Our family had lived peacefully in Warsaw for generations when the Nazis brutally invaded Poland in 1939.
In the 1930s, my grandfather, Duvid Gingold, delivered seltzer bottles. My grandmother, Leah, worked in a neighborhood bakery. When my father, Sam, was 7 years old, he played stones against a courtyard wall with his friends and went to services with his father. They worked, prayed, relished family time and kept to themselves, aware of the antisemitism that surrounded them. On Fridays, Sam smiled at the carp swimming in the apartment’s bathtub. The weekly Shabbat dinner would have fresh fish and shards of bakery leftovers. It was that simple and beautiful.
When the Germans bombed Warsaw on Sept. 20, 1939, life was shattered, erased. The Gingolds' building was shelled, blowing out the facade and guts of the apartments onto the population bolting in the streets. In an instant, my family joined the new refugees who instantly abandoned their lives, scrambling to exit the leveled city. A delay meant death, as Warsaw and its life was razed. However, there was one complication to my family’s effort to flee.
On the day the Germans bombed the city, my grandmother........