In 1939, Monty Kuper was residing in the industrial city of Lodz with his parents and five of his six siblings, in an apartment building located near the train station, whose address was Skladowa Street #14. And on the first of September, when the German Wermacht invaded Poland – the carefree life of his youth would profoundly change forever.
Monty, then known by Moszek, was raised in a poor but nurturing family, and would often reminisce about how he would play football (soccer) in nearby Helenow Park, how he would go to the cinema on the weekends; sing in the synagogue choir during the High Holy Days, and how he helped his father, who was a painting contractor, after school. He also shared that when he used to go to the cinema to see the silent, black and white American Westerns, he was particularly fond of the ones starring Tom Mix, and grade-B cowboy actor, Buck Jones, who he and all his friends referred to in their Polish dialects as: “Bucksie Jones.”
In February 1940, when the German Waffen-SS began their roundup of Lodz’s Jewish population five months after their initial invasion and occupation, Monty, along with several friends from school, were already on their way to the eastern frontier of Poland that was now under the control of the Soviet Union. As a result of the political alignment between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, a non-aggression pact was negotiated between these two divergent ideologues that carved up and annexed Poland, for their own geopolitical and ideological objectives. It was in the town of Kovel (now in present-day Ukraine), where Monty and his friends found refuge from the oppressive hand of German National Socialism. However, Monty was soon approached by the occupying Soviets, who insisted that he become “patriated” into the ranks of Soviet citizenship and a member of the Communist Party in exchange for asylum.
The ultimatum Monty received from the Soviets did not exactly fit in with the spontaneous and free-form, decision-making lifestyle he was adhering to since the invasion of Poland by the Germans in their quest for lebensraum (living space). And so – at age 19 – Monty found himself branded as a “political undesirable,” and was sent to the Soviet Gulag forced-labor camp system in Siberia. For the next 18 months, Monty cleared rocks and cut timber for the construction of the Baikal-Amur Mainline Railroad in the Russian towns of Kozhva and Vorkuta, near the Arctic Circle. Monty once explained his rationale for choosing the role of a political prisoner instead of becoming a party member and joining the armed forces: “I thought I would never see my family again and I would be sent to the front if I agreed to join the Russian Army and become a member of the Communist Party,” he confided. “I was never in fear of my life when I was in Siberia. There was always a possibility I could starve or even freeze to death, but the Russians never tortured or deliberately mistreated us like the Nazis would have done.”
On June 22, 1941, the German Third Reich broke the Molotov-Ribbentrop Non-Aggression Pact and invaded the Soviet Union. Russia was now at war with Germany and as a direct result of this act of aggression by Germany; the Soviets set their foreign political prisoners free to join them in their fight against fascism. Monty was then conscripted into the newly formed 8th Division of the 2nd Polish Corp that was in exile and training with the British Army, in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, under the command of Polish General Wladyslaw Anders. It was during this period that Monty met a Russian girl named Rada; the daughter of a Soviet diplomat, who, with her mother, were sent deep inside Soviet territory, into Tashkent for safety, along with the families of other high-ranking Soviet officials. It was Rada’s mother, Nina Petrovna, the second wife of the future premier of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, who befriended young Moszek, and who, he said was educated in London, and who, ironically – taught him to speak English.
Monty traveled with “Ander’s Army” from Uzbekistan to Persia, Iran, and eventually into the British Mandate of Palestine. After they reached the territory of the British Mandate, the command of this ragtag, undisciplined unit of former political prisoners was then transferred to British control, and Monty, fortuitously, was commandeered by the British Army, and sent to England to train. In the UK, Monty was assigned to the Royal Tank Regiment and stationed at Camp Catterick (presently Catterick Garrison), located near the town of Richmond, in North Yorkshire. It was there he remained for the duration of the Second World War, and where he rose to the rank of corporal, and in charge of the parts department of the British Army’s Royal Motor Pool.
At the end of the war, Monty – like so many others – began the process of searching for family members. He knew very little of the fate of his missing family in the aftermath of WWII; the war that decimated Europe’s Jewish population. He discovered his older brother, Lyva (Leon) in 1945, convalescing in an International Red Cross displaced persons detention camp in Zeilsheim, Germany, near Frankfurt am Main. Leon had survived both forced labor in Auschwitz-Birkeneau Concentration Camp and a death march from Auschwitz to Buchenwald. He also discovered from his brother that their father, Izrael Kuper, and their oldest sister, Mindla, both died in the Lodz Ghetto in 1941, from starvation and tuberculosis, respectively. However, during his lifetime, Monty always lacked the hard and fast evidence regarding the fate of his other family members, and how they endured the daily indignation and degradation of the 14 months they spent inside the Lodz Ghetto.
What Monty never knew was that on the morning of March 10, 1942, 790 ghetto detainees were ordered to assemble on the train platform of the Radogoszcz Railroad Station, located just outside the Lodz Ghetto. These unfortunate individuals received their directive from their Nazi occupiers four days prior, to gather up their personal possessions and assemble at the station because they had been selected for “resettlement” to a nearby work camp. Included on the roster of names, and chosen for deportation, were Monty’s mother, Cutla Bryks, and four of his siblings.
Transport No. 17’s destination on that bitterly cold winter morning was not to a work camp but was to Chełmno (Kulmhof) killing center; the Third Reich’s very first “death camp,” located 31 miles north of Lodz, on the outskirts of the rural town of Chelmno nad Nerem. According to post-war testimony compiled by Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, Israel, these passengers were first taken to the nearby town of Kolo, then, they were ordered to transfer to a smaller, narrow-gauge train that took them directly to an abandoned mill, in the forest, on the outskirts of Chełmno. It was there they spent the night, and on the following morning, they were forced into the back of an ordinary cargo van used for hauling furniture whose motor was left running, and whose diesel exhaust was retrofitted to flow back into the cargo area, thereby, ending the lives of all those who were locked into the back of the sealed van. Their remains were then buried in one of several mass graves, only later to be exhumed and cremated, toward the end of the war, in an attempt by the Nazis to conceal the wartime atrocities they committed.
What Monty never knew during his lifetime was that the ashes of his mother and siblings were scattered in the nearby forest on the outskirts of the town of Chełmno nad Nerem – where they remain to this day.
Parents:
Izrael Kuper, d. Lodz Ghetto
Cutla (nee Bryks) Kuper, d. Chełmno (Kulmhof) killing center
Siblings:
Mindla Kuper, d. Lodz Ghetto
Icek Kuper, d. Chełmno (Kulmhof) killing center
Lyva (Leon), survived Auschwitz-Birkenau, d. November 28, 1998
Lajzer Kuper, d. Chełmno (Kulmhof) killing center
Chaja Kuper, d. Chełmno (Kulmhof) killing center
Sara Kuper, d. Chełmno (Kulmhof) killing center