Born:
Warsaw, Poland
1929
Died:
February 23, 2000
Bernard Lipman was about 10 years old when he observed a wall being built around the Warsaw ghetto in April 1940. In the ghetto Bernard remembered receiving ration cards and having to collect the corpses of those people who died of starvation and disease, placing them in pushcarts to be buried in a mass grave. Lipman was picked up in the middle of the night and sent to the Treblinka extermination camp. After one day in the camp, he was able to escape by hiding under a pile of clothes he had been commanded to deliver to one of the railroad cars. Bernard returned to Warsaw where he was again arrested and taken to another camp. He escaped by cutting through the wire fence, but was caught and taken to the Majdanek concentration camp. From there Lipman was transferred to a series of camps, including Częstochowa, Buchenwald, Dachau and Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Bernard’s father died of hunger in the Warsaw ghetto. He learned after the war that both his mother and sister had been shot and killed as Jews were being rounded up to be transported to the concentration camps. Lipman was the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust.
Parents:
Aaron Lipman, d. in Holocaust
Mother, d. in Holocaust
Siblings:
Sister, d. in Holocaust