UND is pleased to provide an archived video stream of the Great Conversation with Martin Weiss, Holocaust Survivor. Please visit The Holocaust Memorial Museum for more information and incredible stories about one of the greatest human tragedies in history that we must not allow to happen again.
If you have trouble seeing the video, please contact University Relations at 701-777-6034, or email webmaster@und.edu .
Born Jan. 28, 1929, Weiss was one of nine children in an Orthodox Jewish family in Polana, a rural village in the Carpathian Mountains of Czechoslovakia. His father owned a farm and a meat business, and his mother attended to the children and the home.
Weiss attended the village's Czech schools, which were quite progressive, and like many of his classmates, he looked forward to leaving Polana. In March 1939, his life was changed dramatically when Nazi Germany and its allies dismembered Czechoslovakia. Hungarian troops occupied Polana, and Jews were subjected to discriminatory legislation. Czech schools were closed, and the students had to learn Hungarian. The democratic freedoms that the villagers had enjoyed under Czechoslovakian rule disappeared.
After the German invasion of the Soviet Union, conditions in Polana worsened. Two of Weiss’s brothers were conscripted into forced labor battalions. The family soon learned some Jews from the area had been deported to the occupied Ukraine, where they were killed by “Schutzstaffel,” or SS units.
In April 1944, Hungarian gendarmes transported the village's Jews, including the Weiss family, to the Munkacs ghetto in Hungary. In May, they were deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau killing center in Poland. Weiss, his father, brother and two uncles were selected for forced labor; the other family members were sent to the gas chambers. Next, Weiss and his father were sent to the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, and then to the sub-camp of Melk, where they were forced to build tunnels into the side of the mountains. His father perished there.
Weiss was liberated at the Gunskirchen camp, another Mauthausen sub-camp in Austria, by U.S. troops in May 1945. He returned to Czechoslovakia, where he found some surviving family members.
