Jack J Hersch - Death March Escape: The Remarkable Story of a Man Who Twice Escaped the Nazi Holocaust

DEATH MARCH ESCAPE

THE REMARKABLE STORY of a

MAN WHO TWICE ESCAPED

THE NAZI HOLOCAUST

JACK J. HERSCH

Frontline Books, London

First published in Great Britain in 2018 by

FRONTLINE BOOKS

An imprint of

Pen & Sword Books Ltd

Yorkshire - Philadelphia

Copyright Jack J. Hersch

ISBN 978 1 52674 022 9

eISBN 978 1 52674 023 6

Mobi ISBN 978 1 52674 024 3

The right of Jack J. Hersch to be identified as

Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance

with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is

available from the British Library

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The photo of my father that I saw on the KZ Mauthausen website in 2007. (Author)

My father with his brother, Villi, in the rear storage area of their fathers small soap factory in Dej, 1938. (Author)

My father with his sister, Rosie, in an undated photo inside their home. (Author)

My father, second from left, in an undated photo. He is assembled with his Hungarian Labor Service battalion. (Author)

My father and two of his friends in 1942 or 1943, when he was around seventeen. (Author)

My mother. The picture is dated July 30, 1951. (Author)

My mother in 1944, when she was fourteen, with her younger sister, Renee, and their uncle, David Grossman, a medic with the 16th Regiment of the US Armys 1st Division. (Author)

Ignaz Friedmann, in his World War I Austro-Hungarian Army uniform. (Mauthausen Memorial)

Barbara Friedmann, in an undated image.

My fathers Prisoner Personnel Card. (Author)

The photo my fathers siblings mailed him in 1946, during his recuperation in the Kohlbruck Klinik. (Author)

My father among unidentified fellow patients all survivors in the Kohlbruck Klinik in 1945. (Author)

My father in a hospital bed in the Kohlbruck Klinik in Passau, in 1946.

This portrait in camp uniform was taken in 1945, while my father was recuperating in the Kohlbruck Klinik. (Author)

My father on an Israeli beach in an undated photo. (Author)

This is the evening in 1965 when my parents celebrated their purchase of a small stake in a senior citizen home. In exactly twenty years my father had gone from Hitlers Nightmare to the American Dream. (Author)

KZ Mauthausens south wall today. (Author)

Looking through KZ Mauthausens main gate to the Appellplatz (assembly area) as it appears today. (Author)

Looking west into KZ Gusen I, showing the eastern camp wall, and the Appellplatz .

An Allied aerial reconnaissance photograph of KZ Gusen I and Gusen II, taken in 1945.

The stone crusher complex in the Kastenhof quarry.

All that remains today of the stone crusher complex. (Author)

The front of the Jourhaus as it looked during the war. (Bundesarchiv, Bild 192-171/CC-BY-SA 3.0)

The front of the Jourhaus as it looked the day I knocked on the front door. (Author)

A mine wagon of the sort my father loaded and unloaded while working in KZ Gusens Kastenhof granite quarry. (Author)

The intersection where my father escaped the first time, as it appears today. (Author)

The corner building of the Enns town square that housed the Gendarmerie outpost in April 1945. (Author)

The Friedmann home seen from Kristein Strasse . (Author)

The barn my father would have encountered if he had turned left at the Y-intersection after leaving the Friedmann house. (Author)

The exact location of my fathers second escape, as it appeared when I visited. (Author)

The 44 track my father had taken on Saturday night, April 21, 1945, when he got lost. (Author)

This photo was taken ten feet to the right of the photograph above, at the edge of farm fields. The track is visible, pointing back towards the Y-intersection. (Author)

A Google Earth view of Enns, Austria, showing the B1 death march route, and the trees before (east) and after (west) the sugar factory. (Courtesy of Google Earth)

A Google Earth close-up of the Ennser StrasseSteyrer Strasse intersection, the location of my fathers first escape. (Courtesy of Google Earth)

A Google Earth close-up of the Friedmann home and the area where my father got lost. (Courtesy of Google Earth)

General George S. Pattons Third Army route through Europe, beginning August 1, 1944.

One day a few years ago, while at my job working for the Mauthausen Memorial Archives, I received an email from the USA: On your website, in the section death marches, I came across a photograph of my late father in his teens. Can you tell me how your institution came into possession of this photograph?

Following up, I learned the photo was part of a manuscript that had been completed in the 1970s by a local historian, Peter Kammersttter. Kammersttter had conducted interviews with people who lived along the route of the death marches from the Mauthausen Concentration Camp to one of its sub-camps, Gunskirchen, and who still remembered those events of April 1945. One of these people had given Kammersttter a photograph of a young man who had escaped from the march and had been hidden in their house until the end of the war. The young man in the photograph was David Hersch. The sender of the email was his son Jack.

Researching the answer to the question posed in Jacks email, I had the distinct sensation something important was happening; that, like a puzzle, the pieces of a fragmented history were about to be put back together, resulting in something particularly significant. Some days later, I had Jack Hersch on the phone. From two completely different spots in the world thousands of miles apart, two people who apparently had almost nothing in common were talking to each other. Jack, a US citizen, is the son of a Jewish survivor of Mauthausen, a man born in Transylvania, formerly part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. I, an Austrian, am a descendant of a society that bears responsibility for what Jacks father had to endure. Our origins could hardly be more divergent. But there was one thing we did share: a common history of which both of us only knew tiny pieces, stemming from the stories and investigations of others; a history which we both hadnt experienced ourselves but which, to a large extent, was certainly ours.

Jack continued digging deeper into his fathers history. Now, years later, I have read the complete results of his research in the pages of Death March Escape . This book has given me insight into the thoughts and emotions of the author and I realize that my first, distinct sensation back then was right: the story told in these pages is indeed of enormous importance for Jack, for myself, and especially for the world we live in.