Oral History Interview with Armand Mednick

Armand Mednick, named “Avrum” by his Yiddish-speaking parents, was born in 1933 into a close, extended family in Brussels, Belgium. He grew up as a stranger in a non-Jewish neighborhood, often taunted by anti-Semites influenced by the fascist Rex Party. At age six, he was hospitalized with tuberculosis until May 1940, when his father, an active political leftist, fled with his family to France. His father was drafted into the French Army, deserted and placed his son, renamed “Armand”, in a sanitarium at Clermont-Ferrand in the Auvergne Mountains. Armand’s father, mother and baby sister hid nearby in Volvic, where they passed as Christians. When Armand recovered, he joined his family and attended Catholic school. At home, there was some Jewish observance and Armand recalls walking for seven miles with his father to attend a clandestine seder.

Armand’s father joined the French resistance in 1944 and the family returned to Brussels in 1945, where Armand was the first Bar Mitzvah celebrant after the war. The Mednick family moved to Philadelphia in 1947. Buchenwald death lists confirmed that most of their extended family of 55 relatives had been killed. Armand became a potter and teacher and produced a series of clay reliefs with symbolic Holocaust images, in an attempt to exorcise his painful childhood memories.

See also interview with his father, Bernard S. Mednicki.

Interviewee: MEDNICK, Armand Date: June 15, 1983