Survivor: David Lenga

David Lenga was riding a streetcar in Lodz, Poland, on Sept. 1, 1939, traveling across town on an errand for his mother, when the city’s air-raid sirens began blasting. The streetcar halted abruptly, and within minutes the 11-year-old saw German warplanes swooping down, machine-gunning civilians as they scattered in all directions. “Bodies went flying,” recalled David, who ran through an apartment courtyard and took alleyways back to his house. Inside, he found his father, mother, brother and grandmother huddled around the radio. His father somberly gathered everyone together. “This is the beginning of a horrible time,” David’s father told them.

David was born in Lodz on Dec. 3, 1927, to Abraham and Sarah Lenga. His younger brother, Nathan, was born in 1931. Abraham was a chemical engineer who owned and operated a wholesale tannery factory in Strykow, 11 miles south of Lodz.

David enjoyed a very comfortable life with a loving family. He attended public school, which was predominantly Jewish, as well as cheder, and played on his school’s soccer team. But anti-Semitism was always prevalent. “You could feel it in the air,” he said.

On Sept. 8, 1939, David watched in distress as his non-Jewish neighbors and friends welcomed the German soldiers marching into Lodz, accompanied by tanks and half-tracks flying swastika flags.

In mid-September, the Gestapo, now occupying the city, confiscated the tannery factory, keeping Abraham in charge while moving the family to Strykow’s Jewish quarter.

In April or May of 1942, the Germans liquidated the Strykow ghetto, herding the town’s Jews into the cemetery, where they were held for two days and two nights with no food or toilets.

On the third day, Abraham, who was very ill, was sent to a labor camp. The family didn’t expect him to survive. The other family members were transported to the Lodz ghetto, where David worked in a clothing factory managed by Abraham’s oldest brother, Chil, and became a full-fledged tailor.

In a large aktion the following September, Sarah was spared, but David, now 15, Nathan and their grandmother were selected for deportation and temporarily crammed into a warehouse just outside the ghetto along with hundreds of other Jews.

While sitting in the warehouse, David heard someone calling his name. Bewildered, he approached the front door, which a guard opened a crack. “Run for your life,” the guard instructed. David asked for his brother. “He will come later,” the guard told him.

David raced back to the ghetto in search of his mother, but found only Aunt Bina, his mother’s older sister, and Bina’s son. She told him Sarah didn’t want to live without her children and had begged Chil to save them. But when David and Nathan didn’t appear, she went to the SS, desperate, requesting to be deported with them. David later learned that his mother and brother were murdered in Chelmno.

After his mother and brother had been taken way, David became suicidal. He made his way to a third-story window in an abandoned building and prepared to jump. But Bina had followed him and grabbed him. “You have to have hope,” she told him.

Late one night, David was ravenous and sneaked out of the ghetto to a nearby vegetable field. He’d filled his burlap sack halfway with potatoes when a spotlight illuminated him, and an old German soldier pointed a rifle at his head. “What are you doing here, you goddamned Jew?” he barked.

“Please, sir, my family is starving,” David answered. “Maybe you have a grandson my age.”

The soldier lowered his rifle. “Get the hell out of here, and take your goddamned sack with you,” the man ordered. David fled. The potatoes fed him, Bina and his cousin for weeks.

Sometime in 1943, as David passed a newly arrived transport, he heard someone calling him. “I’m a very good friend of your father’s,” a man said. “Until last night, I was working with him in the Poznan labor camp. He’s doing well.” The news reinvigorated David.

In August 1944, as the Lodz ghetto was being liquidated, David refused to leave, believing the Russians would soon arrive. He continued living in his room but had also scoped out a hiding place in the attic of a nearby abandoned building. At one point, he lit a fire to cook a potato, but the smoke was visible and he soon heard Germans approaching with barking dogs. David escaped to his hiding place, terrified as the Germans reached the second floor of the building where he hid. Suddenly air-raid sirens blared, forcing them to leave and saving his life.

After a week in hiding, David saw a dozen men sweeping the streets, part of a cleanup crew that still remained in the ghetto, and joined them. But the work was soon completed and the group, including David, was shipped to Auschwitz.

When David arrived, a prisoner pointed to a chimney spewing black smoke. “That’s where you’ll wind up,” the prisoner told David, who knew he needed to find a way out.

Seeing a group of men volunteering to work in Germany, David joined the line. “I’m a carpenter,” he told Dr. Josef Mengele, who rejected him for being too young. David re-entered the line, but Mengele recognized him. Later that day, however, David sneaked into the workers’ holding area with a kitchen crew. Three days later he was on a cattle train headed for Germany.

The group was taken to one of the Kaufering concentration camps in Bavaria. There, David helped repair damaged railroad tracks, standing in wet cement in rubber boots while wielding a sledgehammer to keep the mixture soft.

Later, his block captain put him to work sewing socks, gloves and vests for the upcoming winter. For months he worked indoors, receiving extra rations. “That saved my life,” David said.

In late April 1945, as U.S. troops approached, the prisoners were evacuated, marched hours to the train station and then loaded into open cattle cars.

The train proceeded slowly, finally stopping in a thick pine forest, where a German military train pulled up alongside it. The same day, American planes strafed both trains, unaware that one held prisoners, and killed many of them.

Some of the prisoners, including David and his friends Roman and Sobol, were able to jump out, escaping into the forest.

The three eventually reached a farmhouse, where the farmer and his wife let them stay in their barn, providing cots, clothes and regular meals. “We were given the opportunity to be human beings,” David said.

Less than a week later, David heard the thunderous roar of tanks. “Come out,” his friends yelled. “We’re liberated.” It was May 5, 1945.

The freed prisoners sought in vain to communicate with the American soldiers. Finally, an officer approached. “You boys are Jews?” he asked in Yiddish. “We’re taking you with us.”

The officer transported them to a displaced persons camp in Landsberg, 40 miles west of Munich. Using the camp as a base, David traveled throughout Germany, desperate to find family. Unsuccessful, he went to Sweden, accompanied by Roman and Sobol.

The three were sent to a men’s camp in the hamlet of Fur. While checking out a nearby women’s camp, David met Charlotte Katz, a survivor from Czechoslovakia. The two soon moved to Helsingborg, where they married on July 18, 1945. Their daughter Helene was born in May 1946 and daughter Bert in September 1948.

While in Sweden, where David worked as a custom tailor, he learned his father was alive and back in Strykow. “I couldn’t speak. I was crying and my wife was holding me,” he said. He began corresponding with Abraham, but they weren’t able to see one another until 1953, when David, working three jobs, had saved enough money to buy his father a boat ticket from Israel, where he was then living. “That was a meeting I will not forget for my entire life,” David said.

In 1954, the family moved to Pittsburgh, where daughter Barbara was born in December 1955. David worked as the manager of a custom tailor shop and then, in the 1960s, opened Lenga’s Tailoring.

They relocated to Los Angeles in 1966. David designed suits for Eric Ross & Co. until 1981 and then switched into real estate investment, retiring in 1989.

Charlotte died in 2000, when her car was hit by a man fleeing police in a high-speed chase. “We were totally devastated,” David said. Three years later, on May 4, 2003, he married Eva Mandel.

Now a grandfather of seven and great-grandfather of three, David began telling his story in 2013. At 87, he speaks regularly at the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust and participates in The Righteous Conversations Project.

David took many risks during the Holocaust, any one of which could have been his last. “Call it cunning, call it instinct, call it whatever you want,” he said. “The fact is, I dared it, and I made it. I’m very proud of it.”