Abraham Bomba (1913–2000) was a barber in the city of Częstochowa when Nazi Germany invaded Poland in September 1939. In 1941, Abraham was imprisoned in the Częstochowa ghetto. There, he married his first wife, Reizl, who gave birth to a baby boy. In September 1942, the family was sent to the Treblinka killing center along with thousands of others. Upon arrival, Abraham's wife and son were murdered in the gas chambers. However, Abraham was one of the few people selected for forced labor. At Treblinka, he had to pick up and sort clothing that the Nazis had stolen from the murdered Jews. He was also forced to cut women's hair before they were killed in the gas chambers. In January 1943, Abraham escaped from Treblinka and made his way back to the Częstochowa ghetto. There, he tried to warn the remaining Jews about the murders happening at the Treblinka killing center. During this time, he also met and married his second wife, Regina. Regina's first husband had been killed at Treblinka. Abraham worked in a labor camp from June 1943 until his liberation by Soviet troops in 1945. He and Regina immigrated to the United States in 1951.
People went in through the gate. Now we know what the gate was, it was the way to the gas chamber and we have never see them again. That was the first hour we came in. After that, we, the people, 18 or 16 people...more people came in from the...working people, they worked already before, in the gas chamber, we had a order to clean up the place. Clean up the place--is not something you can take and clean. It was horrible. But in five, ten minutes this place had to look spotless. And it looked spotless. Like there was never nobody on the place, so the next transport when it comes in, they shouldn't see what's going on. We were cleaning up in the outside. Tell you what mean cleaning up: taking away all the clothes, to those places where the clothes were. Now, not only the clothes, all the papers, all the money, all the, the...whatever somebody had with him. And they had a lot of things with them. Pots and pans they had with them. Other things they had with them. We cleaned that up.
We would like to thank Crown Family Philanthropies, Abe and Ida Cooper Foundation, the Claims Conference, and BMF for supporting the ongoing work to create content and resources for the Holocaust Encyclopedia. View the list of all donors.
