Eugene Black Character Traits

Eugene Black was a very brave soul, working his way through and surviving the holocaust. Eugene was born Jeno Schwartz, in Munkacs, Czechoslovakia. During his childhood, he had a very happy life with his mother and sisters. Although his mother came from an orthodox Jewish family, religion played little part into Eugene’s life. On May 14th, while Eugene was walking home from school, the next years of his life were changed for the worst. 200 yards from home, Eugene saw an S.S. man hit his mother across the face and shove her into a lorry with the rest of his family and his two sisters. Then, Eugene was forced onto the lorry, along with other Jewish people/families from the ghetto. After being transported to Auschwitz, Birkenau, Eugene was separated from his family, starting with

When he arrived, he was completely shaved, showered, and given the number 55546. After ten days at Auschwitz, Eugene was selected for slave labour and sent to the Little Camp at Buchenwald, then to Dora Mittelbau in the Harz Mountains. At Dora Mittelbau, Nazis used slave labourers to make V1 and V2 rockets underground, but Eugene’s job was to load small trucks with rocks dug out from tunnels for 12 to 14 hours at a time without rest and on starvation rations. Unfortunately, after five months, Eugene became very weak and caught pneumonia, his life was then saved by an unknown German doctor. In mid March 1945 Eugene was sent to Bergen Belsen, people were lying all over the place, he described it as a ‘hellhole’. On April 15th, the British army finally liberated Eugene’s camp and he was freed. After the excitement of liberation had gone away, Eugene discovered that he had lost his whole family, except for one older brother who had been an officer in the Czech army. For quite awhile, Eugene was homeless and worked as an interpreter for the British army in Sennelager. Things seemed to never get better for Eugene, that was until he met his future wife, Annie, who he