Shoa survivors Edward Mosberg, his wife, Cecile, and their daughter Beatrice (with camera) stand at the front of crowd gathered March 16 in his birthplace, Cracow, for ceremonies marking the 65th anniversary of the liquidation of the Polish city’s ghetto. Photo courtesy Edward Mosberg
April 03, 2008
As his hometown of Cracow observed the 65th anniversary of its ghetto’s liquidation at the hands of the Nazis, Edward Mosberg was determined to share his first-person memories of those moments.
Speaking from the podium March 16 in the Polish city’s council chambers, the real estate developer who now lives in Union described the horrors he witnessed as a young man on March 13, 1943.
“They killed a lot of people,” he said in his remarks. “When a mother was holding a small child, they ripped that child from her arms, and they smashed its head against the wall. When they saw somebody was carrying a child in a knapsack, they shot into the knapsack. I saw dead bodies laying all over the streets and in the houses.”
Two weeks later, at the Whippany offices of NJ Jewish News, he pointed to photographs he had taken of the rally in the Cracow plaza where the ghetto once stood.
Mosberg attended the anniversary events with his wife, Cecile, who also endured life in Cracow under the Nazis, and their daughter, Beatrice.
The only Americans on the trip, they joined with a handful of survivors from England, Canada, and Israel. The Jews of several generations composed a small part of the crowd that gathered at the ghetto site, then walked to Plaszow, a concentration camp a few kilometers outside of town.
“I saw some people I knew, but not too many Jewish people were in the march,” Mosberg said.
He believes the majority of the 1,000 people at the gathering were Poles. “Many of them didn’t know that things like this existed,” he said.
For nearly two decades, Mosberg has returned to his birthplace each year. It is a site haunted by memories of the liquidation, and stories that he relates in a voice that still quivers.
“They brought in sick people here and took away from them crutches,” he recalled. “They said, ‘Listen, if you can run across the square you will be safe.’ So people on their knees, on their hands, they were trying to move, and before they got to the end they were shot. It was like a game they played.”
Later, Mosberg worked in the office of the commander of Plaszow. From there, he witnessed the murder of family members.
“I saw when he was killing them, hanging them. The mother of my wife was given a benzene injection. This is how they killed her. My wife saw her mother pulled by her leg and then put on fire.”
Survivor Edward Mosberg tells the Cracow City Council about the atrocities he witnessed in the Jewish ghetto and nearby Plaszow concentration camp. Photo courtesy Edward Mosberg
Mosberg was transferred from Plaszow to the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, where he was nearly beaten to death by a guard. He endured, and was liberated in early May 1945.
For all he witnessed, Mosberg said, he believes attitudes in his country of birth have changed since his childhood.
“I don’t see anti-Semitism in Poland. Before the war, yes. They were a different generation of people. You see, the old people die out. The new people — some of them don’t know who is a Jew even,” he said.
He is optimistic about Cracow’s small Jewish community.
“It is mostly older and dying out,” he said. “But there are some younger people. They are finding out that their father or their mother was Jewish. They are trying to come back to the Judaism.”
Mosberg is also working to recapture a part of their common past.
“As long as I live and I can walk and talk, I will be there to talk. Because if I don’t tell, who will?” he said. “I don’t go in there to talk for you. I talk for the people who were killed. This is my obligation.”
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