Herman Shine

Auschwitz escapee who survived against the odds

His best friend would not leave him behind. A Polish civilian risked his life to spirit him out.

And a young woman he had met by chance helped find him a hiding place until the end of the war — and became the love of his life.

At least 1.3 million people were deported to Auschwitz, the complex in Germanoccupied Poland that had the heinous distinction of being the largest killing centre of the Nazi regime during the Second World War. About 1.1 million people died there. Fewer than 200 escaped and lived. One was Herman Shine.

Indeed, Shine lived to be one of the last surviving escapees from Auschwitz. He died on June 23 at 95 at his home in San Mateo, California.

“I am alive thanks to not one but a dozen miracles,” Shine told The San Francisco Chronicle in 2009.

He was born Mendel Scheingesicht in Berlin on 4 October, 1922, to Gerson and Therese Scheingesicht. His father moved to Germany from Poland after the First World War to work as a merchant and, in Berlin, developed a work programme for veterans who had been blinded.

As a teenager in 1939, not long after Hitler invaded Poland, Shine was taken to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, about 20 miles north of Berlin, along with other Jews, including his friend Max Drimmer.

“The SS walked around with whips, with sticks, with steel bars, you know; they would beat you for any reason,” Shine told the Bay Area Holocaust Oral History Project in 1990.

In 1942, the two friends endured a five-day journey to Auschwitz in a packed railway livestock car. Prisoners were divided after they arrived, some destined for labour, others for the gas chamber. Drimmer sneaked into a line with Shine, without knowing where they would be sent.

They were both spared, and wound up at Monowitz, a work camp also known as Auschwitz III.

Shine became a roofer there and also worked at a subcamp called Gleiwitz.

By his account, he was working in Gleiwitz when he spotted a group of young women cleaning up the camp.

Shine befriended one of them, Marianne Schlesinger, who told him that though she was forced to work for the Germans, she was allowed to live in her family home outside the camp because she was only half Jewish.

Shine told her about the mass murder of Jews that was underway, and she gave him her family’s address in the hope that he might find his way there at some point.

Around this time, Józef Wrona, who had been hired as a civilian labourer at Monowitz, befriended Drimmer.

Sometime in 1944 Wrona warned him that he had overheard SS officers, who did not know he spoke German, talking about killing the remaining workers at Monowitz.

Wrona devised a way to smuggle Drimmer out of the camp, a potentially fatal endeavour. Poles harbouring escaped Jews could be killed, along with their families. He agreed to include Shine in his plan.

Wrona created a hiding place at a construction site near Monowitz, and during a break Shine and Drimmer ducked into it. They huddled there for more than a day underneath building insulation, until Wrona returned at nightfall with civilian clothes.

They emerged wearing workmen’s clothing and caps to cover their shorn heads and made for the camp fence, where Wrona had cut a hole.

Shine and Drimmer wriggled through, free for the first time in five years. Joined by Wrona, they headed for his family home, more than nine miles to the south.

On the way the three were stopped by a German soldier, but after questioning Wrona they were waved through, all assumed to be Polish workers.

Wrona hid the escapees in his barn and brought them food. He also agreed to mail letters to friends, a service that could have been their undoing. In one instance Drimmer unwittingly endangered them all when he wrote to a friend named Herta Zowe. German authorities discovered the letter when they stopped Zowe and searched her.

They then converged on Wrona’s home with dogs and searched the premises, including the barn. But they failed to check an upper loft, where Drimmer and Shine cowered in terror.

Shineknewtheyhadtoleave, he recalled. He remembered the address of Marianne Schlesinger. They could stay at her house, he told Drimmer.

“He said, ‘You’re crazy,’” Shine said in Escape From Auschwitz: Portrait of a Friendship, a 2001 documentary film about their escape. “‘How the heck we going to get on the railroad, it’s almost 100 kilometres, this is war, we need papers.’ I said, ‘What choice we got?’ ”

They eventually made their way to Schlesinger’s home in Gleiwitz, where she and her family helped them find shelter.

When a rich German offered to take them in at his villa, they hid there until Germany’s defeat in 1945.

The next year, Shine married Schlesinger and Drimmer married Zowe in a double ceremony in Berlin. Both couples emigrated to the US in 1947 and settled near San Francisco. Shine and Drimmer remained close until Drimmer’s death in 2012.

In California, having Americanised his name, Shine worked as a day labourer before starting a roofing firm.

He never learned whether his parents had survived the Holocaust, but two of his sisters and two brothers lived through the war and settled in different countries.

His survivors include his wife, Marianne; and a daughter, Sonja.

Shine and Drimmer did not see Wrona again until 1990, when he came to Los Angeles to be named one of the Righteous Among Nations by Yad Vashem, an honour reserved for gentiles who saved the lives of Jews during the war. Wrona died in 1991.

“We want our story to be told to as many people as possible,” Shine told the Los Angeles Times in 1990. “Józef not only risked his life but he risked the lives of his entire family and his entire village.”

DANIEL E SLOTNIK

“I am alive thanks to not one, but a dozen miracles”

New York Times 2018. Distributed by NYT Syndication Service.