Hershel Fuksman: " People should accept each other and live by the biblical motto: Love thy neighbor as thyself". I was born in a small, beautiful town only fifteen kilometers from Warsaw. Piaseczno had a population of about five thousand, three thousand of them Jews. I was the first and only child/grandchild that became the apple of my extended family’s eye. They showered me with affection and attention. A few weeks before the war, fearing abuse that he had heard about from passing displaced Jews from Germany, my father escaped to Bialystock, on the border of Poland and Russia. When the German Army invaded Piaseczno on September 1, 1939, my mother and I found ourselves trapped in our burning building. We ran into the street only to be forced by the Germans back into the smoke-filled halls. Fortunately, a Polish soldier instructed us out of the building when he saw us crouching, afraid to go back out into the street. Being shot by a German soldier rewarded his action. I was six years old. We found shelter with family, but life took on unexpected demands and abuse. We were forced to clean the dead people and horses from the bombed streets. Hardships of life became a daily ordeal. After five months under the Nazi occupation, my father sent a messenger to bring my mother and me across to Bialystock. With many difficulties and dangers from bombings, strafing, and being arrested, we crossed the border and were met by my father who brought with him a big loaf of bread. My brother was born in Russia where life had its own dangers. Disease, hunger, and Communist scrutiny of foreigners were common. Bialystock was overrun with refugees. People were arrested in the middle of the night and never heard from again. My father was one of these. We lost track of what became of him and do not know whether he survived or perished. In the meantime, because of the harsh life in Bialystock, my mother applied to return to Poland. The officials agreed to send us back home, but instead we were sent off into the deep Taiga Siberian forests. Out of the one hundred families that were sent to this place, called Komi SSR, only eight families and two children survived. We endured eighteen months of slave labor before being given permission to leave in 1942. We went to Bagish, Russia, where the Enders Polish Army was being formed. There, my mother remarried, and this new family of six survived the adversity and privation and uncertainties of life under the Communist order. When the war ended, Polish citizens were permitted to return to Poland. We traveled in cattle cars for weeks heading home. We were met there with jeers and shouting for Jews to go to Palestine. Most of our extended family had been murdered.