Solomon Baruch Kornmehl 1911 - 1945

Born 6.6.1911 in Bobowa
Died 15.1.1945 in Mauthausen

Biography

 

Solomon Baruch Kornmehl was born on 8 June 1911 in Bobowa, Poland, to Ele Kornmehl Ziegeltuch and Berl Rosenberg. He had six brothers and sisters. His father was a Torah scribe for the famous Bobover Hasidic sect. The family was very religious.

Sadly his father, Berl Rosenberg, died of typhus before World War I. Eventually, his mother and the children moved to Kraków and settled in Kalwaryjska Street.

Solomon was not married. He worked as a tailor. He registered with the Kraków Jewish community and they provided him with an ID card. He was subsequently incarcerated in the infamous Plaszow concentration camp. Initially his name was on Schindler’s famous list; however it was subsequently removed for unknown reasons. This sealed his fate: years of hardship and starvation in concentration camps.

In August 1944 Solomon Kornmehl was transferred to Mauthausen and given the prisoner number 87761. He was sent to St. Valentin, a distant subcamp of the Mauthausen/Gusen concentration camp. Mauthausen inmates were used by a variety of companies that accommodated a small number of inmates on their own. The St. Valentin camp inmates made vehicles for military use at the Steyr-Daimler-Puch factory.

On 13 January 1945, Solomon was transferred back to the main Mauthausen camp and two days later he died of acute colitis and weak circulation of blood. He was 33 years old.

When the war ended it was evident that almost all of Solomon's family had died in the Holocaust. The exception was his niece, Helena Schupper. His niece was a courier in the Warsaw Ghetto and was involved in the Ghetto Uprising. She survived the war and emigrated to Israel and has spent the interim years sharing her story of survival with the world.

 

Jill Kornmehl

 

Translation into English: Joanna White

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