Beginnings
Aron was born in Vilnius. A city with a great Jewish culture, where 70,000 Jews lived, there were more than 100 temples and many theaters. Yiddish was spoken and there were four newspapers in this language. He lived with his parents and two brothers. Raised in a religious environment of the middle class, he studies until the first years of high school. At the beginning of the war, he was transferred to the Vilna Ghetto where he spent terrible moments and the consequent separation of his parents.
Ghetto
At the outbreak of World War II, on September 1, 1939, Vilna was occupied by the Russians and in 1940 it was handed over to the Lithuanians. That same year Nazi Germany attacked the Russians and three days later, on June 25, Vilna was occupied by the German army where the majority of the Christian population welcomed them. Then the hardships and the hunting of Jews began. In Vilna, two ghettos were built. At first, Aron was with his family in the number 1. Shortly after and after a selection, some families were willing to be transferred to the 2nd. On the way, they noticed the trap and the Balbaryski family left the line to hide in a bombed building. They took out the yellow badges with the Maguen David and in the morning they went to the second ghetto where they learned about the final destination that the rest of the families had, they had been murdered. They lived there a few weeks in a brutally inhuman way, sharing a room with 20 more people.
Resistance
"In the ghetto, there was a resistance of the Jewish youth, the partisans who fought in the woods among which was Hirsch Glick, a young man of 24 years, who composed the Hymn of the partisans that we sing to this day in each act of commemoration. Glick was caught and shot in 1944. One of the surviving partisans is my cousin Baruch Shub who today lives with his family in Israel." Thus passed the two years of existence of that ghetto until the liquidation on September 3, 1943. For a time he was hidden in a cellar with 150 Jews, upon discovering them transported them as cattle in trains to Estonia.
Camps
From then on, already separated from his family, which he never saw again, he spent his days in the six Estonian Concentration Camps and then in the German Concentration Camps: Stuthof, Dortmettingen-Natzweiler and finally Bergen Belsen.
Bergen Belsen
In 1945 Aron was deposited in one of the 20 wagons that moved to the concentration camp of Bergen Belsen. Each freight car carried 100 people locked up, with a suffocating environment and no food. After 10 interminable days, they arrived at the destination. When the doors opened, the light was cast on what was inside. On one side, there was a pile of dead people, and on the other side, there were those who were still alive. Aron was in last.
2 months
The general picture of the KZ Bergen Belsen concentration camp was terrifying. Among the prisoners, they commented that you could live maximum 8 days. Aron survived 2 months. The camp consisted of 3 sectors in which the SS corralled in subhuman conditions to 60,000 prisoners. Bergen Belsen did not work, there were no gas chambers, but slow death was expected due to exhaustion or diseases. Humiliations killed prisoners more than diseases. Every day more than 600 people died of hunger. He suffered from typhus, tuberculosis, and other ills. Aron was assigned to Camp I barrack No. 12. There were no bunk beds and he slept on the dirty floor, next to the corpses of prisoners who died night and day. The infections came quickly and within a few days, he was contaminated with lice.
Forces
"In my subconscious, I wanted to lie down and never get up again. It is possible that instinctively, I clung to the latent longing to live" Campo's commander was SS officer Josef Kramer, who stood out for his excesses of sadism and cruelty. The day began at five in the morning. They told the living and the dead that were placed around the barracks. The misery daily food ration consisted of a lean soup of potatoes shells boiled in water and without salt. Always lurked the danger of the more robust that stole food from the weakest. As early as 1945 the daily rations were reduced and in April the Germans cut supplies. The behavior of the prisoners was not related to human life, they were more animals than anything else. Without a doubt "Bergen Belsen, it was hell"
Light
April 15, 1945, the British Artillery Regiment entered the hell of Bergen Belsen. The SS men offered no resistance and were disarmed. However half an hour before their surrender they killed as many prisoners as they could. The sergeant who commanded the liberation of the camp did not know what he was facing. In his notebook he wrote "strange mass of people with shaved heads, in horrible and degrading clothes of prisoners". In Field I called "Field of Horror", the English found 22,000 women, 18,000 men and 500 children crammed into approximately 100 wooden barracks. In field II around 17,000 men. Three days after the entry of the allies, the action of burying the thousands of dead who were scattered began. This task was entrusted to the men and women of the SS. In the neighboring towns, the English brought the mayors and many inhabitants to see the horrible crimes committed.
Release
After the liberation, they continued dying around 500 people per day. The lack of knowledge on the part of the British did not facilitate the recovery of the already ex-prisoners. 100 medical students from England and Holland came to do a personalized job and help the sick. Of the 2,000 people who were transported to the field along with Aron, 10 were left alive, he is part of this group. In Camp II, they renovated a building with the infrastructure of a hospital, where the survivors could be treated correctly, and then moved to different places. Aron entered there in May 1945, he received clean clothes, a complete disinfection and slept after a long time in a bed with mattress and blanket. On May 8, 1945, the sirens sounded to announce the surrender of Germany and the end of the war in Europe. Camp II of Bergen Belsen became a refugee camp.
Emigration
Aron left recovered of the field in search of the construction of a new life. The red cross found in La Paz, Bolivia his uncle Dr. Mauricio Balbaryski, who in 1939 had emigrated there. On December 24, 1946, he received him with open arms. He provided a home and studies. Aron was building his new birth between Buenos Aires and La Paz. He worked on one side and another until in 1956 he met in La Paz his faithful companion, Susana Kessler, a native of Vienna, who before the Nazi persecution in Austria took refuge with their relatives there in 1939. On September 21, 1957, they married in a happy home and a beautiful family composed of two daughters who would bring four grandchildren. "The sad events remain engraved by all the life in the mind of a survivor, and it is more, they persecute it during their daily life, like a kind of nightmare, similar to a film of horrible and indelible experiences".
