Zigi Shipper survived the Łódź ghetto, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and a sub-camp of Stutthof, and made his way to England in 1947, where he settled in north London, married a fellow survivor and spent the last forty years of his life talking to British schoolchildren. He met more young people in Britain on Holocaust testimony work than almost anyone else of his generation. Prince William and Prince Harry both visited him at home for testimony sessions in 2017 in connection with their work for the Holocaust Educational Trust.
He was born Zygmunt Szpicer in Łódź in 1930. His parents separated when he was a small child and he was raised by his paternal grandparents. He was nine when the Germans took the city in September 1939. The Łódź ghetto was sealed in April 1940 with around one hundred and sixty four thousand Jews inside. He worked, like every child over ten, in the ghetto factories, in his case in a metal shop. The starvation in the ghetto killed his grandfather and reduced him by his thirteenth year to under thirty kilos.
He was deported with his grandmother to Auschwitz-Birkenau in August 1944 on one of the last Łódź transports, after the ghetto was finally liquidated. The grandmother was sent to the gas chambers on arrival. Zigi, fourteen and looking younger, was nearly sent with her. A man on the ramp told the SS officer he was older than he looked and could work. He was selected for labour, tattooed B-18814, and sent on within weeks to a sub-camp of Stutthof in eastern Pomerania, where he worked through the autumn and winter of 1944 in conditions even worse than at Auschwitz. The death march out of the camp in early 1945 took him north along the Baltic coast in winter conditions that killed most of the people on it. He was liberated by British forces near Neustadt-in-Holstein in May 1945. He was fifteen and weighed under thirty five kilos.
He found his mother in London in 1947. He had not seen her since he was a small child. He spent his working life in office machines and stationery in north London. He married Jeanette, also a survivor, in 1956. They had two daughters and six grandchildren. From the late 1980s onwards he gave testimony in British schools, sometimes with his friend Manfred Goldberg, on a programme run by the Holocaust Educational Trust. He visited Auschwitz and Łódź many times with school groups. The two princes’ visit to his Bushey home in 2017, at which Goldberg was also present, was the basis of a Royal Foundation film on Holocaust testimony.
Shipper was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire in 2016 for services to Holocaust education. He died on 17 January 2023, the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day, at the age of ninety three. The work continues through Holocaust Educational Trust testimonies he recorded and through the daughters and grandchildren who carry his story now.
See also
Sources
- Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 2 vols, HarperCollins, 1997 and 2007
- Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2004
- Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2010
- Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936 to 1945: Nemesis, Allen Lane, 2000
- Trial transcripts and judgment, Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949 onwards