At the time of World War II my grandfather Louis Licht had two of his brothers and their families living in Warsaw: Eisek and Yisha, and Moishe and Ester. Eisek and Yisha had four children, their oldest son named Tunik, two other sons and one daughter. These eight relatives  were lost in the Holocaust.

Another brother of Louis Licht, Josef, immigrated from Warsaw to Haifa, in 1925. He and his family moved to Haifa, Palestine in 1925.

Simon Lechtuz is the son of Josef, and my father’s cousin. Carolynn and I met him in Los Angeles in 1997. He told us Ben and  Mayer Licht went  from Ukraine to Warsaw to work and go to school, stayed at Josef’s house. They went back to Ukraine. Ben later told Simon he remembered him as a child playing under the table in Warsaw.  Simon said his father made men’s pants, the family was poor. Simon had his Bar Mitzvah and went to Heder in Warsaw. Simon and his sister Sara were born in Warsaw. His younger siblings were born in Palestine.

My grandfather, Louis Licht, in 1935  visited his brothers Eisek and Moishe and their and family in Warsaw, and Josef and his family in Haifa.

Simon  Lechtuz, said that when he was in India in World War II, as a soldier in the Palestinian brigade of the British Army, he met a man serving in India  who told him about Eisek and Moishe, that they owned a large sweater factory which employed 400 people and sold sweaters to Europe.

Daniel Mendelsohn, author of The Lost: A Search For Six Of The Six Million, spoke at the SFJCC in May 2008 and Carolynn and I heard his message.  I referred to his search in my chapter The Shtetl and the Aftermath. There is a similarity between his story and my story. His search was also for the brother of his grandfather, wife, and four daughters, killed in the Holocaust in the shtetl Bohlekiv, Ukraine. A brother had gone to Israel in the 1920’s. His grandfather went to the United States. I also have a few pictures of my lost relatives. Daniel’s pictures had written on the back: “killed by the Nazis”, and he referred to “the unknown and the unknowable” (7).

I once told a friend who was a survivor, that I didn’t know about my relatives lost in the Holocaust until about the year 1999, and my father and grandfather never talked about them. My friend asked me why? Daniel Mendelsohn spoke about how it was too painful for close to relatives to talk about it. When his grandfather died they found that the wallet he always carried with him had many letters from his brother in Europe trying to leave, and there must have been guilt by the survivors that they couldn’t have gotten their relatives out in time to save their lives.

Before World War II  Warsaw’s Jewish community of more than 400,000 was the largest in Europe.

The Nazis occupied Warsaw in September 1939, in 1940 they forced all the Jews to move into one area, which became a Ghetto, forced the Jews to build a surrounding wall, sealed it and anyone caught trying to leave was shot. There were two sections,  divided  by a street car line. In 1941 about 450,000 Jews were in the 740 acre Ghetto. The Jews were 38% of the population, the ghetto was 4.5% of the size of Warsaw.

Some died by disease, some by starvation, some were transported away to Treblinka and  gassed there, and some died in the Warsaw Uprising at the end. I don’t know how my relatives died, but I know that they should not have died.

Nelly Cesana (nee Zygler), May 2, 2003, spoke at Beth El and wrote in the J. She was 4 years old when she went to live in the Warsaw ghetto. She remembers the fear, never feeling safe, constantly hiding. The hunger: no food, no milk. “German soldiers were everywhere”. There was disease, she survived typhus. Her brother was on the outside disguised as a Catholic, he smuggled out Nelly and her mother two weeks before the uprising.

In 1942 300,000 Jews were deported from the Warsaw Ghetto to Treblinka concentration camp. A total of about 900,000 Jews were killed at Treblinika.

When reports of mass murder leaked back, a resistance group in the Warsaw Ghetto, led by Mordecai Abnielewicz, they fired on German troops as they tried to round up Jews for the railroad cars. April 19, 1943, the Warsaw ghetto uprising began. Seven hundred and fifty fighters fought the heavily armed Germans. They held out for nearly a month, until May 16, 1943. Of the more than 56,000 Jews captured, about 7,000 were shot, and the remainder were deported to concentration camps (Bachrach, 70).

Miriam Wiener wrote that the uprising “pitted about 750 barely armed youngsters and some 40,000 unarmed Jews who had dug into underground bunkers against 2,000 superbly armed German troops. The uprising lasted nearly a month; its defeat required the incineration of nearly every building in the ghetto. The old Jewish quarter of Warsaw was completely destroyed. Mordecai Abnielewicz, the leader of the uprising, and his general staff committed suicide in their bunker at Mila 18 to avoid capture. To celebrate his victory, General Jurgen Stroop, the commander, ordered the dynamiting of Warsaw’s Great Synagogue. (117)

December 2004, Laurie Copans wrote in the J, Newly discovered Warsaw ghetto diary describes last days of the uprising. The six page diary has surfaced in a Holocaust museum in Israel. The identity and fate of the author is unknown. She described a nine day period starting on the sixth day of the uprising, April 24, 1943 to May 2, when she lived in a basement crowded with others, smoky from the outside fires.  “She lived on a bowl of soup and a cup of coffee a day. Outside the Germans were burning down houses.” Her last entry: “The only thing we are left with is our hiding place, of course this will not be a safe place for very long. We live this day, this hour, this moment.” These pages are part of a large collection by Adolf-Abraham Berman, a survivor of the ghetto and leader of the Underground, now living in Israel.

From 1939 to 1943  Warsaw historian Emanuel Ringelblum and a group of colleagues secretly collected documents of Jewish life in Nazi occupied Poland. They stuffed the documents in metal cans and buried them in three sites. Two were found after the War, and are known as the Ringelbaum Archive.

In 2005 an exhibit of the Archive came to the SFJCC, and there was a speaker. She was born in Warsaw in 1935. In the ghetto the Nazis told them they would be relocated, promised them bread and jam if they went to the train station (to Treblinka). They tried to hide, suffered from starvation. She escaped on a train to Berlin, had false papers, wore a cross.

In April 2005 Alexandra Wall reported in the J that Warsaw museum on the verge of breaking ground. It will be a museum of history of Jews in Poland. The Polish government has donated the land, which is near the memorial in the former ghetto, and 26 million of the 33 million needed to construct the building. It will be for research, and every Polish student will visit it.

In 2000 Carolynn and I went to Warsaw. We walked through the area that formerly was the Warsaw ghetto. We saw the main monument, the monument at the leaders bunker, the monument at the location where they left for the train, the site of the future museum in the park, and the approximate boundaries of the former ghetto. Most of the area is redeveloped into businesses and housing.    …

The Pianist, is a 2002 movie by Roman Polaski starring Adrein Brody, based on the book, which is the true story of Wladyslaw Szpilman in Warsaw from 1939 to 1945. He went from being one of Poland’s leading pianists, to hiding in the Warsaw ghetto in empty rooms eating scraps of food, after his entire family was taken away to the death camps. In the final scene in the movie he is barely alive wandering in the desolate ruins of the bombed and burned ghetto.

Mila 18 by Leon Uris, is the 1961 novel about the Warsaw ghetto and the 1943 uprising. 18 Mila Street is the address of the command bunker of the leaders of the uprising. The characters are fictitious, but represent the small group of Jews who hopelessly courageously fought against the Nazis.

Elie Wiesel wrote: “Let us remember the heroes of Warsaw, the martyrs of Treblinka, the children of Auschwitz. They fought alone, they suffered alone, they lived alone, but they did not die alone, for something in all of us died with them.