Holocaust Survivor, Minnetonka Resident Shares Harrowing Story of Death, Life

Murray Brandys, now 89, leaned on a podium as he began to tell his life story to a room full of strangers.

Nearly 75 years to the day after Germany invaded Poland, and Brandys’ life changed forever, he was here to help people remember the tragedy of the Holocaust, and to adhere to the Jewish mantra of “Never forget. Never again.”

Brandys, now retired with his wife and living in Minnetonka, survived internment at six different concentration camps, including the infamous Buchenwald. After five years captive –his teen-age years scarred with the atrocities of Nazi punishment – the United States Third Army Division freed him when they found 156 survivors from Buchenwald that had been marched to a women’s prison in Laufen, Austria. At the time, he was 20, and weighed 65 pounds.

“For six months of that, I never changed my clothes. I never brushed my teeth,” he said.

At one of the camps, Hundsfeld – Brandys’ first, he was literally fed boiled grass to eat, along with a ration of bread.

Meanwhile, he and other Polish Jews were performing backbreaking work, forming bricks and carrying them to wagons. Those bricks were to be used to repair bombe-out houses back in Germany.

“How did you survive? What went through your mind?” asked a student, one of many St. Michael-Albertville High School teens in the crowd.

“I always told myself that, ‘You know, I’m gonna outlive them.’ I’d look at them [the SS guards] and think that.” 

Against all odds, he has. After five years of whippings, beatings, cold showers, no food and attack dogs, Brandys survived what 6 million other Jews did not.

His worst experiences came at Buchenwald, where at one point he was asked to unload dead prisoners off a truck (after a march back from another camp), and “stack them like lumber,” before they were placed in the crematorium.

At another point, he was pulled aside by the citizen-police who patrolled the camps. He had sung for his captors at other camps, and performed for his captors at Buchenwald as well.

As a result, he’s named his memoir “My Name was NO. 133909, and I Sang.”

“My family was very musical. I loved to perform. One of my siblings, a sister, was a trained opera singer. So a friend of mine and I would sing for them. I don’t know if they always liked it,” he recalled.

As the Third Army and the Russian Army closed in on Weimar, which was home to the Buchenwald complex, Brandys and 1,500 other prisoners were marched out of the camp.

“They tossed bread out of the back of a wagon, and people trampled each other for it. This was going to be a death march,” Brandys said.

Brandys pushed a cart, which made him valuable. At one point, not thinking, he reached down for what he thought was food.

“I was caught immediately and taken back to the death commando. I knew, at any moment, I would be executed,” he said.

So Brandys sang for the men.

“It was the solo of my life.”

For whatever reason, he was pushed back in line.

The march led to into Austria. The SS dropped the prisoners, now down to 156, at the prison. The soldiers grabbed civilian clothes out of trunks (on the carts the prisoners had pushed), changed, and walked away.

“We saw garbage cans, and ran for the potato peelings. We ate for the first time in days,” he said. “The women there, at the prison, cried when they saw us.”

Documents created stated Brandys was only 17, so instead of an adult prisoner of war, he was treated as a child. That worked to his advantage, as efforts of the Red Cross and even First Lady Elanor Roosevelt got him to America.

“You students,” he said, in closing, “have every opportunity here. You can do whatever you want to do in life.”

Asked if he’s ever gone back to Europe, Brandys said candidly he’s never wanted to.

“My life is here. Everything I could see there, I can see here.”

He built a successful life in the U.S., even bringing his two surviving brothers to the States. His parents, two sisters and two brothers were all killed in camps, including Auschwitz.