Oral history interview with Froim (Erwin) Baum

Froim (Erwin) Baum was born on April 15, 1926 in Warsaw, Poland and describes growing up as the youngest of seven children; his father’s work as a tailor and his mother’s work running a small candy store; the death of his father in 1932 and subsequently having to enter the Krochmalna Street orphanage; moving into the Warsaw ghetto in 1940; drifting between the orphanage and his family’s home and leaving the ghetto for short periods to smuggle bread in from the Aryan side for his family; returning to the ghetto on the evening of August 6, 1942 to discover that the entire orphanage had been deported to Treblinka; escaping to Płońsk, Poland with his family and secretly working for a Polish peasant family; the liquidation of the Płońsk ghetto in November 1942 and being sent to Auschwitz, where his mother and two sisters were immediately killed; initially being placed in the line headed for the gas chambers but changing lines when Adolf Eichmann’s back was turned; his brief internment in Monowitz before being returned to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where he worked in the Kanada section sorting through prisoners’ confiscated belongings; his transfer to a number of other concentration camps including Stutthof, Stuttgart, and Dachau; going on a death march from Dachau to Allach, where he was liberated by the United States Army in the spring of 1945; living in Belgium for a short period; and immigrating to Canada in 1951 and then to the United States in 1966.