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.
She has a paper that her husband works for the Germans so she says, "Don't worry." I mean...I says, "But I have to worry because I am over seventeen. And if they see me, they will grab me." So she says, "Don't worry. You go hide." So I was hiding in the house and she went downstairs with my three sisters. Everybody was having that...that thing on the back of the thing with a piece of bread with a...with a schmates [cloth] inside. I don't know what they keep inside. And that's how they went downstairs. And this is the...the last time I saw them. Because the Germans, even if they saw the paper, they just took the paper like this and ripped it apart and they took them out. That time they took about ten thousand people to the place Umschlagplatz where they took the people to Treblinka. I was laying, hidden in a room in the top of the ceiling. They made like a blind room. If you wouldn't know it, you wouldn't know it's a room. But it actually was like a hideaway on the top of the ceiling. And I was laying there, and I heard the Germans came into the house and they take them out downstairs, and I was laying there. I didn't know what to do, what to say. And I figured because of the paper, he's going to read the paper and he's going to say, "Oh well," and he's going to let them stay. And he tell them to go downstairs. In the courtyard, there was already hundreds of people like this, and they took them away.
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