The guest speaker at the Illinois Holocaust Museum posed an unanswerable question to the dozen Chabad eighth-grade boys sitting in front of him. Mitchell Winthrop, 88 years of age, a survivor of the Auschwitz and Mauthausen Nazi concentration camps, had been raised in a secular Jewish home in Lodz, Poland. Why had he, he asked the boys—someone who hadn’t even had a bar mitzvah—been chosen to survive the Holocaust and not his pious, white-bearded grandfather?
His question was meant to provoke thought, but it also spurred the graduating class of Chicago’s Seymour J. Abrams Cheder Lubavitch Hebrew Day School into action.
“It’s never too late to make a bar mitzvah!” called out 14-year-old Yankel Raices. The group was on a trip to the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Skokie, the highlight of which is to hear a first-person account from a survivor. “We can do it right now. We can put on tefillin.”
Winthrop’s family intended for him to have a bar mitzvah; as a boy, he had even chosen which bicycle he wanted from his uncle’s shop as a birthday present. Then came the Nazi invasion, and on Nov. 14, 1939, the imposing Great Synagogue of Lodz—where Winthrop’s bar mitzvah was to be held a few days later—was burned to the ground. The next few years were a living hell for young Mitchell (born Mietek Weintraub; his Hebrew name is Moshe), during which he lost his home, family and friends.
More than seven decades later in Skokie, it took Winthrop a moment to realize that the boys were not joking. If Winthrop was willing, they would celebrate with him, then and there.
“I forgot the prayers,” Winthrop objected.
“We’ll help you,” the boys replied, almost in unison.
A few moments later, with a yarmulke on his head and a pre-war photograph of his entire family on the screen behind him, Winthrop donned tefillin for the first time. As he finished saying the words of “Shema,” the boys began to dance, pulling the older man into the joyous circle.
“When we started doing the hora, I felt very emotional,” says Winthrop. “Here was my whole family looking and witnessing my bar mitzvah, if only in a picture. I’m emotional even now as I retell it.”
The Early Years
Winthrop’s story begins years earlier, in the bustling city of Lodz, where he was born to an upper-middle-class family. Lodz—then home to nearly 200,000 Jews who made up some 30 percent of the city’s population—was a textile hub, and Winthrop’s father, Shimon, was a traveling salesman for his family’s successful textile business. Winthrop’s grandparents were strictly religious Jews, and while his own parents were less so, they remained closely connected to Jewish life.
Winthrop attended the Katzenelson School, where he studied Hebrew, and he often attended synagogue with his father or grandfather. “I still remember some of the prayers I learned preparing for my bar mitzvah from back then,” he recalls. “I studied hard because I didn’t want to shame my parents and family.”
Yet the bar mitzvah was not to be. The Nazis entered Lodz in September of 1939, and by May of the next year, the city’s Jews were forced into a ghetto—the second biggest in Poland—the Weintraub family among them.
“My father died of hunger in the ghetto,” relates Winthrop. “We were a well-to-do family, but my father died of hunger. After that, there was nobody to attend to my religious upbringing.”
Because of its high level of productivity, the Lodz ghetto remained intact until 1944, when the remaining Jews were shipped to Auschwitz and the ghetto liquidized. At Auschwitz, Winthrop and his mother, Devorah, both made it past the selection, and Winthrop remembers his mother being happy they had both been given the chance to live. He never heard from her again.
“When the war ended, I looked for her, and I’ve kept looking until today,” he says. “I still don’t know what happened to her or her six sisters.”
The only valuables Winthrop had with him when he arrived in Auschwitz were photos of his family. Ordered to strip and hand over their clothing, the inmates were left with only their shoes and belts. Winthrop slipped the photographs into his shoe.
“I had no money, only photos, but it was a treasure for me. As soon as I hid them, I felt a sharp blow to my head; it was a Kapo [an inmate who served as a prison functionary] watching that people don’t slip any money or jewelry into their shoes,” he remembers. “I emptied my shoe and when he saw it was only pictures, he didn’t care, but I was afraid to pick them up again. I just left them there.”
Winthrop spent eight days in Auschwitz; he says he doubts he would have survived had he been there any longer. When inquiries were made for an experienced electrician, Winthrop volunteered himself despite a total lack of knowledge of the subject, and thus was sent to a nearby coal mine to work.
He worked there until Jan. 17, 1945, when, with Soviet Red Army troops approaching, he and his fellow inmates were forced on a death march. Auschwitz was liberated 10 days later.
Escaped and Sent Back
Winthrop remembers people dying around him as they marched, coupled with the fatigue that enveloped him. “I was sleeping as I marched; I knew that after a few days of this, we’d all be dead.”
After three days of marching, Winthrop made a daring escape together with an older Jew from Luxembourg. They were caught just a few days later and sent to Vienna, where Winthrop attempted to pass himself off as a Pole.
“They saw I was circumcised and knew I was lying,” he adds. “The Aibershter [‘the One Above,’ in Yiddish] helped me survive.”
From Vienna, the now 18-year-old was transferred to the Mauthausen labor camp in Austria, where he remained for three months and five days until it was liberated by the American army in May of 1945.
“I was emaciated, sleeping on corpses when the Americans came in,” recalls Winthrop. “But the first thing I did was take a train back to Lodz, back to the Russian side, to see what happened to my family, my home. Nothing was left.”
In the ensuing months, Winthrop and a few fellow survivors his own age managed to smuggle themselves back into the American zone, bribing Soviet troops and walking all night to once again find freedom. After a few years in a Displaced Persons camp in Germany, Winthrop immigrated to the United States in 1948.
Safely in America, Winthrop went about rebuilding his life, earning a master’s from the University of Chicago, teaching at Purdue University and then working as a teacher in the Chicago Schools System. His Polish remains impeccable; after his retirement in 1989, he worked in the Cook County courts system as a Polish interpreter. All the while he never shared his harrowing life story.
“At first, no one here wanted to hear our stories,” says Winthrop of the atmosphere Holocaust survivors encountered in the early post-war years. “They dismissed it, so I learned to clam up.”
Not wishing to traumatize his three children, he didn’t share his story even with his own family, finding ways to evade explaining the numbers tattooed into his left arm. It was in an effort to discover his mother’s fate that pushed Winthrop to pen his memoirs, The Arrival: I Sought God in Hell, with the hope that someone with any knowledge of what occurred might contact him. When he was done, he approached the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Skokie about adding it to their gift shop.
“They told me that the book would sell better if I would consider speaking to audiences, as part of their speakers’ bureau,” he says. “So I was sort of pushed into this.”
Today, Winthrop addresses school groups and other audiences at the museum around once a week. Warm and articulate, he has become a popular speaker, sharing his experiences with a generation that can hardly fathom the horrors he witnessed and endured.
“People are buying the book and listening to my story,” he says. “So it’s bearing fruit.”
The Bar Mitzvah
Having studied about the Holocaust as part of their eighth-grade curriculum, the Cheder Lubavitch boys boosted their learning with a visit to the museum.
“The exhibit is very well-done. The tour takes you through the rise of Hitler to the Wannsee Conference [outside Berlin] to the war, and ultimately, to liberation,” explains Rabbi Ilan Heifetz, the school’s secular-studies principal. “It’s a very powerful experience.”
At the end of their tour, the group met Winthrop, who told them the story of his life and shared with the boys a poem he had written for the 70th anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation.
“I asked the boys: How could G‑d save me? I wasn’t a full-fledged Jew; I was circumcised, but never had a bar mitzvah.
“Instead of answering the question, they made me a bar mitzvah!”
Winthrop asked that the one extant photo of his family—taken mere months before he was born and given to him years later by a great-uncle who survived the war—be beamed onto the screen as the boys began to help him put tefillin on.
“When I began to repeat the prayers, I realized that I knew them,” says Winthrop. “Seventy-five years! Seventy-five years after I learned them, I remembered. I tried to go ahead because I knew the words.”
Unbeknownst to the group of boys at the time, one of Winthrop’s sons was in the room, capturing the moment on video and witnessing an event that Winthrop refers to as bashert—something that was meant to be. “It was my parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, all of my relatives, and one of my sons there, too; I was in front of my whole family. It was very exciting and emotional for me.”
Days later, Winthrop attended the boys’ graduation ceremony, putting tefillin on again, this time with Raices’ father, Rabbi Sholom Ber Raices of Lubavitch Chabad of Skokie.
If there is one word that could sum up the experience, it might simply be this: “wow.”
“Wow,” replies Winthrop, “is right.”
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