poland in 1935.
On 1 September 1939, Wielun was heavily bombed by the German Air Force. John’s family fled to the countryside. In Piotrkow, a city about 200km away, they saw German soldiers, and realised they could not run away. As the bombings had stopped, they returned home.
“Our place was not bombed. We went back into our apartment, and Dad started working again. Soon, he tailored for the Germans. The Gestapo wanted uniforms; they brought the material and paid with cigarettes. They treated Dad well.”
After a few weeks John and seven other Jewish boys in his class at school were told to leave. John’s father began to educate the children himself.
John Szaja Chaskiel, 15 years old. 1945.
In 1941 a German soldier died in an accident in Wielun. The Germans accused the Jews of murder and ordered the Jewish Council to select ten people to hang, including John’s great uncle.
A Jewish policeman and an SS officer came to John’s house and ordered John’s father to hang the Jews, which he refused. The SS officer hit him with his gun. “Why can’t you do it?” the German asked, and John’s father answered, “Because I cannot hang my own uncle.” When John’s father continued to refuse, the SS officer shot him in the head.
This happened in front of Rajzla, 12-year-old John and two of his younger siblings. John took his father to the cemetery and dug a grave in the frozen soil. After they had buried their father, they came home and cried. Their mother stayed strong and told them that they had to get on with life.
John was caught in a round-up one day and transported to a labour camp in Poznan where he had to build roads. It was extremely hard work and there was never enough food.
One day a German foreman asked John to buy him some chocolate and cigarettes at the train station. While he was there he saw a train loaded with piles of wood leaving the station. In a split second, he made a dash and jumped on the train.
The train stopped in Kalisz, a town in central Poland. John walked around, not knowing what to do. Eventually, he knocked on a church door and begged the priest for help. The priest took him in.
Around six months later, in April 1943, another priest arrived. John overheard the new priest saying to the host, “I believe you are keeping Jewish people here. This is dangerous. If you are caught you will be shot.” John was afraid the priest might denounce him. At 3:00 the next morning he took a rucksack, stole a pushbike and left.
John went back to his hometown, but found his house empty. The neighbours were horrified to see him. When John asked whether he could stay with them, they turned him down.
The neighbours had told him that his mother had been sent to Lodz, so he decided to go there.
Whilst walking around Lodz, John could not see any Jews. Eventually he dared to ask a Pole where all the Jews were. The Pole directed him to the ghetto, where he needed to convince one of the guards that he was Jewish, just to be let in.
As soon as he was in the ghetto and heard his language, he felt relieved. He was soon reunited with his sister Fella. He stayed with her and found a job sweeping the square where the food was delivered. John worked there for about six months until mid-1944 when the Germans started to evacuate the ghetto. “My foreman told me to go with my sister into hiding. I understood that this ‘evacuation to the east’ was all Nazi propaganda, but my sister believed it and so we went on the transport.”
John and Fella were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. On arrival, they were separated. A prisoner started to talk to John, “I know you. I went to school with your brother Abram. I’ll help you. When asked how old you are, say 17.” John, 15 at the time, said he was 17, and survived the selection. John was tattooed with the number B7584 on his arm.
After a few weeks in the camp, John ended up in the farm building of Auschwitz. He became the essenskutscher, the person to deliver milk in the morning for the SS officers, and the bread and soup for the prisoners in the camp. John had a cart and two horses to deliver the food. He slept with the horses, had warm civilian clothes and had enough to eat.
At the end of 1944 the Russians were approaching from the east, and John was sent on a death march away from the camp. They walked for five or six days, and many people died on the way. In Breslau, they were pushed onto open coal trains. When the train finally arrived at Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany, more than half of the people on the transport had died.
John was put into Block 66, the children’s block, with over 800 Jewish boys. They had to work in nearby Weimar, clearing the rubble caused by the American bombs that had fallen on the town. The bomb attacks gave them some hope that the end of the war was near.
01 — John and other Buchenwald survivors in front of ship to Australia, 1948. 02 — John and other Buchenwald survivors travelling to Australia, 1948.
A few days before the Americans liberated the camp, all Jews were led into the forest and shot. The block elder of John’s barrack, a Czech political prisoner, reported to the camp leader that all boys in his barrack were Polish. It saved the lives of the boys. On 11 April 1945, the American tanks rolled into the camp. “I did not believe we were free until a Jewish chaplain started talking to us in Yiddish.”
At the end of May, John was taken to Zurich where doctors diagnosed him with tuberculosis. He went into hospital and a sanatorium where he stayed for five months.
In May 1946 the Red Cross informed him that his oldest brother Mendel and his sister Fella had survived. Fella was living in Sweden. John travelled to Gothenburg, just in time to celebrate Fella’s wedding to a Swedish man. While Fella and her husband went to America, John went back to Switzerland and started to learn a trade – he wanted to become a motor mechanic. After receiving a telegram from an uncle who had survived the war in France, John went to live in Paris.
In Paris, John caught up with some of the other boys who had been in Buchenwald. They would later be collectively known as the “Buchenwald Boys”. Eventually, John and 45 of the boys decided to move to Australia, following a conversation with Mina Fink, an ambassador from the Australian Jewish Welfare and Relief Society.
In Australia, many of the Buchenwald Boys went to different cities, but eventually most of them came together in Melbourne. After 18 months in Australia, John met Rosie, an Australian Jewish girl of Polish descent. They married, and later had two children.
Since 1955 the Buchenwald boys have organised an annual ball to celebrate the anniversary of their liberation. In 2006 SBS made a documentary about them called The Buchenwald Ball.
During the 1990s John started to work as a volunteer guide at the Melbourne Holocaust Museum (previously, Jewish Holocaust Centre). For the visitors to the museum, he wants to be a witness that the Holocaust really happened. He never forgets to tell them, “Don’t hate.”
