Izak Goldfinger

Izak Goldfinger was born in Tropie in 1925. His parents had a big farm in the village. In the beginning of the German occupation, he was working at a road building site. However, as time went by and the reprisals against Jewish people got worse, the family became poorer and poorer. In 1941, the whole Goldfinger family was resettled to the Nowy Sącz Ghetto. Izak was chosen for forced labour in the Lipie camp. Every day, he was brought there from the ghetto. Later on, he was transferred to the Rożnów labour camp. There, he was not only forced to work very hard, but also often beaten by the merciless camp guards. This inhuman treatment and heavy labour forced him to escape from the camp and go back to his parents in the Nowy Sącz Ghetto. However, as a fugitive, Izak was searched by the police and eventually captured and sent to the Muszyna labour camp. There, his job was to impregnate ready-cut pieces of wood. He planned to escape on New Year’s Eve 1942/1943, but the camp was closed even before that date and all the inmates were taken to the Tarnów Ghetto. From there, Izak was transferred to the Szebnie labour camp near Jasło in the spring of 1943. He recalled that he had to live in unheated horse barracks there. The conditions in the camp were inhuman: the inmates suffered hunger, the sanitary conditions were miserable and the guards were violent towards the inmates, punishing them physically for almost everything. Izak’s job was to clean the river Jasiołka.
One of the most dramatic days Izak could recall was the day when the camp was liquidated, the 4th November 1943. On that day, a selection was held. After the roll call, 28,000 naked people were forced into train carriages, 100 inmates per carriage. At 1 a.m., they set off to an unknown destination, with no water or food whatsoever. The 24-hour journey felt like an eternity.
On 5th November, early in the morning, they arrived at their destination, which turned out to be the concentration and death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau. During the selection, Izak stood face to face with a man in a white gown who turned out to be Josef Mengele. Izak was classified as “capable of work.” His head was shaved and the number 161154 was tattooed on his left forearm. “This means life. You mustn’t die here,” said the inmate who did the tattoo. Izak needed to learn all the camp rules and regulations, which encompassed almost everything possible, like how to walk or when to take his cap off. In Auschwitz, Izak met a friend from Muszyna who organised some additional food for him. His friend also got him a job in the camp which consisted of bringing dead bodies to the crematory. This experience left deep scars in Izak’s psyche.

On 16th January 1945, at 4 a.m., the evacuation of the camp started. Izak left Auschwitz with a death march and arrived at the Mauthausen camp, where he got another prisoner number: 125374. The nightmare started all over again. Izak was forced to carry huge pieces of granite up the stairs – 186 stairs, to be more precise. Later on, he was transferred to the Gusen II camp where he was digging tunnels. Because of the hunger and terrible sanitary conditions, he contracted typhus and dysentery there. As the front line approached, all the dead and dying inmates were buried. On his 20th birthday, Izak lay in a mass grave, unconscious for most of the time. When he finally woke up, he was at a hospital. A friend had recognized him among the dead bodies shortly after liberation. “It was a miracle,” Izak would always say.

In 1947, Izak left for Palestine. He did not eradicate his camp number, although he had the possibility to do so. For the rest of his life, he kept confronting his past. He shared his story with young people, held lectures and readings. He also often visited Tropie and his beloved Nowy Sącz. Izak Goldfinger died on 3rd February 2014 in Tel Aviv.

AUTHOR: Łukasz Połomski, Ph.D., Sądecki Sztetl

Izaak Goldfinger;
still from the movie Chai-Życie

Dehumanization

This is the process of dehumanization, at which the humanity of the representatives of a given group is negated and they are compared to animals, insects, or diseases. Dehumanization helps to overcome the natural repulsion and resistance of one person to murder another. The dominant group receives a propaganda message that the “others” are inferior, not human, and therefore should not function in society. Individuals belonging to the victim group are stripped of their identity, dignity, and even their names, which were replaced with numbers during the Holocaust.

Dehumanization can be countered by condemning hate speech, banning hateful propaganda and the activities of those responsible, and immediately punishing perpetrators of hate crimes and other atrocities.

How does this person’s story illustrate response to the particular stage of genocide in Dr. Stanton’s theory?

The story of Izak Goldfinger shows to which extent the Nazis tried to deprive the camp inmates of their dignity and humanity. The inhuman conditions, the severe hunger, the lack of sanitary facilities, the violence and the physical punishments were supposed to “break” the victims – not only physically, but also mentally. Dehumanisation was also achieved by not respecting dead bodies, desecrating them and burying them in anonymous mass graves. Yet, Izak survived all these tragic events and although they definitely left their mark on him, he still maintained his will to live. He did not succumb to the process of dehumanisation, although he was constantly reminded of it by the tattoo on his left forearm.