Photo courtesy Jessica Voyles
Sullivan High School English teacher Rebecca Lawson left introduces Holocaust survivor Jerry Koenig, who gave his account of Poland under the Nazis during World War II.

•May 11, 2016•

Eleven people hidden in a hole under a barn in Poland lived in fear of death for 22 months during World War II.

Jerry Koenig, Holocaust survivor of that ordeal, told Sullivan students what life of a persecuted group was like under the Nazi reign of terror. Only 10 percent of the Jewish population in Poland survived the Holocaust.

Sunday, May 1 was Yom Hashoah (Day of Remembrance of the Holocaust), making Koenig’s presence historically significant for those gathered in the Sullivan High School gymnasium.

“After Germany took over Poland in 1939, they forced Jewish people to wear a white arm band with the Star of David,” Koenig, who was nine years old then, recalled. “Then they started rationing food to give the army first priority.”

Koenig and his middle class family lived in Pruszkow but were soon trucked to Warsaw ghettos where the Nazis were starting the starvation process to exterminate the Jews.

“There were 300,000 people crammed into a walled neighborhood and survival depended on how much food we could buy from the black market,” Koenig, said, recalling his father arranged an escape to the country for his mother, younger brother and himself.     Login or Subscribe to read the rest of this story.