Beginning with the occupation of Poland in September 1939 and especially after June 1941, a wave of mass murder swept across Europe. At the end of the war, it became clear that about 6 million Jews, including about 1.5 million children, were exterminated by the Nazi killers.

At the beginning of the war (end of 1939 – beginning of 1940) my parents fled east to the Soviet Union and spent the war period in Magnitogorsk. In 1946 they returned as a married couple with two children to liberated Poland, but what they found were only burnt remains and no relatives.

Before the war, my relatives lived in Lodz, a large industrial city, where my father arrived with his family, following the great depression (in the early 1930s) that also affected Eastern Europe, from Koniecpol. My mother’s family lived in Lodz from the 19th century.

In my research I found documents from the Lodz ghetto, in which most of my relatives are listed, both from the Dickerman and Tushinski families. See reference to the entry “Lodz Ghetto” on Wikipedia.

After his death, my relative David Minc left me all the documents he had from the Holocaust period, mainly letters from his family members and a number of photos. I transferred all the documents to Yad Vashem for keepsake. I also transferred to Yad Vashem all the letters that my father had in his possession from the period after the war, mainly correspondence with Holocaust survivors.