Let's Make Things Better
A Holocaust Survivor's Message of Hope and Celebration of Life
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Gidon's Story
Gidon, (formerly Peter Wolfgang Löw) was born in Carlsbad, Czechoslovakia in 1935. In 1938, Hitler took over the Sudetenland as part of UK Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's appeasement plan, as he tried to avoid war. In 1941, Gidon, his mother, and his father were taken to the Theresienstadt (or Terezin) concentration camp, located about 50 kilometers north of Prague.
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Gidon was in the concentration camp from the ages of six to ten (1941 to 1945). During his time in the camp, Gidon was severely malnourished and witnessed public executions, beatings, and torture. He saw his father only twice, being marched by, six abreast, one of the slaves used by the Nazis to mine mica.
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Gidon lost 26 family members in the Holocaust. They were murdered in Theresienstadt, Treblinka, Auschwitz, Maly Trostenets, Riga, Lodz, and Warsaw. Only Gidon and his mother Doris survived.
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Gidon and his mother arrived in Toronto, Canada, in 1949, where he became very involved with the Zionist youth organization HaShomer HaTzair, and in 1959, Gidon came to Israel to fulfill his dream. A living part of Israeli history, Gidon served in the IDF, guarding Mt. Scopus in 1962 and fighting in a combat unit in the Six Day War as well as the War of Attrition.
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From his first marriage, Gidon has a daughter and a son. From his second marriage to Susan Kashman Lev, he had four children, another daughter, and three sons.
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Left: Gidon aged approximately 12 months, Carlsbad, Czechoslovakia, 1936.
Right: Gidon aged approximately 3 years, Carlsbad, 1938.
From left to right:
Rosa Samish, Gidon's great-grandmother was put on a transport from Prague to Terezin, where she spent two months. Rosa later perished in a gas chamber at Treblinka.
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Fritz Samish, Rosa's son, and Gidon's maternal grandfather was a bank manager and had served in the Austro-Hungarian army during the First World War. He has transported to the Warsaw Ghetto just weeks ahead
of the Nazi "Grosse Aktion" in which 25,000 Jews were sent to Treblinka.
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Doris Löw, Gidon's mother, pregnant with Gidon in this photo, survived four years in Terezin as a slave laborer. She survived the camp and later moved to Canada. She passed away in Israel in 2003.
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Ernst Löw Gidon's father, was a slave laborer in Terezin for four years before he was put on a transport to Auschwitz and tattooed as prisoner B12156. Two weeks before Auschwitz was liberated on January 27th, 1945, Ernst was sent on a death march to Buchenwald. He never arrived.
Copy of Gidon's (Peter W. Löw) paperwork and Jewish Star. He was number 885.
Susan Kashman Lev 1943-2012
The pendant Gidon's father gave his mother when they parted. It is the emblem of Terezin.