Yossel Wajntraub was born in 1914 in Żywiec, a small industrial and market town in southern Poland near the Silesian border. The region was still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the time, becoming Polish after the First World War. Żywiec had a modest but established Jewish community living alongside Catholic Polish neighbours; a brewery, a paper mill and sawmills gave the town its working rhythms.
His family were artisans. His father ran a small carpentry workshop attached to their home, producing furniture for local households and nearby estates. Yossel learned the trade from childhood, first sweeping shavings, then sanding joints, then working wood under his father’s eye. By his late teens he was regarded locally as a skilled carpenter, known for careful joinery and plain, durable work.
In the interwar years he remained in Żywiec, gradually taking over the workshop as his father’s health declined. He married Chana Rosenfeld in 1938. They were considering expanding the business when war broke out in 1939. After the German invasion, Żywiec was absorbed into the territory annexed directly to the Reich. The Jewish population was subjected to escalating restrictions, forced labour, and deportation. Yossel’s trade kept him in the town for longer than most. He was put to work under guard repairing and constructing wooden structures for the occupying administration.
In March 1943 he, Chana and their newborn son Mendel were deported to Auschwitz. Chana and Mendel were taken from the ramp to the gas chambers of Birkenau and killed within the hour. Yossel was selected for the carpentry workshop in the main camp, given prisoner number 107842, and assigned to a block under a German criminal kapo named Bruno. The workshop produced crates, fittings, bunk frames and the wooden infrastructure on which the camp ran. He was there for almost two years. Skill kept him alive longer than most. Chance did the rest.
After liberation in January 1945 he did not go back to Żywiec. Like many survivors, he spent time in displaced persons camps in the British zone of Germany, first at Bergen-Belsen and then at Hohne, slowly regaining strength and working again as a carpenter, repairing furniture for other survivors. He emigrated to Britain in 1947, carrying only his trade, fragments of memory, and a deep reluctance to speak of the past. He settled in Manchester, married another survivor, Rivka Lewin, and built a new, quiet life. They had two children. He rarely spoke of Auschwitz, even to his family, offering only brief answers when asked. Silence, for him, was not avoidance alone but a sense that language could not hold what had happened, and might even diminish it.
That changed in the late 1970s. A Jewish community organisation contacted him seeking survivor testimony. He refused at first, but the request was framed as a loss of living witnesses rather than a personal confession, and it stayed with him. Around the same time, his daughter brought home a distorted account of the Holocaust from school. Hearing it unsettled him. He realised not only that the collective memory of the Holocaust was fading, but that it could be reshaped in ways that obscured what had occurred.
His first testimony was not public, but a recorded interview given in fragments. It exhausted him, and afterwards he returned to silence. Yet something had shifted: the experience had been placed outside himself. A year later he agreed, reluctantly, to speak at a school in Manchester. He insisted he would not take open questions. The talk was halting and restrained, but he was struck by the attention of the students: quiet, serious, unperformative. What changed him was not ease, but responsibility. He came to see testimony as a kind of craft: shaping fractured material into something that could still stand and be passed on. Even then, he never became comfortable with it. He withdrew at times.
He settled into a pattern: speaking occasionally, carefully, as though performing a difficult and necessary trade.