They didn’t want to know about the concentration camps
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Ezra Perl was born on September 18, 1919, in the village Slatinské Doly in Carpathian Ruthenia in a family of a Jewish entrepreneur. He and his 14 siblings, like most of the other Jewish children in the village, went to a Czech elementary school. Later he went to study at the school of electrical engineering to Brno. Already as a student he got involved in the social-democratic youth movement and in the physical training union Ha Koah. After the occupation of Czechoslovakia, he first worked in Prague, from where he was transported to Theresienstadt. There he secretly married Karolína Poláchová. From Theresienstadt he continued to the concentration camp Auschwitz where he worked in the “Sonderkommando” (a “special commando” was a group of camp inmates forced to do the work in and around the gas chambers). Then he was on the “death march” to Sachsenhausen and was assigned to a “bombsucherkomando”. By the end of the war he survived a second death march to the north of Germany. There he was liberated. After the war he reunited with his wife and worked for the railways. He submitted eighteen applications for emigration to Israel. In 1965 he was finally permitted to emigrate to Israel with all of his family. He lives in Tel Aviv.”
