Edward Mosberg, a Holocaust survivor whose passion for sharing his story inspired people everywhere, died on Sept. 21. He was 96.
Mosberg, born in Krakow, Poland in 1926, lost his entire family in the Holocaust. He told his story of surviving the Krakow Ghetto and German labor and concentration camps, sometimes wearing a reproduction of his striped concentration camp uniform and a bracelet fashioned from his original labor camp ID tag. He accompanied multiple groups to Europe with the International March of the Living. His final trip to Poland with March of the Living took place just a few months ago.
“I go any place they need me,” Mosberg said in testimony now housed in USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive. “I go to schools, synagogues, [do] whatever they need me [to do] because this is my duty and obligation.”
Mosberg was 13 years old when Nazi Germany invaded his hometown of Krakow in September 1939. At the time his parents owned a department store and his large extended family was an integral part of the city’s 60,000-strong Jewish community. Beginning in 1940, the Nazis began deporting tens of thousands of Krakow’s Jews to the nearby countryside. Ed and his father Ludwig managed to escape the city but became separated as they sought safe haven for their family in Russian-controlled territory. A few months later Ed’s mother, Bronislawa, sent for him and he returned to the ghetto that had been established in Krakow in March 1941. He later learned that his father had been rounded up and killed in a police station in Czortków (present-day Ukraine) in September 1941.
By August 1943, the Nazis had sent almost all of Krakow Ghetto’s Jews to labor or concentration camps. Mosberg, his mother, and his sisters were sent to Płaszów, a labor camp in Krakow that supplied slave labor to a nearby stone quarry and network of armament factories.
In 1944, in advance of approaching Soviet troops, the Germans began dismantling the Płaszów camp. Prisoners still able to work were forced onto trains destined for labor camps in Germany and Austria, while others were sent to Auschwitz. In his testimony, Mosberg remembers seeing his mother for the last time in May of that year.
“They took my mother to the gas chamber of Auschwitz,” Mosberg said. “I remember it like yesterday when she waved her hands to me and I never saw her again. This was the worst thing in my whole life.”
Soon after, Mosberg’s sisters, along with thousands of other women in the camp, were called for a selection. His sisters were among the first in the group to be sent to Auschwitz. Only days later, Mosberg himself was deported, first to Auschwitz and then to the Mauthausen Concentration Camp in Austria.
At Mauthausen, Mosberg would volunteer for extra work in the kitchen and eat anything that the office administrative staff left as scraps. This extra food — coffee grounds and mouthfuls of extra soup — gave him the strength to endure the grueling work regimen.
After liberation Mosberg was sent to Italy to recover from tuberculosis, and, while there, reconnected with Cesia (Cecile) Storch, a Krakow native who he learned had been imprisoned with his sisters. She, too, had lost many family members. The pair then moved to Belgium and were married in 1947. Four years later the couple immigrated to the United States, where they lived in Harlem with their children. Ed worked small jobs, often three at a time, before finding success as a real estate developer. The family eventually settled in Parsippany, New Jersey.
Later in life, Mosberg began seeking opportunities to share his story. He spoke at schools, synagogues and community organizations, and became active with Yad Vashem, March of the Living and USC Shoah Foundation.
Ed and Cecile were married for 72 years. Cecile died in February 2020.
Mosberg is survived by his children, Beatrice Mosberg, Louise Levine (Stuart), and Caroline Mosberg-Karger (Darren) and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
– Courtesy of USC Shoah Foundation
