 but one of the Soviet soldiers saved his life at the last second. After the clash in the village, the reconnaissance unit withdrew, and only after another month was the area liberated by the Red Army. After liberation, Dan met his Soviet rescuer again, who promised him: “You are coming with me to Berlin.” But the family that had given him refuge demanded the money promised them for saving him, and only after a number of months they returned him to his mother, who had survived the Shoah. Dan’s father had been a member of the Polish National Underground (AK) and was murdered by one of his Polish counterparts.
After the war, Dan stayed in Poland where he met Dorota, who became his wife. He learned electronics, and in 1965 immigrated to Israel. There he worked in the engineering unit of the Ministry of Communications, as well as taking charge of the projects laboratory at the Electrical Engineering Faculty at the Technion.
In 1960 Dan met one of his rescuers, Gertruda Marciniak, the Mother Superior of the convent in Otwock where he had been hidden. She told him on her deathbed about one day when the Germans had come on a surprise visit to the monastery to look for Jewish children. Since she had no time to hide Dan, Marciniak concealed him under her long habit, which reached the floor. She was a tall woman, and Dan was just three years old. “She told the Germans that the monastery was not hiding any children, and in complete silence she walked around the kitchen, with me under her dress, held by her legs so I wouldn’t fall. This act required nerves of steel, but we stood up to the test and got out of it alive,” he relates. In 2007, Yad Vashem posthumously recognized Gertruda Marciniak as Righteous Among the Nations.
Dan and Dorota have four children and seven grandchildren.
Ed Mosberg was born in Krakow, Poland, in 1926. He and his family were interned in the Krakow ghetto on its establishment in March 1941. On 13 March 1943, Ed was sent to the Plaszow concentration camp. There he was put to work in the office of the camp commandant, which overlooked the camp complex and enabled him to witness the murder of many prisoners, including members of his own family.
Ed was transferred from Plaszow to the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, where he was almost beaten to death by one of the guards. “You considered yourself lucky if you had work. I was a strong young man, not afraid to try anything,” related Ed. “In Mauthausen I worked in a stone quarry. I had to climb 186 steps up and down while carrying rocks. If you stopped for a moment, they would shoot you or throw you off the cliff to your death.” When the American forces approached, the German guards from Mauthausen gathered the prisoners in a cave and tried to detonate it. The prisoners, Ed among them, were saved when the explosive failed to ignite. “Those that survived owe their luck to that,” Ed said.
On 5 May 1945 Ed was liberated, the only surviving member of his family. Due to his weak physical state, he was forced to spend some time in Italy before returning to Krakow, the city of his birth. There he met Cecile, a fellow survivor from his hometown, who had also lost her entire family in the Shoah, except for her father. Ed and Cecile moved to Belgium, where they wed.
In 1951, Ed and Cecile arrived in the US, where he became a successful businessman. The couple had three daughters, and devoted their time to the Jewish community, as well as to recovering, restoring and preserving many Jewish cultural artifacts lost during the Shoah. Among these treasures are Torah Scrolls saved from destruction during the Holocaust that today are preserved and used in many synagogues across the US and Israel. Ed also supports research into topics connected to the Holocaust. “I feel it is my duty to tell… lately I began to give testimony about my experiences during the Shoah because our numbers, the numbers of the survivors, are dwindling.”
Ed and Cecile Mosberg, members of the American Society for Yad Vashem, are recipients of the “Yad Vashem Prize for Commemoration,” presented to th