Holocaust Testimony
by Shirley
His story is told by his wife Shirley. His story was first printed in the Argus:- a local newspaper based in Brighton and Hove in East Sussex…
To go to the Argus website please click here
‘My husband grew up in a split second’
As a young teenager, Alfred (Abram) Huberman thought his journey at the hands of the Nazis was a big adventure. He had already suffered at the hands of the Germans when his hometown of Pulawy in eastern Poland was bombed and his house destroyed in September 1939. Yet, despite this and the killings of his uncle and older sister in Warsaw some 80 miles away, he was still a boy at heart. The Germans rounded up all the Jews and separated the men from the women. Mr Huberman lost his family and, before being loaded on to a lorry, had to help bury the body of a dead Jew.
“One of the men onboard the lorry bribed the German guard to let him jump off. But when he did, the guard shot him,” said Shirley Huberman, Alfred’s wife. “That’s when Alfred grew up,” she added, “That’s when he knew it was real and not an adventure anymore.” What followed for Alfred was a series of gruelling terms at concentration camps. On entering his first camp, Skarzysko Kamienna in Poland, in 1942, Alfred had to drill holes in shells to insert detonators. The job gave him tuberculosis and the yellow TNT powder in the shells ate into his skin. From her home near Old Shoreham Road in Hove, Shirley told The Argus: “You were nothing, you were worthless, you weren’t human. “The survival rate in the camps was just six weeks but he lasted 18 months. “He said it was out of sheer luck.”
His journey continued to Czestochowa and then to Buchenwald. When he first went into Buchenwald his captors plunged him in a vat of disinfectant, with the Germans using sticks to push heads under the surface. His ordeal was then extended to Remsdorf, a camp that was not finished, meaning his first night was spent sleeping in a field in the snow. Once, when Alfred had an abscess in his tooth, he had to pass it off as toothache after a guard questioned his swollen face. Shirley said: “When you were sent out to work you couldn’t come back empty-handed. You either had to carry back a dead body or some bricks. And there was no reason, it was just cruelty.”
Towards the end of the war Alfred was taken from a camp and put on a train. Shirley said: “The train was bombed and they were so pleased. I mean, they were frightened but they knew it was the Allies.” The prisoners were then taken on a death march where those who could not keep up were shot and pushed into a ditch. They marched through the Sudetenland, Hitler’s annexed part of Czechoslovakia. Alfred’s journey ended at the Theresienstadt camp, where he was liberated by the Russians. On liberation day he looked out of the window and saw a Russian tank. The driver waved at him and said hello. Shirley said: “He said it was the most wonderful feeling when the Russians came into the camp.
“The first thing he did was go for a walk around the town. He wanted to feel freedom.” He was made to wait, though. His liberation came on the last day of the war, May 8, 1945, some three-and- a-half months after Auschwitz was captured. Shirley said: “The Nazis kept moving the prisoners. They didn’t want the Allies to know what they were up to.” Indeed, when the Russians turned up in the Theresienstadt camp, they opened a cupboard and a pile of dead bodies fell out. Shirley said: “Normal people like us couldn’t imagine why people would want to do that. “He was there and, living through it, even he couldn’t understand.
“He said if one guard was watching them he was nice to them, but if there was more than one…”What worked in Alfred’s favour was his age. He did not know how old he was. Being about 13, he was able to pass himself off as old enough to work for the Germans, and avoid being sent to the gas chambers.
Before the war Alfred had more than 50 relatives. None survived except his sister, who somehow live through Auschwitz.
After the war, the British pledged to accommodate 1,000 survivors. Following a spell in the North of England Alfred, moved to Hove in 1946. Shirley met him at a Jewish youth club in Hove in 1953 when she was 19. They married and had three children together.
Alfred worked as a tailor in Hanningtons in North Street until the shop closed in 2001. He died in 2011, aged about 83. Shirley, 80, said: “He had all these scars from the things that happened but he was the kindest person you could know. He wasn’t bitter. “He said if you are bitter it eats you up. You would imagine he had all sorts of hang-ups but he didn’t. “He didn’t want to talk about it but he thought he should do because he wanted the world to know what was going on. “A lot of people didn’t know anything about it and he was pleased to tell it. “Of course, he never made it as bad as it obviously was, because it was hell.”