"The human material is too weak"

Roger S. Gottlieb

pp. 287-297

in: John K. Roth (ed), Genocide and human rights, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005

Abstract

My father-in-law Jacob Greenspan (of blessed memory) was a diminutive, energetic Polish Jew who survived the Holocaust by fleeing into Soviet Russia, along with his wife and approximately 800,000 other Jews, after Germany invaded Poland in 1939. After the war, all Jews who indicated that they wanted to return to Poland were considered potential enemies of the state and sent to labor camps near the Arctic Circle to cut trees. After two and half years in such a camp, the Greenspans were freed; they made their way to Uzbekistan, where they managed to eek out a living for two years. Eventually they returned to Poland and then went to a Displaced Persons camp in Germany, their departure point for immigration to the United States in 1951.