Ed Mosberg survived the standing cells in the Nazi concentration camps
He was a 13-year-old kid who survived the camp AND the cells. He was shipped off to the Plaszow camp in Poland. He and his family were shipped off to these camps, but since he was the male of the group he was sent to a standing cell. He remembered his mother had her child in her hand and the Nazis killed the baby. From his own words he said “They took the infant out of the mother’s hand and smashed it against walls and it was killed instantly,” Mosberg recalled. He was horrified by this. Another thing he had witnessed was the Nazis saying to the elderly, “Ditch your aid and get to the other side and we will let you free”. He thought they were lucky, but then he witnessed them being shot. He was only “released” from his standing cell in 1944 when his Poland camp fell. He was then moved to a camp in Austria in 1944 where he moved rocks up stairs. When the liberation came he was VERY lucky.
The day before liberation, SS officers told Mosberg and others at Mauthausen, “The Americans are coming and we want to save you.” Scores of them were led to caves booby-trapped with dynamite — which failed to go off. His sisters were not so lucky. That same day, the two were among some 7,000 women who were lined up on a Baltic beach and shot dead. Mosberg was so beaten down that when he was free to go, “I didn’t want to leave — I didn’t know where to go,” he said.
To this day he still wears his uniform from the concentration camp. He doesn’t want ANYBODY to forget the Holocaust as it is slipping into history. He says, “As long as I live I have to go and talk about this so the Holocaust will never be forgotten.”
After he was released, he was 19 years old. He was battling tuberculosis and had 3 jobs in Italy. He was able to get an education up to 7th grade and get enough money to move to New York with his wife! He (later) returned to the site of the Mauthausen camp, wearing his prisoner uniform and carrying a hard rubber whip just like the one the Nazis used to beat him. He bought the paraphernalia from collectors over the years, paying $50 for the hat and a couple hundred dollars for the jacket, to which he added his number. His wife says, “He sees it as his life mission to keep that memory alive.” To this day, he lives in New York which of 500,000 Jews in the camps only 100,000 live now. Continue reading
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