Joe Engel papers

Joe Engel was born on October 9, 1927, in Zakroczym, Poland, approximately 25 miles northwest of Warsaw. He lived with his parents and eight siblings in a rented three-room house. Engel spoke Yiddish at home and also knew some Polish, German, and Hungarian. He started attending cheder when he was five years old and began public school at the age of seven. After the German invasion of Poland in 1939, Engel's family was forced out of Zakroczym and escaped to Plonsk, east of Warsaw. Plonsk was eventually turned into a ghetto.

In 1942, the Nazis liquidated the Plonsk ghetto. Engel was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in the fall of 1942. He was selected to attend a bricklaying school in the Auschwitz main camp. Engel worked in this camp until January 1945, when he and other prisoners were sent on a death march through Czechoslovakia, ahead of Russian forces. Survivors of the march, including Engel, were forced into open cattle cars, from which Engel escaped by jumping. He managed to hide from SS patrols in the area and joined a Nazi resistance group. Liberated by the Russian army in March 1945, Engel returned to Poland, eventually escaping to West Germany to avoid being drafted by the Polish army. In 1949, Engel obtained an affidavit to immigrate to the United States from an aunt living in Charleston, South Carolina.