For several years we have brought you stories of Sparks resident Mitka Kalinski. Mr. Kalinski survived the Holocaust as a child-slave on a Nazi soldier's farm.

Last week (late Nov.2023) Mitka fulfilled his decades-long wish to visit the Holocaust Museum. We had the privilege of traveling with him, a trip made possible by Honor Flight Nevada.

For this week's Someone 2 Know - we join Mitka as he steps back some 80 years in time.

At the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, the sights and sounds are immediately evocative and intense, and for Holocaust survivor Mitka Kalinski;

"Oh, did it ever bring back memories, jeez"

The US Holocaust Museum is a living memorial to the persecution and murder of six million European Jews by the Nazi regime between 1933 and 1945. Mitka Kalinski is a living witness. His story begins as a Jewish child in Poland; “That's where my mother was burned alive - 1939. I became an orphan.”

At an orphanage, then a boarding school in Soviet Ukraine, Kalinski escaped death several times as the Nazi’s continued their ethnic cleansing.  When Mitka was about six or seven years old, he remembers being packed with others inside a cattle wagon like the one on display at the museum.

“How can you forget a cattle wagon when I’m inside”

The Nazis used locked, windowless cattle wagons to deport and transport the Jewish people to ghettos and concentration camps (also known as extermination camps).

“See, I survived the cattle wagon, here, you're looking at me. How about the other people with me?”

Some of Mitka's questions may forever remain unanswered; “Those people that were with me, what happened to them?”

Historians say upwards of 17 million people died during the Holocaust. Mitka survived when a Nazi soldier put him to work as a child slave on his farm. In 1945 the Allied Forces of World War II began to free captives; “I was liberated in 1945 from General Patton, “ Kalinksi tells us, emphatically.

There was a lot to take in at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, and Mitka handled it with his signature stoicism. After the tour, Kalinski sat for an in-depth interview with an oral historian; “It’s very important to me to do that because I lost my family to Hitler.”

Especially important, adds Kalinski, to make sure kids know the truth about the Holocaust; “To teach the kids the same age as I was when I was in Germany”.

A memory Mitka promises to share as often as necessary, for as long as he is able.

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If you would like to learn more about Mr. Kalinski, his book, called "Mitka's Secret" is available for purchase, we have the link for that and links to the Holocaust Museum and Honor Flight Nevada, here -

Mitka’s Secret; A True Story of Child Slavery and Surviving the Holocaust https://www.mitka.life/

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum https://www.ushmm.org/

Honor Flight Nevada http://www.honorflightnv.org/