Mendel Rozenblit

Mendel was one of six children born to a religious Jewish family. When Mendel was in his early 20s, he married and moved with his wife to her hometown of Wolomin, near Warsaw. One week after the Rozenblits' son, Avraham, was born, Mendel's wife died. Distraught after the death of his young wife and left to care for a baby, Mendel married his sister-in-law Perele.

1933-39: In Wolomin Mendel ran a lumber yard. In 1935 the Rozenblits had a daughter, Tovah. When Avraham and Tovah were school age, they began attending a Jewish day school, where they studied general subjects in Polish and Jewish subjects in Hebrew. Avraham was 8 and Tovah was 4 when the Germans invaded Poland on September 1, 1939.

1940-44: By the fall of 1940 the Rozenblit family had been sent to the Warsaw ghetto. During the ghetto uprising in April 1943, Mendel and his family managed to escape to the outskirts of Warsaw. They decided that if anyone should get lost in the chaos, they would all meet at a designated farmhouse. Suddenly, Avraham disappeared. Perele set out to find him, and was never seen again. Mendel eventually found Avraham, shoeless, at the farmhouse. Not long after, Mendel, Avraham and Tovah were arrested and deported to Auschwitz.

At Auschwitz Mendel was selected for hard labor. His children were gassed. In 1947 Mendel immigrated to the United States, where he began a new family.