Eugene Black: Holocaust Survivor

After the holocaust ended, unfortunately many people died not being able to tell their story, but everyone should be thankful for the people that survived that were able to tell the world about what they experienced during that dreadful time in there life. Many people that survived the holocaust were willing to tell their story and share their experiences with the world for everyone to know what it really was like even if it was hard for them to go back and think about all the terrible things they had to go through. One holocaust survivor among many was a man named Eugene Black and he was born as Jeno Schwartz in 1928 in Munkacs, Czechoslovakia. Unfortunately the area where Eugene and his family lived was given back to Hungary in November of

On the 14th of May, Eugene was coming home from school when he noticed only 200 yards away from his home, a German military truck outside his house and it had his father and two sisters on it while an SS man hit his mother across her face and then shoved onto the truck. Eugene was able to go into his own house and was forced onto the truck with his family and other Jewish people that were living in the nearby ghetto. Eugene and his family were sent to Auschwitz Birkenau but they all eventually became separated with his mother and sisters going together, his father somewhere else and Eugene was left all alone hoping that one day he would be able to reunite with his family after all of this came to an end. In the story Eugene’s experience is explained in third person and they said, “ Eugene remained at Auschwitz Birkenau for around ten days before being selected for slave labour. He was sent by train to the Little Camp at Buchenwald and then on to Dora Mittelbau in the Harz mountains, where the Nazis used slave labourers to manufacture V1 and V2 rockets

Typhus was rife and sanitation non-existent”. Finally on April 15th, Eugene was liberated by the British army. The euphoria of liberation eventually worn off and Eugene came to realize that he had lost all of his family except for his older brother that was in the Czech army. Eugene was only 17 years old and he was homeless and stateless. For a little, he worked in Sennelager for the British army as an interpreter where he met Annie who became his future wife. After marrying Annie and having the arrival of his four children, Eugene was finally able to get his future back. He and his family moved to England in 1949 and he began to work as a warehouse man for Marks and Spencer. He worked his way up to a manager position by the time he retired. One thing that Eugene had a lot of sorrow but also found comfort in hearing about what happened to his sisters. In his story he explains he was able to find out this news: “In common with many survivors, Eugene is still piecing together his family's story. In 2009 he discovered that his two sisters did not die in the gas chambers of Auschwitz as he had believed for over 60 years. Eugene and Lilian went to examine the International Tracing Service archive at Bad Arolsen in