When the war started I was out out of the building, of the building where we lived. It was near a hospital the building. And all of a sudden the airplanes came, and for ten hours bombed Warsaw. The next day the newspaper said that 80,000 people were killed that day in Warsaw. I saw, I mean, people, animals laying in the street killed. And the order came out from the Polish government, every man 15 years to 55 has to register to defend Warsaw, and I was 16 or 17. I had to go and register, so I went to register for the army.

I found out from my aunt about the partisans. I didn’t know what a partisan is, and I just wanted to fight the Germans because what they did to the Jews. I had to get, to get together with my friends, we were about nine or ten, I don’t remember. And the rumors was that the war wouldn’t last more than three months after England and France got into the war. So we were talking about it, and I was the main speaker, and I said to them, “My cousin told us that there’s a partisan group forming in a village near Lublin.” So we decided, and I told my mother, my father, my brother that I gonna go. For a few weeks, few weeks.

The friends I run away from Warsaw ghetto with about five of them went to farmers house one day to get some food, and they found some liquor there. And they stayed there, ate and drank liquor. Got drunk, and the farmer called police. They came and shot five of them. So I lost, already, my friends. Three of my friends did not want to stay there, went back to the Warsaw ghetto. So I was the only one from the group who stayed with Korzinski. Little by little we got, bought some guns, we ambushed Polish police, we took away the guns from them, we started to do some work against Germans.

I used to get letters from my mother. She used to send a letter from the ghetto to the Polish site…from the Polish site, send a letter to a Polish guy where we used to camp in the forest, a friend of ours, a supporter of the partisans. And my mother wrote to me that they’re starving, that they have got nothing to eat in the ghetto. I left my partisan group, and I went to the Warsaw ghetto…I knew all the tricks how to get in and out of the ghetto. And I got into the ghetto and I brought all the food. And I…the last time…The last time I saw my parents and my brothers.

They used to do a trick, the Germans used to send spy planes every morning, to look around where we are. We used to get drops from Russia; ammunition, mines by parachute. So we had a lot of parachute. I even had underwear made, my underwear were from parachute. So what we used to do, we used to take the parachute about a mile from our camp where we stayed, hang it up on a tree, and then another this way. And the Germans came and bombed the parachute and we fired at them with machine guns and cut them down, the airplanes.

We got together, we heard there was a camp near Lublin, Jewish prisoners were there. Yanishus Youbleski. We were eight or ten guys. Two Russians and the rest Jews. Going to liberate the camp. When it got dark, we crawled up to the camp. In the first was a Jewish policeman standing near the gate. We killed him, and then two Ukrainians, we killed them. And the other Ukrainians supposedly ran away, and we went to the camp and 600 Jews were freed. One day, I spoke at the Federation here in Los Angeles, about my experience, and I said that the part of liberating camp in Yanishus Youbleski, a camp with 600 Jews. A guy stood up in the audience and said “I was in the camp.”

I think that human mind cannot comprehend what happened, that this is gonna happen. Could you comprehend this? That this could happen? Human mind cannot comprehend this. That they were gonna take people and gas them and kill them by the millions. I could never comprehend this. So that’s why it didn’t even come into my mind. All right, they put them in the ghetto. They still gonna survive. No, no they’re not.