David Bayer

“When I came back to our house there was Germans, in our house, robbing us, taking everything that they can. German officers and German soldiers, whatever they could. A lot of shoes, a lot of leather, they were taking whatever they wanted. We came in, the Germans asked, ‘What are you doing here?’ We said, ‘We live here, this is my house.’ They were laughing and making fun of us. We were scared, me, my mother, my brother, my two sisters, my father. My father was 40 years old then. And there was a German that asked my father, ‘Why do you, why do you, nobody likes the Jews. Why are you so afraid? Why nobody likes the Jews?’ Because, my father told him, ‘Because we don’t hit back.’ He made a gesture with his fist, I was scared I thought my father was going to hit him but he just made it with his fist. So every German laughed and they left.”
(postwar testimony)

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Born January 8, 1926, Zgierz, Poland

Listen to Leon Merrick discuss being evacuated from a forced labor camp and transported to the Buchenwald concentration camp »

Listen to Leon Merrick discusses the importance and difficulties of work in the Lodz ghetto »

Leon was the oldest of two boys born to a Jewish family in Zgierz, Poland, a city well known for its textiles. In 1939, after Germany invaded Poland, Leon’s family left Zgierz for Lodz, Poland. They were forced into a ghetto in 1940. The ghetto was in the city of Lodz. Four years later the ghetto was closed and Leon was taken to a forced labor camp in Kielce, Poland. He worked in an ammunition factory for 3 months. In 1944, as Soviet forces began an offensive, Leon was taken to a forced labor camp in Czestochowa, Poland. At the end of December 1944, the Germans evacuated the camp and took its prisoners to Buchenwald, a concentration camp near the city of Weimar, Germany. Three months after entering Buchenwald, Leon was taken to Flossenburg, another concentration camp. He was there for three weeks until, as the war came to a close, the Germans herded the camp’s survivors on a death march. The death march lasted three to four days. On April 23, 1945, U.S. forces liberated the survivors near Chan, Germany. Leon immigrated to the United States in 1949 and was drafted into the American army in March 1952. He reached the rank of sergeant. Leon met his wife Nina in Washington, D.C.; she is also a Holocaust survivor.