Zalman Gradowski

Zalman Gradowski or Chaim Zalman Gradowski (1910 – 7 October 1944) originally from Suwałki, was a Polish Jewish prisoner of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp during the Holocaust in occupied Poland, who kept a secret diary.

On November 2, 1942, he was deported, as were all Jews then living in Lunna, as well as neighboring towns, to the Kielbasin (Kolbasino) transit camp (Transitlager or Sammellager). On December 5, he and all his Jewish townsfolk (numbering approximately 1,500) were forcibly marched from the Kielbasin transit camp to Lososno, Poland, where they boarded a train bound for, as he later discovered, Auschwitz. The train arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau on the morning of December 8. After "selection" at Auschwitz-Birkenau, his family members as well as all women and children, and most of the men who were on the transport, were immediately sent to the gas chamber and murdered. Shortly afterward, Gradowski and several others from the transport who survived the “selection” were sent to work in crematoria as part of the Sonderkommando slave labour unit.

Life

Zalman Gradowski was born the son of Sarah and Shmuel Gradowski, who was trained as a rabbi and worked as a cantor. He and his two brothers, Moyshl and Avrom-Eber, visited the Yeshiva of Lomza; his two brothers taught at a yeshiva in Suwałki, while Zalman worked in his father's clothing store. Due to the good libraries there and the discussions of literary texts in the Jewish community, he was able to pursue his interest in literature intensively. Gradowski had a lively exchange about literature before the beginning of the war with the Yiddish writer David Sfar, his wife's brother-in-law and the only survivor of the family, and Sfar remembered Gradowski as someone who dreamed of a life as a writer.