Abraham Lewent (1924–2002) was born in Warsaw, Poland in 1924. The Lewent family was living in Warsaw when the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939. Later, the Lewents were confined to the Warsaw ghetto. In summer 1942, Abraham's mother and three younger sisters were rounded up during the Great Action—the mass deportation of Jews from the Warsaw ghetto to the Treblinka killing center. They were likely killed upon arrival. Abraham was not caught in the Great Action, because during the round up he hid in a small space in the ceiling. Afterwards, Abraham found a forced labor assignment at a nearby airfield. He returned to the ghetto in December 1942, reuniting with his father. During the Warsaw ghetto uprising in April–May 1943, Abraham and his father saw the ghetto being burned to the ground. They were eventually rounded up and sent to the Lublin concentration camp (called Majdanek). Abraham's father died there. Later, Abraham was sent to the Skarżysko-Kamienna labor camp, then to Buchenwald and several other camps. US troops liberated Abraham from a train in April 1945.
We went to that Umschlagplatz. We were sitting three days over there, without water, without anything, for three days. And it was hot. On the third day they gave us water, and they said we're going to leave. Where we're going, we don't know. They put us on trains. I was together with my father, and with this man, and his wife, or his sister, was it? And they took us to Majdanek. Majdanek was a camp near Lublin, and over there was five fields. That means every field had eight or nine hundred people and it was barracks and there's nothing to do Majdanek. The only thing you were Majdanek you did, you sit sometime all day long, and sometime they took you out to work and a half of them never came back. They make you sit all day long and breaking up from big stones to make little stones, or digging holes, digging ditches, and covering the ditches up. That was the work. That's what you call, uh, a camp what actually is annihilation...they annihilate people, actually. Very little food. Very little food.
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