A week later, in the summer of 1942, the Ghetto Police began evicting residents from their homes. This happened while Leah and the other kids were at school and Ewa was at a workshop. By the afternoon, they had taken around five thousand men, women, and children to the assembly area.

Ewa, on witnessing the commotion, ran to school to fetch her children and then hurried home. Her heart was pounding when she found the house empty.

“Where is Papa?” Leah cried out. “Mama! Where is Papa?” she shrieked, tugging at her mother’s skirt. Her heart was bursting with grief. She feared her father had met the fate of her late uncle.

“Papa is outside watching the parade, my darling,” Ewa reassured her and hid her children inside a concealed closet in their basement. “I am going out to bring Papa. You two must promise not to leave this cupboard until you hear me or your uncle call your names.”

Ewa rushed, overwhelmed by the flood of the most unfortunate among the most downcast on God’s earth. She cursed herself for leaving her husband alone in the house.

Ewa shouted his name until her voice was hoarse. She asked a couple of familiar faces about his whereabouts. They were clueless, answering her in a dull, mechanical tone. Their minds brimmed with all the horrors awaiting them at their journey’s end.

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Finally, she reached the railway track, where the crowd stopped. She ran alongside freight cars, crying out, “Symeon! Symeon!” in a tone she could only hear and understand.

Gunshots broke the uncomfortable silence. The German police shot and killed more than a dozen young men and women who tried to escape. A deathly stillness followed the dreadful scene.

“Stop running unless you want someone to kill you as well!” A ghetto policeman stopped her, roughly jerking her arm. This jolted her out of a trance, where she had fixed her focus on her husband. It snapped her back to reality, making her worry about her kids, who were still back home.

“Get on the train!” the policeman shouted in Yiddish.

“I am looking for my husband, Symeon Poznanski. I did not find him when I reached home,” Ewa implored.

“Push her into the carriage! If she resists, hand her to the Germans!” another policeman who had been watching for a while exclaimed.

When Ewa narrated her story, the man held her by the forearm and urgently pulled her out of the crowd. “Go to your children. I have brought you out of the crowd and the Germans did not notice. If you stay longer, you will be on your way to Treblinka.” The man left her. She walked away, hoping to find her husband at home.

She heard the whistle and the chugging of a train as it carried its occupants to their deaths, about 50 miles away.