“I remember my mother and father talking about the Germans before when there were rumbles of war, and we weren’t too worried, per se, because they lived through the First World War, through Germany and Poland, and so forth. And at the time the Germans were considered very civilized. So they weren’t too worried about it, apparently.”
The youngest of three siblings, Allen Wayne was born in Radom, a Polish city of about 80,000 people, of whom more than one-quarter were Jewish. Allen’s father was the administrator of a building supply company, and the family lived comfortably in an apartment building that had both Jewish and gentile residents.
After war broke out in 1939, life quickly grew difficult. Coal and food were so scarce that sometimes nine-year-old Allen woke up in the middle of the night to join the long lines for supplies. Forced to relocate to the Radom Ghetto, the family survived longer than some because they worked in truck repair and scrap metal, jobs that were useful to the Germans. But at the beginning of 1943 Allen was put on a train bound for the death camp at Treblinka. An acquaintance on the train encouraged him to jump. “I found my way back to my parents’ apartment, knocked on the door, opened the door, and of course everybody was sitting shivah for me. So, that was a nice homecoming.”
The family remained together until Allen’s sister, Dosia, was sent to work as a farm laborer and the others were put on a train bound for Auschwitz. As soon as they arrived, men and women were separated. Together with his father and his brother, Leon, Allen was forced to build a series of labor camps. They suffered from bitter cold, illness, and constant, gnawing hunger. In the spring of 1945 they were sent to Kochendorf, a sub-camp of Natzweiler in southwest Germany. As the Allies approached, Allen and Leon were forced on a two-week march to Dachau. An elderly German woman—who gave the brothers several pounds of dried fruit and then hit a guard with her cane when he tried to take it away—probably saved their lives. Their father, who had been sent to Dachau by train, starved to death en route. From Dachau, Allen and Leon were put on a train to Austria, but it never reached its destination. American troops liberated them on May 1, 1945.
Allen and Leon went to Garmisch, a Bavarian town under American occupation. There, they were reunited with their mother and learned that Dosia had been murdered. Allen came to the United States in February 1948 at the age of 16, and his mother and brother went to Canada. He lived briefly with them there, but returned to the United States permanently when he met and married American-born Joan Greenstein. Allen died in Houston in April 2005.
Parents
Mordechai Weinryb, d. Dachau, 1945
Brucha Kirshenbaum Weinryb, survived
Siblings
Leon, survived Dosia, d. Auschwitz