Szymon Srebrnik

Szymon Srebrnik was born in 1930 in Łódź

Srebrnik was born in Łódź, Poland, the only child of his parents. During World War II his family was moved into the Łódź Ghetto. In the summer of 1943 he saw a German soldier shoot his father David dead.

In the winter of 1943 he was deported to Chełmno, where he was put in a chained forced labor unit. He buried victims of the gas vans, sorted their belongings and found his mother Leah's papers among them. The guards spared him in part because of his singing.

On January 18, 1945, the Germans shot the remaining Jewish workers. Srebrnik was shot in the head but survived and crawled to a Polish farmer's stable. Soviet soldiers found him and he was taken to a hospital in Warsaw.

He testified at a Polish trial of Chełmno staff in Łódź in 1945. He later moved to Israel, lived on a kibbutz and served in the army. He testified at the Eichmann trial in 1961 and at trials in Germany from 1962 to 1965.

Claude Lanzmann interviewed him for the 1985 documentary Shoah. He died of cancer in August 2006 at Tel Hashomer hospital.