Journey Through the Inferno

Book excerpt: Memoirs of Boren, born to the Borenstejn family in Warsaw ca. 1925. Boren feld from the Nazis with his father and brother in September 1939, with the hope of later rescuing his mother and sister. They found shelter in Bialystok and then in Krzemieniec. After the Nazi occupation in 1941 they were persecuted by local Ukrainians and then interned in the ghetto. They tried to escape but were caught and imprisoned. His father and brother were hanged, but Boren escaped and made his way back to the Warsaw ghetto. His sister had died of typhoid fever; he was reunited with his mother, from whom he hid the fate of her husband and other son. Describes life in the ghetto and the uprising, during which his mother was killed. Boren served as a courier during the uprising, but was captured and deported. He survived Majdanek, Auschwitz, and Sachsenhausen, and two death marches. In 1946 he emigrated to the U.S.