[Serious] What is the story about your ancestor you want to share with the world?

A relative of my family living in the same village as my grandfather. He had a wife and two sons. Until the Russian Revolution, the town was under the Russian Empire. The Polish-Soviet war ended in 1921 with this town right on the borders of the Belarusian Soviet Republic and Poland. My grandfather and this relative had family in Belarus who secretly crossed the border into Poland. In 1939, the Soviet Union invaded and extent the boarders of Belarus. In 1941 the Nazis came.

The town was mostly Jewish and my granddad and his family were Jewish. After several months of abuse and assault, the Jewish community were rounded up in the square. Some men were taken off to be shot, the others were forced onto a two-street ghetto with forty, fifty people in a tiny house. In around 1942, the Jews were forced out of this ghetto and made to march to a large town nearby, which had a ghetto of around 20,000. Some young men were sent to a labour camp, including this relative. It was believed these camps were safer, because as long as they felled trees and built roads they'd be useful and therefore kept alive.

My granddad and his relative were sent to the labour camp. The wife and his sons were not. The Nazis liquidated the ghetto in two rounds. The liquidation of a ghetto is when soldiers go around the streets and houses and shoot the Jews on sight. They assaulted and raped men and women, and threw children out of windows, stamped on babies. Mostly it was shooting. The first liquidation took the of the younger son and the second killed the mother. The eldest son was able to escape in the chaos and make his way to the labour camp.

The labour camp had relatively little security. This was because there was no where to run. There were perhaps 50-80 men with some guards, but most of the work was across a relatively large area of land. It wasn't a fence or the guards alone who kept them, it was being in a massive forest when winter was setting in. It was not impossible to enter the camp and because of anti-partisan activity, where anyone who was suspected of being Jewish or a partisan was shot, it initially seemed safer in the camp. So the boy ran to the camp and managed to enter and find his father.

However they were aware of the precarity of the situation. Partisan activity was coming closer to the camp and they had contact with partisans and knew there was an encampment. They were aware of the liquidation of ghettos and knew they could not wait longer. They stayed for a few months I think. At this point my granddad had escaped and risked the threat of anti-partisan activity.

It was winter but they were desperate. The relative, the son and a friend made a plan to escape in the night. To do so they would have to cross a river which had a rotting wooden plank-bridge. My granddad had crossed this when it was autumn. It was dangerous to cross and the son fell in. They fished him out but the water was freezing and he'd hurt his leg.

The son was unable to walk properly. Maybe time would have healed him. The father carried the son on the back. They walked for several days towards where they believed the partisan camp was, and to safety. They didn't know it but in this time the labour camp had been liquidated, just days after their escape.

When they were still walking, and the son's condition was getting worse, they heard activity and realised they were close to either Nazi or anti-partisan soldiers. They weren't detected as yet but needed to reach the safety of the partisan camp as quickly as possible. Carrying the son slowed the father and the friend down, and therefore risked all three of them. They hid the son, who was a teenager, in a bush and promised to return in a few days once the anti-partisans or Nazis moved on.

They reached the camp within a day of quick walking. They returned to where they believed they had hidden the son but found no sign of him.

After the war he left to Israel, and married another survivor of the Holocaust. She died of breast cancer some years after the marriage.

/r/AskReddit Thread