Second birthday celebrates survival
Isolation won’t dampen the 75th anniversary of Zigi Shipper’s liberation, he tells Luke Mintz.
Zigi Shipper has long considered May 3 to be his ‘‘second birthday’’. On this day in 1945, when he was 15, he was in the naval town of Neustadt, fully expecting to be loaded on to a ship by Nazi officers and blown up in the middle of the sea.
Almost two months earlier, as Soviet forces closed in, Shipper and hundreds of others had been sent on a ‘‘death march’’ from Stutthof concentration camp through Nazi-occupied Poland and into Germany. Anyone who fell over was shot dead instantly, and Shipper had not had any water for a week. Exhausted, hungry and seriously ill with typhus, he arrived in Neustadt on the brink of death.
But as RAF planes started bombing overhead, his captors suddenly ran for cover. Eventually, a fellow prisoner said to him: ‘‘Look around you.’’ The Nazis had disappeared, replaced by British soldiers. He had been liberated.
Seventy-five years later, Shipper tells this story with gusto over the phone from his home in Bushey, Hertfordshire. He usually celebrates today’s anniversary in his garden with family – he has two daughters, six grandchildren and four greatgrandchildren, with another on the way. But coronavirus means that he will mark his ‘‘second birthday’’ alone this year, for the first time. He cannot even visit Jeannette, his wife of 65 years, who lives in a care home.
‘‘What can I do?’’ he asks. ‘‘I can only have my party by myself.’’ Shipper does not seem afraid of Covid-19, nor does he consider himself particularly vulnerable, despite being 90. When you have lived through suffering as awful as the Holocaust, he suggests, there is little that frightens you.
‘‘There is nothing we can do,’’ he says.
‘‘All we can do is hope it will finish quickly. Maybe we’ll find a [vaccine] and everybody will be able to start living again. If somebody had told me 20 years ago I would reach 90, I would think they were mad. How can anybody be 90? So don’t give up, whatever you do.’’
Indeed, as soon as lockdown is over, Shipper is keen to return to his speaking tours of schools and offices, aided by the Holocaust Educational Trust. It is an activity that has occupied much of his life since he retired from his successful printing business some years ago. He has met several members of the Royal family, plus prime ministers Boris Johnson and Gordon Brown. In 2012, he even spoke to the England football team about the importance of tackling racism – a lecture which left the likes of Steven Gerrard and Ashley Cole ‘‘engrossed’’, according to a report in the Telegraph.
Shipper, born Zygmunt, was just nine when Hitler’s armies invaded Poland, on September 1 1939. He awoke to find his father standing by his bed, about to say goodbye. The Germans would only imprison men of fighting age, his father believed, and so he had decided to flee their hometown for Russia.
Although he returned to Poland later in the war, Shipper never saw him again and believes he died in Treblinka or the Warsaw Ghetto. His parents had divorced before the war and his mother had moved to Belgium, so Shipper was raised by his grandparents in a Nazi-built Jewish ghetto. Food was scarce and his grandfather soon became weak and died. ‘‘When I was 10, I stepped over dead bodies in the ghetto without much feeling,’’ he has said previously.
In 1941, he was rounded up by Nazis for ‘‘resettlement’’ and loaded on to a lorry – but the 11-year-old managed to jump off the back and escape home. He had no such luck in 1944, when the ghetto was liquidated. It was two years after senior Nazis had settled on the so-called ‘‘Final Solution’’ – the plan to eliminate Europe’s Jewish population.
He was taken to a train station with his grandmother. ‘‘I can’t see any trains,’’ he told her. She pointed at the cattle trucks in front of them, on to which they were loaded for a journey of several days.
At first there was no room to sit down, or even to close the doors, but multiple prisoners died along the way, their bodies thrown out by Nazi officers. Upon arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau, he noticed the sky was hazy, and a terrible odour filled the air. He later learnt it was the smell of burning flesh from the gas chambers.
Young and fit prisoners like Shipper were put to work, with everybody else sent to their deaths. Yet, somehow, his grandmother survived – although they became separated. He later discovered that she died in Theresienstadt, in Nazi-occupied
Czechoslovakia, on the day of the camp’s liberation.
Shipper was shaved, stripped of his possessions and handed striped clothing with an identification number – digits he still struggles to forget.
He was soon moved on from Auschwitz and transferred across various labour camps over the next year. In one, he saw five men hanged after they were accused of stealing cigarettes. ‘‘Each one jumped off the stools they were put on so as not to give the -Germans the satisfaction of knowing they killed them.’’ He ended up in Stutthof, and from there was sent on the death march that ended in his liberation.
While recuperating in a German children’s home, he received a letter with a British postmark. It was from a woman who thought it ‘‘quite possible’’ that Shipper was her son. She asked him to look at his left wrist to see if there was a burn mark, which had happened when he was four.
‘‘I knew then the letter was from my mother,’’ he recalls.
She asked him to come to London. Cautiously, in 1947 he obliged, and he has lived in Britain ever since. One day he attended a dance for young Holocaust survivors at a club in Belsize Park, north London. ‘‘I looked around and thought: ’I know him from the ghetto, him from Auschwitz.’ I felt as though I had found my family again.’’
At that club he also met Jeannette, a French Jewish refugee. It was only in the early 2000s that Shipper felt able to return to Auschwitz, after ‘‘nagging’’ from his children. He now cannot count the number of times he has visited concentration camps. Most recently, during their tour of Poland in 2017, he accompanied the Duke of Duchess of Cambridge to Stutthof.
‘‘[They] came towards me and said: ’Hello, how are you?’ I told them: ’We will be on the news now, and people will say, if the royals can go to a concentration camp, why shouldn’t we?’ We went around and they [William and Kate] went into the rooms alone. Both of them came out crying. That meant a lot to me.’’
As Shipper gears up to spend his ‘‘second birthday’’ under the shadow of a global crisis, it is not coronavirus that is occupying his mind. Instead, he imagines himself sitting down and having a conversation with Hitler.
‘‘I would say: ’You killed over six million people, but look at my family, look at what I have got. You didn’t succeed.’’’