Benjamin Bender

Benjamin Bender was born to a Jewish family in Poland. He was 11 years old when Nazi Germany invaded his native Poland at the start of World War II. He lived in Czestochowa, a town steeped in medieval ideas and anti-Semitic attitudes. When the Nazis arrived, Benjamin, his family, and the town's other Jews were put into a ghetto. Later, Benjamin and his brother were spared deportation to the death camps because they could provide useful labor for the German war machine. Forced to leave their parents behind, they moved from factory to factory, only to end up at the Buchenwald concentration camp. Benjamin survived to be liberated from the camp by U.S. forces in 1945. He was 17 years old. He told his story in his memoir Glimpses: Through Holocaust and Liberation, published in 1995. Interspersed throughout the book are chapters about Bender's future wife, Sara, born in Baranowicze, Poland, her own struggle against the Nazi occupation, and how the couple met on an Israeli kibbutz. The 1992 documentary film Liberators: Fighting on Two Fronts in World War II, included Bender's return to Buchenwald.