Escape From Warsaw Quotes

At sixteen John escaped from the Warsaw ghetto, leaving behind his parents and his sister. They were killed. Everyone was killed. John somehow obtained Polish seaman’s papers, and for several years he worked in the engine rooms of German freighters. When the war ended he came to Israel via Cyprus,

SEPTEMBER 1, 1939 WASHINGTON, D.C. The Nazis invaded Poland on a Friday. At 2:50 a.m., President Roosevelt was awakened at the White House residence by a phone call from William Bullitt, the U.S. ambassador in Paris, with news that German planes were bombing Warsaw and that German panzer divisions had punctured the borders. “Well, Bill, it’s come at last,” the president said. “God help us all.” A few hours later, the president met in the Oval Office with Secretary Hull, Undersecretary Sumner Welles, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, and Harry Hopkins, the commerce secretary and one of Roosevelt’s closest confidants. William Barrett, Hull’s senior advisor, sat in on the meeting to take notes.

A young Jewish man escapes the Holocaust and makes his way to England, where he manages, through sheer entrepreneurial genius, to make a fortune. His old widower father remains behind in the Warsaw ghetto and the young man is able to pay for an incredible, daring, and expensive airlift to rescue him. Once his father is safe in England, the young man tells him he must think of himself as an Englishman. “That is what I am now, Papa,” he explains to the old man. “This land has given me refuge and a haven and I have succeeded here. I am, by God, an Englishman and you must think of yourself as one from now on, too.” He takes his father to Bond Street and has him fitted for and dressed in a brand-new expensive suit in a haberdashery there. Then he takes him to a fancy tonsorial place where the old man is put in the barber chair and the hair cutter begins cutting the old man’s payos, the locks of hair worn by religious Hasidim. The father is suddenly sobbing convulsively and his son, with deep compassion as he watches his father’s hair locks tumble to the floor, sympathetically asks: “What, Papa? Are you crying because you feel you are losing your Jewish identity?” The old man shakes his head, sniffs, and, with another convulsive sob, says: “No, son. I’m crying because we lost India.