Lecture: Surviving the Holocaust

In 1939, Sam Silberberg was a 10-year-old living in Poland with his Orthodox Jewish family. That year, the Nazi occupation of Poland and discrimination against the Jews began: mandates that Jews wear the yellow Star of David on all external clothing as identification, confiscation of property, and eventually ghettoization. Silberberg was tattooed with the number 178509. In 1942, his town of Jaworzno, Poland was ordered to be “cleansed” of Jews, and Silberberg was sent to the Annaberg and Blechhammer (a satellite of Auschwitz) concentration camps. Silberberg, not yet 16 years old, was able to escape and was given protection in a convent until the end of the war.  He lost his father, two brothers, and a sister to the extermination policies of the Nazis.