Harry Gordon - Oral History Interview, 1980
Harry Gordon was a survivor of the Nazi Holocaust who settled in Madison, Wisconsin, after World War II.
Harry Gordon was born in Kaunas (Kovno), Lithuania, on July 15, 1925. He was the only child of an Orthodox Jewish family with deep roots in Lithuania. In the summer of 1940, after Harry's second year of high school, the Russian army occupied Kovno. A year later, Lithuania fell to the Germans.
Shortly after the Germans arrived, Harry's ailing mother was poisoned along with all other patients at the Jewish hospital in Kovno. His remaining family members were herded into a ghetto with 35,000 other Jews. Harry's father was deported. Harry was shuffled between the ghetto and forced labor camps for the next three years.
In 1944, he was deported to Dachau, where he dug ditches for the disposal of corpses. In 1945 Harry escaped from a trainload of prisoners and walked to Landsberg-am-Lech, Germany, where he was met by Allied troops. By then he weighed only 50 pounds. Harry was hospitalized for eight months and recuperated at a rehabilitation camp for displaced persons. While there, he met and married Genia Lelonek, a Polish survivor.
The Gordons immigrated to the U.S. in March 1949. They lived in Pennsylvania and New York City before arriving in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1951. Harry moved from job to job before becoming self-employed as a scrap metal dealer. The Gordons had three children before divorcing in 1969. Harry wrote a book about his Holocaust experiences, The Shadow of Death: The Holocaust in Lithuania (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1992). Harry died in 2010.
Harry Gordon, Oral History Interview
Listen to Harry Gordon tell his story to the Wisconsin Historical Society interviewer.
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Oral Histories: Wisconsin Survivors of the Holocaust
Hear the stories of 22 Holocaust Survivors and two American witnesses interviewed between 1974 and 1981.