Bialystok to Birkenau

Book excerpt: Memoirs of Mielnicki, who was born in Wasilków, near Białystok, in 1927. Pp. 92-205 recount his experiences in the Holocaust. Describes the German occupation in June 1941, followed by a pogrom carried out by the local population. Mielnicki, with his parents, sister, and brother, was interned in the ghettos of Białystok and Pruzany. In December 1942 the family was deported to Auschwitz, where Mielnicki's parents were killed and he was separated from his siblings. In 1944 he was sent to the Buna factory, where he befriended Russian POWs who helped him adopt a Russian non-Jewish identity. In early 1945 he was transferred to Mittelbau-Dora and then to Bergen-Belsen, where he was liberated. He returned to Białystok, then emigrated to France and later to Canada. He was reunited with his sister shortly after the war, but with his brother, who was in the USSR, only 47 years later. In 1991 he testified at the German war crimes trial of Heinrich Kuhnemann, an SS-officer at Auschwitz who had beaten Mielnicki's father and sent him to his death, but Kuhnemann was not convicted.