In 2001, an international medical conference that dealt with issues of kidney transplantation took place in the city of San Francisco. The conference was organized by the International and American Societies of Nephrology. One of the participants of this conference was Dr. Ronnie Mangel, the founder of the department of kidney transplantation in a hospital in Montreal, Canada. Presently, Dr. Mangel is a senior physician in this department, and successfully performs transplants of this very important organ in the human body. He also teaches at McGill University of Montreal, as an associate professor.
Dr. Ronnie Mangel has experienced an unusual fate. During the Holocaust, as a little boy, Ronnie, his sisters, their mother and other relatives, were imprisoned in a Krakow Ghetto. There, they endured much suffering and witnessed the deaths of many people who were close to them.
During these times, many of their Polish neighbors aided the Nazis in eliminating the Jewish population. But members of Ronnie’s family were lucky to meet some merciful and honest people who risked their own lives (in many instances, for profit) to help members of the Mangel family avoid death in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.
In 1939, prior to the Holocaust, 60,000 Jews lived in Krakow. Because of the efforts and aid of some of these Polish people, Ronnie and some members of his family were among the 2000 Jewish people from Krakow who survived the Holocaust. Throughout Poland, out of a Jewish population of over 3,250,000, less than 10 percent of the Jewish citizens survived.
Ronnie’s grandfather on his father’s side was the owner of a leather factory. He was able to give his children an excellent education that served them well in pre-war Poland. His son, Henrick Mangel, became a successful and wealthy banker in Krakow. Henrick and his wife, Sophia, had three children: Miriam and Irene, and then Ronnie, who was born in 1938. Miriam was born in 1933, Irene – in 1937.
Sophia was a very energetic, practical, and resourceful woman. She successfully managed the family bakery and grocery and spent a lot of time with her children. Sophia dearly loved her two brothers and two sisters, and was devoted to them. Sophia’s father was a roofer and before the war, he left for America, hoping to begin a new free and happy life there and to send for his family. But he did not survive the arduous immigration journey, so he did not live out his dream.
At sunrise on September 1, 1939, the Germans attacked Poland. World War II began at this time, and lasted more than five and a half years in Europe. Poland had military agreements with France and England, and was counting on help from their allies. On the third day of a bloody struggle, Poland’s allies announced the war against Germany but did nothing to help Poland.
Ronnie’s father, Henrick Mangel, was an officer in the reserves and he was drafted after the Nazis attacked. Soon, the Germans defeated the Polish Army and the Polish officers fled to different countries. Fortunately, Henrick found himself in Romania (and not in the Soviet Union), was taken prisoner, and sent to a POW (Prisoners Of War) Camp where he hid his Jewish heritage. Soon, he was able to escape the camp. Other Polish officers who fled to the Soviet Union, were arrested and shot in the spring of 1940 by the Soviet People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (known as NKVD) in Katyn and Mednoye, Russia.
Henrick was able to make it to Bucharest, and to get in touch with the Jewish community there who helped him obtain false documents. These documents stated that he and his family were citizens of the Republic of Chile and were under the protection of the Chilean government. Henrick found a job in Bucharest and managed to establish a correspondence with Sophia who had remained in Krakow with their children.
The German Army occupied Krakow on September 6, 1939. Occupation of the city stopped the well-regulated life of its citizens; existence for the Jewish people there became unbearable. Jews were persecuted from the first days of occupation – their jobs were terminated, apartments were robbed, people were forced to leave their homes and wear prominent signs with six-pointed “Stars of David”. Many Jewish people were killed. After an announcement that Krakow was now the capital of Poland, the situation became much worse and many atrocities against the Jews were committed by the Polish people. It has become known only recently that in the beginning of the German occupation, Poles in the little town of Edvabno had locked their Jewish neighbors inside of sheds and burned them alive in order to steal their houses and property. Life for Polish Jews became unbearable.
In April of 1940, Jewish citizens from Krakow were evicted to nearby villages; in the next four months, the majority of them were forced to leave Krakow, as did the Mangel family. They managed to take certain valuables with them which became very useful in the years ahead.
Historically, one of the first ghettos for Jews was organized in 1555, when Jews were moved to a special city district of Rome. Three hundred and eighty-five years later, the Nazis repeated this imprisonment, gathering Jews from many European countries into Middle Ages-type ghettos and concentration camps.
In early March, 1941, the Nazis began to resettle the local Jews from the Krakow Ghetto to the opposite side of the Vistula River into the Podgorze block of the Jewish city district of Kazimierz. This ghetto was separated by barbed wire fences and stone walls.
The Mangel family was one of the many families in the Krakow Ghetto. They lived in a small house along with 7 other families. Sophia and her three children inhabited a part of the tiny room; there was no place for beds. In the ghetto, people lived in unbelievably harsh, over-crowded conditions, devoid of the simple means of a normal existence. There was a horrible stench in the house and the women tried to protect their families from disease by constantly scrubbing the floors and boiling clothes. However, people were dying every day due to the extremes of hunger, beatings, torture, and abuse of all types.
In the ghetto, some factories and workshops were opened, and Jews were used as slave labor. They were also made to work in other places outside the ghetto. Sophia and many of her relatives, along with other Jews from the ghetto, were taken out by car every morning. Ronnie and his two sisters stayed home all day by themselves; Sophia left them food for the whole day and Ronnie’s older sister, Miriam, took care of her younger sister and brother. After some time, it became very dangerous to leave the children alone because the Nazis and their Polish allies were searching homes and taking away the children. Later it became known that the children they removed were murdered.
Sophia got to know some people who were working in a children’s orphanage and who agreed to allow her children to stay there while she was at work. But soon, it became dangerous to leave the children there as well. When Miriam was old enough, she went along with Sophia to work in a mattress factory.
In October of 1941, another concentration camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau, (also called Auschwitz-2) began to function as an extermination camp. In September of 1942, four gas chambers commenced operations there. They looked like saunas with showers, and wooden bars on the floor. Hydrogen cyanide powder flowed through the holes in the ceiling, bringing a hideous death in minutes. In conjunction with the gas chambers, four crematoriums were built to burn corpses.
People were taken to Auschwitz by railroad from all over occupied Europe. “Selection” took place, and arriving inmates were divided into three groups.
The first group was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau for extermination in the gas chambers within a few hours.
The second group was sent to labor camps for slave labor in different industries and factories. The lives of inmates in labor camps were absolutely exhausting, in conditions of constant abuse. They were beaten all the time, and intimidated by vicious dogs. The suffering of these people is indescribable. Weak inmates were sent to gas chambers. Tens of thousands of people died from horrible labor conditions, hunger and disease.
The third group was used for criminal medical experiments – in this group were mostly twins, dwarves, and people with hereditary deformities.
Auschwitz, situated only 30 miles southwest of Krakow became a symbol of the greatest catastrophe that ever happened to the Jews. As soon as this extermination camp began functioning, the Nazis started killing the Jews of Krakow. More than one million Jews from many countries of occupied Europe were killed in Auschwitz. In its gas chambers, Krakow Ghetto inmates were murdered along with Jews and non-Jews of occupied Europe.
At the same time in the Krakow Ghetto, the Nazis and their allies started conducting so-called “actions”. The ghetto’s gates were closed, inmates were herded in a central square, and “selection” began taking place – the elderly, people who were sick or weak, and the children were taken away to Auschwitz. Inmates who were still capable of working were left back at the ghetto. During one of those “actions,” Ronnie’s grandmother was taken away and never seen again. She died in the Auschwitz gas chambers along with many other relatives and friends of the Mangel family.
By this time, Sophia had gotten to know one of the security guards who was stationed by the ghetto’s gates. This guard was an anti-fascist and a very honest man who liked Sophia. He started warning her of future “actions” and also opened the gates to the city where Sophia was able to trade clothes and valuables in exchange for food for her children and relatives.
One of Sophia’s relatives also worked at the Jewish Administration of the ghetto and continually warned Sophia about future “actions” so she could have time to hide the children.
Once, having received a warning about a big “action,” Sophia walked out during the night with Miriam and Irene, crossed the bridge through Vistula River, and took the children to one of the nearest villages. She knew a Jewish family with false, non-Jewish, documents who lived there. These people put the children into bags and hid them in the attic where they stayed until the end of the “action”. Ronnie was hidden in the house of the relative who worked for the Jewish Administration of the ghetto since at that moment, everybody thought that he would be safer there. There were also other times when the children needed to be hidden.
Sophia found out that all Jews who were citizens of other countries, who weren’t born in Poland and had appropriate documents, could leave the ghetto and live outside its borders. She let her husband know, and Henrick was able to copy his Chilean passport and send it to the Gestapo office of the Krakow Ghetto. This was enough to let Sophia and their children get out of the ghetto. However, Sophia’s brothers and sisters had to stay behind the barbed wire, so she decided to stay with her family in the ghetto.
In March of 1943, the Nazis decided to liquidate the Krakow Ghetto. A few days before that, the security guard warned Sophia to leave the ghetto as soon as possible and take her false documents that proved she and children were Chilean citizens. Sophia did not understand his warning and ignored it. Soon the Nazis conducted the last “action” in the Krakow Ghetto. More than two thousand people were sent to the gas chambers of Auschwitz and the rest moved to the Plaszów concentration camp. Sophia’s two sisters and one brother went to the Plaszów camp. Sophia and her children, along with 60 other inmates, who had documents of citizenship of foreign nations were placed in jail. Daily, during the next six weeks, inmates were lined up outside in the jail yard for inspection; rain or shine. Finally, all inmates from Sophia’s chamber were let go.
Sophia, her children and also her best friend and her daughter decided to go to one of the villages close to Krakow. Inmates from the other chambers were sent to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany, where they were promised to be exchanged for German prisoners of war. However, those people most likely did not escape alive since there has never been any information about exchanges of that kind.
In the Plaszów camp, the Nazis and their Polish allies abused inmates with calculated cruelty and animal rage. Each morning people were lined up for inspection, and they had to stand naked for hours, in rain and extreme cold. For no reason, they were beaten and their faces were pushed into the dirt and snow until they were exhausted with pain, hunger, and weakness. Many of the inmates were ill with typhus and dysentery. There was a ravine in that camp, and the Germans shot sick inmates there, and then burned their corpses. Thankfully, Ronnie’s aunts and uncle were in Plaszów only for a short period of time, since they were chosen to work for Oscar Schindler’s factory.
Not far away from Krakow, Oscar Schindler, a German manufacturer, opened an enamel factory. Most of the workers at his factory were Jewish inmates from Plaszów. Schindler promised them that he would protect them and would not let them go hungry and he was true to his word. Oscar Schindler built the camp with barracks for his workers to make their lives easier. His factory and camp were part of the Nazi concentration camp system and Schindler paid money to the German Reich for this. Schindler was doing everything he could to get as many Jews as possible to work at his factory, convincing Nazis that all of these workers were very valuable specialists. Oscar Schindler saved about 1,200 Jews. All of the workers in his factory, including two of Ronnie’s aunts and an uncle, were freed in January of 1945.
In the meantime, Sophia and her best friend decided to take their children and attempt to escape Poland and try to go to Romania. They found smugglers and paid them well for transporting them through the border to Slovakia. There was a huge risk in this, since these smugglers could turn them into the Gestapo at any time. Even during that time, Sophia did not give in to desperation and fear, and was always reassuring to her children and her friend. The fugitives decided to cross the border in two groups: Sophia, Ronnie, and Irene were in one group, and Miriam, Sophia’s friend, and her friend’s daughter – in another group.
They used the railroad to go through Poland. When getting close to Slovakia, everyone, including toddlers, had to jump off the slow-moving train. Then, they hiked through mountains during the night and slept in sheds during the day. The fugitives introduced themselves as Chilean citizens of Polish descent who had gotten stuck in Poland during the war. Finally, with the help of the smugglers, they safely crossed the border into Slovakia.
In Slovakia, they paid policemen who delivered them to a camp for foreign refugees. After a short time, they left that camp and on foot, often at night, walked from one village to another, usually sleeping under the stars. Finally, they took a train to Budapest.
They lived in Hungary’s capital for a few months, getting to know the situation in the country; afterwards, with much adversity, they attempted to reach the Romanian border. In the beginning of 1944, they arrived at a small border town in Hungary. Newly arrived fugitives were carefully hiding their Jewish descent and Ronnie and Irene never let them down. In order not to raise suspicions, they attempted to blend in as much as possible. As foreigners, they had to check with the police frequently but their life in Hungary was relatively quiet.
At the end of 1944, again with help of smugglers, they tried to cross the Romanian border, but were stopped by the Romanian border patrol. The fugitives pretended that they were lost and the patrol let them return to Hungary.
In the beginning of 1945, Henrick sent a trusted person to his family and he brought them to Bucharest. After much suffering and long years of separation, the father was reunited with his children, and the husband with his wife.
On May 9, 1945 the war was over and soon Sophia’s sisters and brother, saved by Oscar Schindler, arrived in Bucharest. After everything they had gone through, the Mangel family did not want to return to Krakow. After the Holocaust only very few Jews were left in Poland and hatred for the Jews was still flourishing. Pogroms were still active, and Poles continued killing surviving Jews.
In 1946, the Mangel family, along with relatives who had survived, decided to go to Israel through Bulgaria but the Soviet military at the city of Sofia, turned them back to Bucharest. Then, they went to Prague, Czechoslovakia, where the newly-revived Jewish community helped them to overcome the difficulties of post-war life. Ronnie and his sister began to study in a Prague school.
In 1949, the Mangel family emigrated to Canada and Miriam was repatriated to Israel. And, in Canada, just as the mythological Phoenix, they were “reborn from the ashes.” Ronnie continued his education, successfully graduated high school, and then went on to McGill University, in Montreal. For two years, he studied nephrology and kidney transplantation at Harvard University with an additional nine months of study in London, England. He became an expert in kidney transplantation.
Ronnie married Lillian and they had two sons and a daughter, all of whom graduated Jewish schools and received a Jewish education. The family speaks English, French, Hebrew, and Yiddish, and Ronnie also remembers some Polish. They all observe Jewish traditions and spend all of the Jewish holidays together. Ronnie and Lillian are now grandparents. Their older son and daughter are both doctors, and have their own Jewish families. The younger son is not yet married, and is a Psychology instructor in a Vancouver college.
In spite of the extraordinarily difficult childhood and barely surviving catastrophe, Ronnie found the strength within himself to find success in life. The genealogical tree of his family has healthy roots, a stable trunk, beautiful branches and new, young growth.
I know this unusual story firsthand. Ronnie’s wife, Lillian (Leah) is my cousin. Her father, Moishe Rykliansky (Moishe Ryklis in Canada) is my uncle. He is the younger brother of my father Tsemakh Rykliansky.
Moishe Ryklis constantly supported his brother, Tsemakh, after the war, both emotionally and financially. Moishe and his wife, Malka, came to the Soviet Union where they met Tsemakh in Moscow and together, went to visit Vilnius, Odessa, and other cities. Their communication could have brought a lot of trouble to our family during Soviet times (where people who kept ties with foreigners were persecuted), but the correspondence between Moishe and his brother’s family was conducted nonetheless.