Father's Hometown of Lublin

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"My father was born in Lublin, Poland. 1919. He was a student. My father was the youngest of sixteen children. Fifteen of those children were girls. He basically was just a typical teenager -- growing up with a fairly Orthodox Jewish family.

[During the Holocaust] Lublin had a fairly small ghetto area. They were pretty much confined to that area, as was most of the Jewish population in Lublin.

My father, in 1939 when the Nazis and Hitler did invade Poland, my father became part of a resistance fighter group. Fighting the Nazis. He told me that they would go out at night and they would throw Molotov cocktails at German tanks. They would blow up bridges. They would try to put as much resistance toward the Nazis. And one evening in late September of 1939, my father went home and was told by his mom that the SS troops were there that afternoon looking for him, and that he had to report to them or the family would be taken to Majdanek, which was a concentration camp outside of Lublin. Instead of reporting he and some of his friends escaped across the border into the Ukraine and met up with a resistance group that my mother was part of."