My father, a Catholic Pole, was captured by the Germans in 1940 
and taken to Buchenwald Concentration Camp. He spent almost 
5 years there as a slave laborer. My mom, a Catholic Polish teenager, 
was captured in 1942 after seeing her mother and sister raped by the
Germans and then killed along with her sister’s baby. My mom spent 
3 years in various slave labor camps in Germany.

Why were my parents taken to Germany?

The Germans needed workers because their men were trying to 
conquer the world and there was almost nobody left in Germany 
to work on the farms and in the factories. So the Germans brought 
about 12 million people from the countries they conquered into 
Germany. My parents were liberated in May of 1945. They spent the 
next 6 years in Displaced Persons Camps waiting for some country 
to allow them to come there. My parents wouldn’t go back to Poland 
because it had been taken over by the Russians. My father tried to 
return and was shot at by Russian soldiers. My uncle went back and 
was sent to Siberia where he died in a Russian concentration camp.
In 1951, the US accepted our request to come to America. We were 
among the lucky 270,000 refugees who were allowed into the country.