Jack (Jakub Szulim) Kowal

https://vhaonline.usc.edu/viewingPage?testimonyID=41943

Jack's father died when he was 3. Both sides of the family wanted Jack. Eventually they agreed that he would stay with his mother until he was 14 and then move to Plock. He grew up with his uncles and aunts and called his grandparents "mother" and "father".

Jack served in the Polish Army in 1939 prior to the German invasion in September that year. He took the training to be a medic and remembers that the officer training the group asked why it was that people urinated more in winter than in summer, and he was the only one that knew (less is lost in sweat). He was first in his class.

In the artillery training in the Polish Army during the same period it was the custom to have Jews do the calculationsfor range adjustments for the practice shellings. Jack performed these calculations, until a friend told him "whether you know or not, act like a dumb peasant and say you don't know since if you are right and the shell hits target the officers will claim credit and if it misses they will call you a dumb Jew and curse you". Jack followed his friend's advice.

In 1939 during the German invasion of Poland ...

Jack was in the Polish army when it was ignominiously defeated by the Germans in 1939. He escaped the usual murder of Polish Jewish prisoners of war by leaving his disintegrating unit and returning on foot to Wloclawek. On the way a group of peasant women got him through a German roadblock disguised as a woman. When he arrived back, un uncle met him in the street and told him not to go home since the family were sitting shiva (mourning his death). His uncle broke the good news to his family. In the deportation he arrived at Auschwitz and survived because of his useful skills as a barber to the German soldiers. He was also in five other camps. He served as a medic and saved a number of inmates lives, one of whom recognized him at a survivors reunion in 1986 in Washington. Jack did not remember the other man. Jack came to America after the war, with no relatives in America. He had a hard time establishing himself but met with some good people who helped him.

Ghetto(s) Zychlin (Poland : Ghetto)

Camp(s) Lehmfeld (Poland : Concentration Camp)

Jawischowitz (Poland : Concentration Camp)

Buchenwald (Germany : Concentration Camp)

Schoppinitz (Poland : Concentration Camp)

Auschwitz II-Birkenau (Poland : Death Camp)

Wiesengrund (Poland : Concentration Camp)

Hardt (Poland : Concentration Camp)

Falenfeld (Poland : Concentration Camp)

Interview Code 39040

He lived in Dorchester, Massachusetts