Now listen to Ben Benari's recollections of the deportation of Polish citizens from Brno. This is the same transport that took Robert Reich from Brno.
Baruch Birstenbinder, later Beno Benari, was born in Brno on 29.12.1920.
His mother Rachel and father Isaac, a fur importer, came from Poland. Beno studied economics for two years at the Sorbonne in France, then returned to Czechoslovakia.
While his brother Moshe fled to Palestine at the very beginning of the war, Beno stayed in Brno. He escaped the transport to Nisko, by which his father was deported, whose trace is lost in a Soviet camp somewhere in Siberia. But eventually he was deported together with his mother to the ghetto in Terezín. There he married Anna Klein, originally from Vienna.
From Terezín, he and his wife were deported to the Warsaw ghetto. They were housed in the famous synagogue in Tłomackie. From the Warsaw ghetto, Beno was deported to the Treblinka I. camp, whose inmates worked on the Bug River and built the future Treblinka II death camp. When he and a friend realized what was happening at Treblinka, they escaped.
They were captured by the Germans, tortured by the Gestapo and were brought to the ghetto in Mława. When they were again deported from this ghetto to the death camp in Treblinka, Beno organized the escape of seven people, together they jumped off the train. He returned alone to Warsaw, where he was taken care of by a Polish woman he met by chance, who later became his second wife. Thanks to her, he obtained false documents in the name of Jan Henryk Płusa. Under this name he worked in the vicinity of Lviv and then Nowy Sącz.
After the war Beno returned to his native Brno, only in 1965 he managed to emigrate to the USA with his family. He died on 16 April 2007.
The interview was recorded on 15 March 1995 in West Hollywood, California, USA.
What surprised you most in this testimony?