Jonah Samuel Benson's Obituary
Jonah Samuel Benson, 85, of Pembroke Pines passed away August 20, 2014.Jonah Benson grew up in Vilnius, now the capital of Lithuania, but then its status was much disputed. Known as Wilno in Polish, Vilna in Russian and Vilne in Yiddish, the city was part of Poland between the two world wars. Under the terms of the German-Soviet Pact, which divided Poland, Russian forces occupied the city in late September 1939. On June 22, 1941, Germany attacked the Soviet Union. Two days later the German army occupied Vilnius.Two months later, they took us to the ghetto in Wilno. I was very sick at this time and I thought I couldn't make it, because it was a five-mile walk from where I lived to the ghetto.
It was impossible -- people living on top of people. The first big raid on the ghetto was on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, Yom Kippur. The Germans knew we were going to get together to pray that night. They took away 25 of my family that night. They took them a couple of miles away from the city and shot them all. They used to do that frequently. They'd just snatch you off the street.
They were taking me to the railroad tracks for hard labor. You didn't get any pay, just a piece of bread. Then they squeezed us into ghetto number two. They made our lives even more horrifying through these frequent selections, squeezing more and more into a smaller and smaller space. Some people committed suicide. This is the point [when] they just liquidated more and more people. My brother saw with his own eyes how they killed my father. I wasn't with them at that time. They killed my father right in front of him during a march.
It's hard to talk about. Eventually they took us to Estonia. Then to camps in Germany. Hard labor. It was almost impossible. We saw, every day, people going to the ovens to be burned.
In 1945, the Russians kept driving to the west and somehow or other, we got liberated. I didn't know where my brother was. I came back to Wilno. I went to my neighbor's house and knocked on his door. He looked at me like I was some kind of ghost. He didn't expect me to live. So I said, "Can I come in, talk a little while, maybe have a cup of coffee?" He said, "You can't come in." I looked past him into his apartment, and saw all of our furniture, all of my family's furniture there in his apartment.
Wherever I went, my neighbors didn't want to look at me. Like I was a cursed person. But I tried to trace my brother. I kept seeing ladies with shaved heads, lots of them. And I asked every one of them if they had seen my brother. One lady told me that my mother and sister had the typhus and they were burned in the crematoria. But I couldn't get a trace on my brother.
Finally, I went to Lodz. The Jewish community there had a little meeting place and there, somehow or other, I found out that my brother was alive. So I asked, "Where is he?" They said, "We don't have to disclose where he is. But we'll give you a general answer: He is in Germany." So before I did anything else, I decided to go and meet him.
When the Germans came into Wilno, life turned right away to horror. Everyday they had different decrees. We had to put on signs that we were Jewish. We couldn't walk on the sidewalks because we were Jewish. Anybody who wanted to spit on you could, because they knew that you were Jewish because you had the star on you.I finally got to Germany, and they told me he was in a hospital. He was in the hospital because in the concentration camp his leg was in bad shape. And there were no doctors in the camps, of course. They'd rather burn you than save you. When he finally was liberated, the doctors he found told him it had to be amputated. But my brother was very strong-minded -- he said he'd rather die first. Finally, though, we found a surgeon who would save his leg. My brother still has this leg to this day.(SunSentinel 2005)
Jonah is survived by his beloved wife Natalie, loving daughter Rachel and his brother Sol. Chapel service Thursday, August 21, 2014, 10AM at Levitt Weinstein, 3201 NW 72nd Avenue, Hollywood.
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