Val Ginsburg was born in Lithuania. He was imprisoned in the Kaunas ghetto before being sent to Dachau concentration camp.
In the mid 1940 the Soviet Red Army marched into Lithuania and life was turned upside down for Val’s family. Anyone who owned land or a business was classed as a Capitalist enemy of the people, the punishment for which was deportation to a Siberian slave labour camp. The Ginsburgs had their property confiscated and were put on a list for deportation.
On 15th August 1941, the Jewish population of Kaunas was forced into a ghetto. The small suburb that formed the ghetto was surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards. There was little food in the ghetto and many people died of starvation. Val and his family survived as he was sent outside the ghetto to work as a forced labourer, which enabled him to scrounge or steal potato peelings which his mother cooked.
Val witnessed two major massacres which made a lifelong impact on him. The ‘Big Action’ in October 1941 saw almost 10,000 people taken away and shot by the Nazis and their Lithuanian collaborators. Then in the spring of 1944 the ‘Children’s Action’ took place, when the ghetto children were forcibly taken away and murdered. After this Val lost his faith in humanity, as many of those who were participating in the murder were Lithuanian civilians whom until recently had been their neighbours.
By 1944 the German army was in retreat. The 12,000 remaining Jews were forced onto overcrowded cattle wagons and taken to concentration camps in Germany. Val’s journey took three days, after which he arrived in Dachau concentration camp near Munich. In Dachau, Val lost his identity. He was stripped of his identity, given a prisoner uniform, and an SS guard tore up the precious photograph of his mother which was his last remaining possession. Val was taken to a sub-camp of Dachau and forced to do back-breaking work on starvation rations.
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