San Diego. Calif— Holocaust survivor Benjamin “Ben” Midler, 98 years old, is a living lesson of pure hope and optimism in the way he tells his survival of the Holocaust as a 13 year old boy.
On June 9, 2026, the San Diego Weekly editorial team went to the encounter of Ben at the La Jolla Library inside the RUTH, Remember Us the Holocaust, exhibition. What follows is Ben Midler’s account of his story living as a Jewish person during Holocaust. A poignant testimony of why we owe ultimate remembrance to all those massacred during that time.
The Ordinary Livelihood of a Boy in Bialystok
Born on June 27, 1928, in Bialystok, Poland, a city with one of the most vibrant Jewish communities in pre-World War II Eastern Europe, Ben led a seemingly ordinary childhood. Son of dairy producers and the oldest of three children, he went to Hebrew school and worked as a presser in a tailor shop. His life was marked by a relentless work ethic, one that, in cruel irony, would later keep him alive.
When Germany declared War on Poland, in 1939, the country was split in two. The west fell under the Germans, and the east came under control of their allies at the time, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, officially the Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the USSR, was a non-aggression pact committing both sides to neither aid nor ally itself with an enemy of the other for the following 10 years. Under the Secret Additional Protocol of August 23, 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union agreed to partition Poland; Latvia, Estonia, Finland and Bessarabia were allotted to the Soviet sphere, between Nazi Germany and the USSR, with a secret protocol establishing Soviet and German spheres of influence across Eastern Europe. The pact was signed in Moscow on August 24, 1939 by Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov and German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. Ben described his life in Soviet controlled Poland as the better of two bad options, one where Jews could do most things except running businesses and practice their religion.
June 22, 1941
Though, when Germany declared war on the Soviet Union, the life of Ben Midler, thirteen years old at the time became a six-year struggle for survival. Ben recalls the events with exceptional precision “I do not look up any papers, or books because it’s all in memory” he said. Indeed he remembers this day because he was supposed to celebrate his Bar Mitzvah a week after, one that he got to rejoice 75 years later, but he also remembers June, 1941 because it’s when the Germans burned down the Bialystok synagogue with roughly 2,000 Jewish people inside. A month later, 5,000 people were rounded up. Ben’s father was one of them. They were marched into the forest and killed into a mass grave. Forced to wear a cloth star of David, Ben, his mother and siblings were moved to a small part of the city, commonly known as a ghetto. Cramped into a fraction of the living space he had known before, Ben lived there for about two years.
The First of Many Miracles
In August, 1943, the Bialystok ghetto was liquidated. Jews were marched to a field near the train station where so many of them had been gathered that it took close to seven days to move everyone. On the fifth day, Ben recalls the first of three miracles.
A German officer worked through the crowd with a cane. Its rounded handle hooked around the necks of a few chosen individuals. Ben, his uncle and cousin were among these people, they were pulled aside and packed in three different cattle cars where 150 others were waiting. Little did he know that the officer had just saved his life. The rest of the train started rolling out in the direction of Treblinka’s extermination camp where Jews were stripped of their clothese taken to gas chambers, and placed in ovens to vaporize the bodies. Ben’s car was left behind on the side of the track. The locomotive returned and hooked them up in the direction to Majdanek. Majdanek at the time was both a labor and extermination camp. Ben said his life at the camp was picking up stones and gravel from one place to another without real work to be done.
Saved by honesty
One day, prisoners were ordered in the yard and told to call out the work they had been doing in the ghetto. Ben’s uncle advised him to tell the Nazis he was a Mechanic so they’d survive together, certain the Nazis needed hands to repair vehicles and machinery for their war. When Ben came face to face with a stern-looking officer, the boy panicked and told the truth “So I told the German officer I was a presser” he said.
It was a panic that saved his life. Ben was sorted in with the tailors and pressers, his survival now rested on the simple fact that German soldiers needed uniforms, coats, and shoes. Thus, a boy who could repair clothes was worth keeping. Those left behind were taken into the woods and killed, his uncle was one of them. In 2004, when he returned to that forest where he saw a plaque recording some 15,000 dead.
The Will to Keep Moving with Desperate Hope
Ben was sent onward to Blizyn. There the Germans had no use for a presser so he was put to work in a quarry. He spent a year there being rationed on a thin slice of bread in the morning, marmalade if he was lucky, a bouillon at midday, and bread again at night. He told, that when some would die in the midst of the night, he would eat the bread they had saved because survival left him no other choice.
In May, 1944 when the Soviet offensive pressed close, prisoners were marched west toward Auschwitz-Birkenau. A week after his arrival he was tattooed “B2433“, the B for Birkenau where spent six months digging pits. He forced himself to work harder than his body could handle because he understood the arithmetic of the camp: to stop working was to be useless, to be useless was to be killed.
As the front evolved, he was transferred, once more, to Oranienburg, Sachsenhausen and lastly Ohrdruf. Through each camp Ben kept volunteering, grappling with the hope that the next transfer would bring him close to his his family. He refused to stand still and that kept him alive. His father once taught him that discipline and hard work would not kill him, and so by volunteering one last time, he was sent out of Ohrdruf to Babelsberg to clear the rubble from the streets. When Eisenhower’s troops reached Ohrdruf in April 1945 all they could find were the dead bodies of the priosoners left behind. Ben was already gone. That was his third miracle.
The Journey Home
Ben was liberated in 1945, he was the only survivor in his family. After liberation he ended up at Brest-Litovsk working for the Red Army. Certain his family was still alive, he went home to Bialystok, there, he found no one, only a few Jews who told him there was nothing left for him in Poland. They pointed him toward Lodz where soldiers of the Jewish brigade from Palestine were gathering survivors to bring them to the Land of Israel.
So began a new journey. It took six months across Poland, Slovakia, Greece and Italy before he was loaded in a boat sailing for Palestine. Ben reached its shores in 1946. At nineteen he was enlisted to serve in the Israeli army and fought in besieged Jerusalem, he was released in 1950.
Building a New Life
That same year, Ben met Esther, his wife. They married in January 1951 and raised three daughters. In the meantime, his desperate search for his family had finally been answered. He traced relatives living in Argentina and the United States and it was his mother’s sisters, living in the U.S who found him and sent the visa that brought him to Chicago. There he worked for eighteen years in a milk dairy before buying an auto part store in Illinois. Ben later settled in San Diego where he still lives.
Why does it matter?
Ben Midler is one of the last witnesses to a world that no longer exists. The Bialystok of his boyhood, where Yiddish filled the streets and where a small temple stood on every corner was erased along with his family.
Ben is the voice of the millions who can no longer speak, he did not survive just to live, he survived to make sure we cannot look away and forget. Ben has spent decades sharing his testimony in schools, on TV and to anyone willing to listen and he continues to do so.
“We must speak and fight back anti-semitism. There is a rise of bigotry, hatred and prejudice around the world. We should confront hatred and racism forcefully without compromise to stop atrocities and the persecution of people because of their religious beliefs”
Benjamin Midler
Benjamin Midler is one of the last few individuals with a number stamped on their skin, one of the last few to have lived the atrocities of the Holocaust. Soon there will be no one left to do so. The duty of remembering, of holding to the 11million of individuals murdered during the Holocaust, and to the boy who was meant to die among them now rests on our shoulders. That is the weight Ben has spent his life trying to hand us. He set it all down in his memoir, The Life of a Child Survivor.
Today he is 98 years old, and in superb health. His secret? Walking everyday, farther than most us would, and keep an unmatched positiviy. Indeed Ben describes himselft as a positive men. His motto “Yesterday is gone, today is today, and tomorrow will be a better day”, a philosophy that guided Ben in his telling of the Holocaust. His message is one we should all carry: remember, refuse to look away, and never let it happen again.
For more information about the RUTH exhibition and survivors living in the San Diego County, check https://rememberustheholocaust.org/
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