ARN MANSFELD

ARN MANSFELD (b. October 20, 1910)

            He was born in Lodz, Poland.  He was a bookkeeper until WWII in the Aguda Bank in Lodz, later he was confined in the ghetto there, from which in 1944 he was deported to the Hasag ammunitions factory in Częstochowa.  In January 1945 he was sent to the Buchenwald Concentration Camp, from there to Dachau and Bergen-Belsen death camp, where he was liberated by the British army.  From 1947 he was living in the United States.  He began writing in Hebrew and Yiddish in 1928, published a story about Hassidic life in Hakedem (The days of yore) in Lodz (1930), edited by Y. Krakovski, and went on to published stories and articles as well in Nayer folksblat (New people’s newspaper) and elsewhere, in Lodz.  In the Lodz ghetto, he was a member of Miriam Ulyanover’s writers’ group.  Several of his ghetto novels were discovered in the Lodz ghetto archive.  Over the years 1945-1947, he was a contributor to Di yidishe vokh (The Jewish week) in London, in which, among other items, he placed reportage pieces on ghetto and camp life.  He was last living in New York. 

Sources: B. Mark, Umgekumene shrayber fun di getos un lagern (Murdered writers from the ghettos and camps) (Warsaw, 1954), p. 161; Khayim Leyb Fuks, in Fun noentn over (New York) 3 (1957), p. 273.

Khayim Leyb Fuks