Survivor: Morris Price

“You remain,” the SS soldier said, pointing at Morris Price  — then Moniek Prajs — instructing him to wait in the open truck that had just arrived at Birkenau from the Krakow ghetto. “You get off,” the soldier told another prisoner. Soon, as the soldier continued to shout commands, the truck was half empty, and Morris, two weeks shy of 16, realized he was surrounded by children and older people. “My instinct said that this is the wrong place to stay,” he recalled. He waited for the soldier to look the other way and, “in a split second,” jumped off and joined the 20- and 30-year-olds lined up outside. “I didn’t know what was going to happen, but I was with people like my older brothers,” Morris said. It was March 13 or 14, 1943.

Morris was born on April 1, 1927, in Wolbrom, Poland, to Manela and Itka Prajs. He was the youngest of six children. 

Manela, a businessman with his own horse and buggy, traveled the countryside buying cattle, which he sold to butchers. “He worked hard to support the family,” Morris recalled. 

They were middle class and Orthodox, living in a two-bedroom house. Morris attended public school in the morning and Jewish school in the afternoon. Even at 7, he knew to walk always with a group of boys to avoid being beaten up by anti-Semitic bullies. 

In early September 1939, Morris stood on the street watching German soldiers march into Wolbrom. “It was frightening, but I wanted to see them,” he said. 

Soon after, Morris was no longer allowed to attend public school, and he began helping his father by driving the horse and buggy. By 1941, Manela ceased working and instead rented out the horse and buggy, with Morris as driver. “I was proud of myself that I could do this,” he said. 

Then, in summer 1942, the Wolbrom Jews were ordered to report to the town square. Morris’ sisters Sabina and Helen, however, chose to hide on a farm owned by a friend of Manela. 

At the deportation site, Manela was sent to a labor camp, while Morris’ mother, grandmother and sister Breindel were shipped elsewhere. “I never saw them again,” he said. 

Morris and his brothers Machel and David were sent by cattle car to a labor camp in Prokocim, about 32 miles away. Morris worked seven days a week digging trenches for pipes.

While there, Morris learned that Sabina and Helen had returned to their home in Wolbrom, where some Jews remained. But soon after, discovering that the Germans were planning a final liquidation of Wolbrom, Morris managed to escape from the camp to warn them.

In Wolbrom, Morris and his sisters sneaked out of their house after dark and walked to the farm where the girls had previously been hidden. The farmer put them in a barn attic, but less than a week later asked them to leave, fearing he would be caught. 

The next morning, with nowhere to go, the three siblings headed toward the Krakow ghetto, eventually finding their way there. A few weeks later, Morris returned to the labor camp with his sisters. There, the girls set up an auxiliary kitchen where they cooked soup that prisoners who had money could purchase and Germans received for free.

Morris, because he had once escaped, lived in a different part of the camp from his siblings. The kapo in that unit, angry that the kitchen Morris’ sisters were running competed with one in his area, punished Morris in December 1942 by sending him back to the ghetto. From there, he was shipped to Birkenau.

Morris was processed, tattooed with the number 108262 and assigned a barracks. During the day he worked laying sewer pipe. The kapo in charge, a man known as Franz Marmalade, was kind. “We worked 12 hours, but it was tolerable,” Morris said. 

Two months after arriving, however, Morris contracted typhoid fever and was sent to the infirmary, where he lay unconscious for days. But as soon as his fever broke, he left, fearing he would be sent to the gas chamber. Still woozy, he returned to his work detail the following day. 

One day, Morris was caught rummaging through trashcans near an SS barracks. He was hauled inside and ordered to bend over a chair while an SS soldier beat him with a stick. But the stick suddenly broke, and while the soldiers searched for a replacement, Morris jumped up and ran away, unpursued. “This was the only time I was beaten,” he said. 

In October 1944, Morris was shipped by cattle car to a labor camp outside Dachau. There, he loaded gravel into mine cars that he and other prisoners pushed half a mile and then unloaded. They worked seven days a week, from sunup to sunset.

Around mid-April 1945, Morris was sent on a death march. As the Allied planes circled above, the prisoners saw bombs exploding nearby. “We were happy,” Morris recalled.

The march continued for about a week, until the SS were approached by a high-ranking German army officer who ordered them to take the prisoners to a nearby school and wait for the Americans. “The war is over,” he said.  

But a few hours later, an SS unit came by the school and, announcing that they didn’t take orders from the German army, marched away more than half the prisoners. Morris, who remained, feared they would return, so he climbed into an attic to hide. When he emerged the following morning, no one was there.

About two hours later he saw his first American jeep. “I was free,” he said. It was early May 1945. 

Morris and a few friends moved into a farmhouse near the American Army offices. A few months later, however, he learned that one of his brothers had survived, so he left.

On his way back to Poland, while in the Prague railway station, he ran into someone from Wolbrom who informed him that his two sisters and his brother Machel were living in Sosnowiec and handed Morris the address. “It’s not just a small world. It’s somebody up there who had something to do with it,” Morris thought at the time.

When Morris arrived at the Polish border, he saw people lined up to obtain papers. Unwilling to wait three days, he hopped another train headed into Poland. 

When he arrived at the address he’d been given, he asked the woman who answered the door whether Sabina and Helen lived there. “I’m their little brother,” he said. The woman screamed and ran for Morris’ sisters. Sabina fainted when she saw him. 

A few days later, when Morris traveled to Wolbrom with his brother Machel and two friends, they were stopped by a Polish army lieutenant and asked for identification. When Morris explained he had just arrived, the lieutenant threatened to throw him into jail for life for disrespecting Poland. Finally the lieutenant confiscated whatever money they had and released them. 

Morris and his siblings left Poland a few days later and settled in Munich. 

In September 1949, Morris immigrated to the United States, settling in Nashville, Tenn., where he lived with an elderly Jewish woman and worked in a pawnshop. 

A year later, the Korean War broke out and Morris was drafted into the U.S. Army. He served one year at Camp Rucker in Alabama and one year in Mannheim, Germany.

After being discharged in 1952, Morris managed a store his former boss opened in Portsmouth, Ohio. While there, on Sept. 1, 1954, he became a U.S. citizen. 

Morris moved to Culver City in June 1955. He worked at Hartman Catalogue showrooms for 26 years, until 1981. He then opened his own business, Morrie Price’s Jewelry, in Glendale, where he worked until his retirement in 1999. 

Morris met Shirley Levine on a blind date in April 1960, and they married Jan. 8, 1961. In March 1962, Shirley gave birth to their son Michael, in July 1964 to their daughter Debra, and in December 1968 to their son David, who died at 33 from a neurological disease. 

For the past 10 years, Morris has been a regular speaker at the Museum of Tolerance. He says he believes he had a guardian angel, but he’s also certain he was helped by his will to survive.

“The human body is stronger than any steel. You don’t know how much it can take until you actually try,” he said.