Mr. Jack Sittsamer
Native of Mielec, Poland.Survivor of six Nazi concentration/death camps.
He weighed 72 pounds when he was liberated in 1945.
He is the lone survivor of his entire family; Father – Moses, Mother – Perla, Brothers -Israel and Josef, and Sisters – Devora and Gitla.
Hitler invaded Poland in 1939 and attacked Mielec on Sept. 7th burning the three synagogues. Those inside were burned to death or shot while trying to flee.
Mr. Sittsamer and his brother Israel were forced to work 12 hour days for the Nazis andthe family still lived in their home.
In March of 1942 the Nazi’s forced the family out and were marched seven miles. Mr. Sittsamer’s father was a wounded WW I veteran and he could not keep up. Hewas shot to death in front of the family. A total of 299 were shot during the march.
At the end of the march the men and women were separated. Israel was sent to Pustkow and his mother and younger siblings were sent to Belzec where they were all murdered. Mr. Sittsamer never saw his family again.
He spent the next two years as a slave laborer building airplanes and was tattooed on his wrist with a “K’’and “L” for Koncentration Lager, the camp’s name.
In June 1944 he was sent via a cattle car to Wieliczka, Poland to the underground airplane factories.
In July 1944 he was forced on a cattle car for three-days without food, water or sanitation to Auschwitz and then Flossenburg. He saw the chimneys of the gas chambers and the “mountains of shoes.”
Finally he was sent to Mauthausen, Austria on of the worst death camps. He worked 12 hour days carrying rocks down 186 steps to build large homes. After two months he was sent to an underground airplane factory but then he could hear the Allied bombing raids.
On May 5th, 1945 he awoke to find all of the Germans were gone and a Jeep full ofAmericans told him that he was free. He had to tunnel under the camp’s double fence.
He lived in Eggenfelden, Germany until 1949 when the United Jewish Federationsponsored him in his immigration to the United States. He sailed to Boston and traveled to Pittsburgh. He learned to speak English at night school and married having two children. He worked as a sheet metal worker and retired from Tyson Metal Product Company in 1986. He has five grandchildren.
He returned to Poland in May of 2000 and visited five concentration camps. In a field along the main road in Mielec he found the mass grave where his father was buried.