Henryk Nussbaum

This is my brother Henryk Nussbaum, photographed in Cracow in 1939. This is the last picture of him I have. It was probably taken for his school leaving certificate.

A few photographs survived because my father, Juda Nussbaum, had given them to a lady called Wladzia. Father had told me where he was leaving what - I even had it written down on a piece of paper, but no-one would give me anything back. Wladzia alone, the poorest of all of them, she really was very poor, she alone gave me everything back. I mean the photographs, Mom's silver powder box, which I have to this day, and a ring. Nothing particularly valuable, but nostalgic.

My brother Henryk passed his secondary school exam in 1939, at the Hebrew Gymnasium on Podbrzezie Street. And he was supposed to go to England to study shipbuilding, I remember that. He was very gifted and Father managed to get him a place there. But because there was talk of war, my parents didn't let him go, because we had to stay together. My brother passed his secondary school exam in May and in September the war broke out.

In Plaszow concentration camp I was in one barrack, and my father and brother in a different one, and I lost touch with them and didn't know where they were. I didn't know anything. When they had taken them, where they had taken them. Nothing, nothing at all. Where my father and brother perished there's no knowing. In the camps. But I was told, I mean from what I found out through the Red Cross and people who had come back, that they both died almost at the end of the war, in 1945. But whether that's true, is hard to say, because there are no witnesses. In any case they didn't come back.