Boruch Szlezinger

Boruch Szlezinger (born Baruch Schlesinger-Zilberberg; officially February 26, 1925, unofficially February 16, 1923) is a Polish-born Jewish-French Holocaust survivor, a former deportee of the Nazi concentration camps and a survivor of the Death marches.

Early life
Baruch Schlesinger-Zilberberg was born officially on February 26, 1925, unofficially February 16, 1923, in Trzebinia, Chrzanów County, Poland. He grew up in a modest Jewish income but happy family. His mother, Frida Zilberberg was a housewife and his father, Leon Schlesinger-Lamedh was a tailor. He and his siblings received education at a private Jewish school, l'Alliance. Their parents lived together, married religiously but not civilly, as civil marriage was forbidden for Jews at the time. In his home, his family spoke Yiddish most of the time, but also Polish.

World War II
On September 1, 1939, World War II began with the German invasion of Poland. From the first day of the war, Trzebinia suffered casualties resulting from bombing. At the age of 14, he is witness to execution shootings in the streets. This situation will continue for two years. His father is deported in 1941 to Camp Yohannesdorf. His oldest brother fled to the eastern side of Poland annexed by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (URSS) after the Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Soviet Union which was signed eight days before the start of the war. Baruch remains to fourteen years old, the only one man of the house along with her ​​younger sister and mother. In 1942 he is definitively separated from his mother and sister when both women are sent to work in the nearby town, Chrzanów County, before being deported to Auschwitz a distant eighteen miles away in 1943, where they will be exterminated on arrival. Baruch is deported in 1943 to Blechhammer (Auschvitz 3) in Upper Silesia, where he worked as a slave for the German company IG Farben. He is tattooed on his arrival and identified as number 178605. In December 1944, the Germans considered their attempt to exterminate the Jews is doomed to failure, and unwilling to leave any traces of their crime, organized the march of death where he should advance in the snow and freezing weather without stopping day or night, managing to survive being killed on the field. Miraculously, Buchenwald, a Nazi concentration camp he arrives in Germany where he will "remain" until April 11, 1945, after undergoing new infamies and weighing only thirty-five pounds. While he is close to succumbing to the disease Typhus, Americans liberate Buchenwald and discover the horror, corpses litter the ground by the thousands when they entered the camp.

Life post war
Arrived in France clandestinely, Baruch Schlesinger-Zilberberg, orphan, made ​​his fortune in the clothing business. In 1956, ten years after his arrival, he became a naturalized French and renamed Boruch Szlezinger then started a family the same year.