On a journey of closure and renewal at Treblinka, this Holocaust survivor met a new generation of Jews
25.09.2022 - 12:05
/ manchestereveningnews.co.uk
Ike Alterman is one of a few remaining Holocaust survivors still alive to tell their story. He survived four death camps, including Auschwitz-Birkenau. A 'Windermere Boy' he was one of around 700 Jewish children sent to Great Britain at the end of the war and became a successful businessman in Manchester.
His friend Raphi Bloom works for The Fed - a social care charity for the Greater Manchester Jewish community. He runs the My Voice project, which helps Holocaust survivors and refugees, who settled in Greater Manchester after the Second World War, to document their lives in individual books and podcasts.
Here Raphi talks about travelling with his friend to the former Treblinka extermination camp, where Ike's mother, sister and brother were murdered by the Nazis.
The report contains some upsetting details.
Itzick, known as ‘Ike’, Alterman was born in his mother’s hometown of Ozarow and later went to live in Ostroweic where his father was born and raised and much of the family still were.
Ike is 94, a survivor of four death camps – Blizyn, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Buchenwald and Theresienstadt – as well as a death march.
His father died in the Bhuna work camp; his mother Chawa, his 14-year-old sister Faiga and his nine-year-old brother Pyniek were transported to Treblinka in October 1942 and murdered upon arrival by the Nazis.
Treblinka was one of three killing centres linked to Operation Reinhard, the SS plan to annihilate almost two million Jews who were living in the German-administered territory of occupied Poland.
To carry out the mass murder of Europe's Jews, the SS established these centres which were exclusively or primarily devoted to the extermination of human beings in gas chambers.
Ike is a close family friend. I