Names Not Numbers

Norman Frajman

Warsaw, Poland

Warsaw Ghetto

Majdanek Concentration Camp

Skarzysko-Kamienna Concentration Camp

Buchenwald Concentration Camp

Schlieben Concentration Camp

1929

Norman Frajman

Warsaw, Poland

1929

Norman Frajman was born in 1929 in Warsaw, Poland, into an observant Jewish family. His family was well-off, and his grandmother, a wise woman, insisted that all her children learn a trade. "My mother and her brothers and sisters attended the ORT school after regular school. My grandmother foresaw the necessity of preparing her offspring for life," Norman recalled.

Norman attended a private, predominantly Jewish school, but his education was cut short when, in September 1939, the Germans invaded Warsaw. He was not even ten years old.

In November 1940, Norman and his entire family were forced into the Warsaw Ghetto, the largest ghetto in Europe, where over 400,000 Polish Jews were crammed into inhumane conditions.

After enduring the horrors of the ghetto, Norman’s family, like many others, was deported to the Majdanek death camp. As Norman remembers it - "After the liquidation of the Ghetto, together with my mother, sister, and other members of my family, I was deported to the extermination camp of Majdanek. We had no idea where we were being taken; we thought we were being resettled to a better place with better conditions."

Tragically, his mother and sister were murdered. At the age of twelve, Norman was sent alone to several other camps, including Skarzysko, Buchenwald, and Schlieben. When he was liberated by the Russian Army during a death march in Germany on May 8, 1945, Norman was still only fifteen years old.

After liberation, Norman worked for a year as an interpreter, translating from Russian to German.

He later went to Berlin and lived in various displaced persons (DP) camps, including Schlachtensee, Bamberg in Bavaria, Neu Freimann, and finally the Children's Emigration Centers in Landshut and Prien.In Prien, Norman joined an ORT course in photography. Soon after, he discovered that he had an uncle living in the United States and, in 1948, managed to emigrate there.

Although he never pursued photography professionally, he remained a keen amateur photographer. "I still have my graduation certificate, though it’s a little worn. It certainly helped when I applied for emigration at the US consulate," he shared.

Names Not Numbers

Norman Frajman

Norman Frajman

The End