Today We Remember. We Never Forget. Never Again.
Gershon Press
Today is an important anniversary; it was seventy years ago on this day, 4/29/15, that the Dachau Concentration Camp was liberated.
The photo above is of Gershon Press, who you might call a cousin. The photo was taken after the war in a DP, Displaced Persons’ Camp; he is still wearing part of the camp uniform.
Taken from the photo archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Gershon Press poses after the war in his concentration camp uniform.
Shirley Press is the daughter of Gershon Press. Gershon Press was born in 1921 (though official documents listed his birth date as June 14, 1918) in Kovno (Kaunas), Lithuania and grew up in Sveksna. He was the son of Beines and Sonja (nee Cohn, b. @1896), and he had three younger brothers, Berl (b. 1926) and Meyer and Welrel, who were twins (b. @ 1931-35).
Beines had been drafted into the Russian army and fought in World War I. He died of natural causes before the Holocaust. In 1940 the Soviet Union incorporated Lithuania and the following year, in June 1941, Germany invaded and occupied the country. They began the mass murder of Jews there almost immediately. At the time, Gershon was living in Kovno and working shearing the skin off of cattle and curing it into shoe leather. His mother and brothers remained in Sveksna.
On the eve of Rosh Hashanah, the Germans rounded them up together with all the Jews of Sveksna and shot them into a large ditch in Inkakliai. Gershon Press’ mother and three younger brothers were captured and killed with machine guns on the eve of Rosh Hashanah 1941 as part of the Nazi, large scale immediate slaughter of Jews.
On August 15th, 1941, the Nazis established a ghetto in Kovno. Gershon Press remained there until its liquidation three years later. On July 29th, 1944, he was transferred to Dachau and assigned the number 84847. After his liberation from Dachau by the United States army on April 29th, 1945, he stayed in the Feldafing and Landsberg displaced persons camp and eventually immigrated to the United States.
Remember those who are gone. Remember those who survived. Remember.
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that is so powerful Sue, thanks for this post.
When I was in London last year there was a huge exhibition (10 rooms in all, took 2 hours to view it all) on Dachau and Auschwitz. Room after room of videos and displays of story tellers, official documents, and personal items of jewelry and clothing to diaries and other more personal items. The videos were chilling and provided not only a grim reminder of the devastating and treacherous consequences of absolute power, but also of man’s inhumanity to man. It was heartening to see the people queued in the street to view this exhibition – all of whom will take with them, the terrifying and inhuman images they had just viewed, thus helping to keep our outrage alive. Never again, never forget.
Your personal connection to this story makes it even harder to remember, but impossible to forget.
The world should NEVER foget lest it happen again.
Wonderful story how your second cousin (?) survived. May we never ever ever forget!
Thanks so much for writing about my father. It means a lot to me. Never again. Never forget.