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Jane Ulman

Jane Ulman

Survivor Charles Selarz: Hard labor, love and eventual freedom

Charles Selarz, then Chaim Szklarz, was standing outside with a few friends in early September 1939 when German aircraft suddenly attacked their town of Wohyn, Poland, firebombing the small houses clustered within a two-block area, where the town’s approximately 1,000 Jews lived.

Magda Kahan: Saved, ‘because I had somebody’

\”Give us your jewelry.” The two Hungarian men startled Magda Kahan — then Meisels — and her mother, who were standing in the kitchen of a small house they shared with another family in the Munkacs ghetto.

Jacob Bresler: Riding out tribulation and making it to liberation

Mid-morning on Sept. 1, 1939, Jacob Bresler was playing at the one-pump gas station near his family’s apartment in Uniejow, Poland, rolling the metal rim of an automobile wheel with a wire stick, when a bomb suddenly exploded at the town hall, diagonally across the street.

Survivor: David Wiener

David Wiener was standing on the corner outside his family’s apartment house in Lodz at sundown on Nov. 15, 1939, when German trucks abruptly swarmed the Altshtot (Old Town) synagogue across the street.

Survivor Fred Klein: ‘No name, no number’

The doorbell rang at 6:45 a.m. on Sept. 1, 1939, waking 17-year-old Fred (then Friedrich) Klein, who was at home in Pilsen, Czechoslovakia, on vacation from art school in Prague.

Survivor Paula Lebovics: Staying alive by making herself invisible

“If he can work, I can work, too,” 9-year-old Paula Lebovics — then Pesa Balter — told herself after her older brother, Josef, 14, left the small, rat-infested room that had served as one of their many hiding places in the defunct brick factory for many weeks, ever since the Ostrowiec ghetto was liquidated on June 10, 1943.

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