Edward Mosberg, Holocaust survivor, called on Israeli Foreign Minister, Israel Katz, to apologise to the Polish nation. The issue concerns his statement from February 2019 in which he stated that Poles are genetically predisposed to anti-Semitism. He commented: “This man uttered these shameful words either out of stupidity or out of hatred, I don’t know why. This is an insult not just towards Poland. It is an insult to all Christians around the world (…) I often go to Israel, but as long as this man apologises or until he is removed from the government, I will not go there again. I always come back to Poland with great pleasure.”
Edward Mosberg talks to Maria Kądzielska. This interview will make all of you privy to one of the most amazing testimony.
Mosberg was born on January 6, 1926 in Krakow to a Jewish family as a son of Leiser Mosberg (born in 1887) and Beila nee Blumenkranz (born in 1893). He grew up in this city during the Second Polish Republic.
During World War II, shortly after his father was detained on the street and probably shot by the Germans, in September 1941 Edward Mosberg was imprisoned in the Krakow ghetto together with his relatives (including grandparents, mother and two sisters). After the liquidation of the ghetto, he was transferred to the Płaszów concentration camp. There he worked in the office of the camp commander, Hauptsturmführer SS Amon Göth. Then, transferred to Austrian lands, he was a forced labourer in the KL Mauthausen-Gusen camp and in the Hermann Göring factory in Linz. During the imprisonment, he had the camp number 85454. At the end of the war, on May 5, 1945, he ended up in a cave that was to be destroyed with dynamite loads, which ultimately did not happen. In total, 16 members of his family were killed during the war, including grandparents in the Bełżec extermination camp, and mother and sisters in Auschwitz-Birkenau).
At the beginning of the war, he still lived in Kraków. In the second half of the 1940s, Cesia Storch became his wife (she also survived a German concentration camp, she was detained with E. Mosberg’s sisters). Both in 1951 emigrated to the United States. There they settled in New York Harlem, then settled in Union County, New Jersey. They have three daughters, including Charlotte. In the USA, Edward Mosberg worked in various professions, eventually becoming involved in the development industry. He has Polish and American citizenship.
He participated in commemorative ceremonies in former concentration camps (e.g. in Mauthausen, many times in the March of the Living in Auschwitz) to certify the past. He also became an activist for the improvement of Polish-Jewish relations and the dissemination of knowledge about the Holocaust. He became involved in the activities of the Shoah Foundation and From the Depths. He became patron of the From the Depths Award for the Righteous. He starred in the film production titled Destination Unknown from 2017, depicting the history of the Holocaust. A photo of Edward Mosberg, along with his granddaughter lighting a commemorative torch during the March of the Living in Auschwitz-Birkenau, was printed on the cover of the album Witnesses: The next generations by Eli Rubenstein, published in Polish in 2018, bring the light of memory.
By decision of the President of Poland Andrzej Duda of 27 April 2019, he was awarded the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland for outstanding services in developing Polish-Jewish dialogue, and for disseminating knowledge about the role of Poles in saving Jews.
The second part of the interview can be found here.
Source: PolandDaily
