Abraham Lewent

Born 1924, Warsaw, Poland

Like many other Jews, the Lewents were confined to the Warsaw ghetto. In 1942, as Abraham hid in a crawl space, the Germans seized his mother and sisters in a raid. They perished. He was deployed for forced labor nearby, but escaped to return to his father in the ghetto. In 1943, the two were deported to Majdanek, where Abraham's father died. Abraham later was sent to Skarzysko, Buchenwald, Schlieben, Bisingen, and Dachau. U.S. troops liberated Abraham as the Germans evacuated prisoners.

Describes conditions in the Warsaw ghetto,Poland.

Lisa Derman
http://www.ushmm.org/outreach/ldg0689f.htm
They shrank the ghetto. They made it smaller and we moved in on the street called Operova. We move in. In one...we had one room. There were two rooms, a very rundown place, but however it was a little brick house and it was close to the gate where the ghetto was. In one room the four of us lived, a tiny little room. We had a bed, one bed where the three of us, the children, slept, and Daddy slept on a little bed cot, sort of. Next door, in the other room was a family, a young family, newly married and a brother that lived with them and they were wonderful to us. Wonderful. They did not have children of their own. They shared absolutely everything with us. The little bit of...the extra food, the extra hot water to wash. They sort of thought that maybe, maybe one of us maybe will survive or something. I don't know. It wasn't told to us but I somehow had the feeling. And um my father went to slave labor. I did not work in the ghetto. I was too young. In fact, um, my little brother would run out of the ghetto. He was blond and, and really, his Polish was so very good, and he he did many, many times run out on the Christian side, come back, would bring some food

Born in Poland, 1926

Lisa was the oldest of three children born to a religious Jewish family. Following the German occupation of her hometown in 1939, Lisa and her family moved to first to Augustow and then to Slonim (in Soviet-occupied eastern Poland). German troops captured Slonim in June 1941, during the invasion of the Soviet Union. In Slonim, the Germans established a ghetto which existed from 1941 to 1942. Lisa eventually escaped from Slonim, and went first to Grodno and then to Vilna, where she joined the resistance movement. She joined a partisan group, fighting the Germans from bases in the Naroch Forest. Soviet forces liberated the area in 1944.

Describes conditions in the ghetto in which she and her family were forced to live.