"In 1939 the war broke out. A couple of days later, the Germans marched in, marched in on the main street. They marched in with--everything was motorized--motorcycles--and it looked nice to me. Everything became like a parade. I was a kid so I wanted to see a parade. So I went to go look at the parade. My parents didn’t know that I was going. So there had been a shiksa over there, a Polish or a German woman. She said, 'Here is a Jude,' and she pointed to me, 'A Jewish boy!' So I saw what was going on and I snuck back home.

Well, it started to come to the point when they started to grab Jewish people, before we were all sent to the ghetto. They grabbed Jewish people to work, to do different things, one being my dad who had been grabbed to work too. My mother had been worried. He didn’t come home on time, you know? When he came home, he told the whole story—they grabbed him to work and they hit him. He didn’t want to talk about it…A year later, they would surround the ghetto with a fence. The people would go into the ghetto..."

--from Alter Pisarek of Łódź, Poland. Read an account of his life before and during World War II by clicking here.