Henry Mikols Summary- Kiana Holmes

Interviewed in August of 2001, Henry Mikols tells the story of his disappearance into the Holocaust. This story starts with Henry as young boy, who grew up in Poznan, Poland in the 1930's. A boy who had a normal childhood like most others, but also like the others in 1939 he had that taken away from him. The dictatorship of Hitler had began and everyone was experiencing it. His family who was not Jewish was still treated as though they were, and were forced out of their homes and into the streets with little or nothing to take with them.

Henry was picked up off the streets when the Germans were doing their raids for children. Never seeing his family again he begins his journey into the arms of the Germans. Over a span of two years he is shuffled from farmer to farmer, where he was forced to work as a slave, with little to eat or drink. While on his farm Henry listens to a radio where he is able to pick up political information on the war and other countries. It is not long before the Germans find out and take him away. Starting out in a prison at the Gestapo headquarters, once again he is being drug from one place to another.

They sent him to a political concentration camp in Buchenwald where imprisoned doctors preformed experiments on him, and the other prisoners. In 1945 he is yet moved again, this time like cattle in carts. The train took them to Bergen-Belsen where after only a few days they were liberated by the British army. A tired and malnourished Henry decides to stay and help the Red Cross instead of leaving. After a few years he begins to move around trying to make his way to the United States. In 1949 Henry came to America on a boat, where he became a carpenter and married. He now lives in Dummer, New Hampshire with his current wife and has five children.


Quotes:

"Occasionally I wonder why I survived. Who knows, maybe I'm one of the chosen one's. Maybe I survived so I can tell this to the American people and the Shoah Foundation."

"I like to tell the young generations because in America today's story's are forgotten tomorrow and I don't want this to be forgotten."