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I was born in Vilna, Poland on May 29, 1923 to Boruch (b.1900 d. 1944) and Leah (b. 1899 d. 1943) Krugman.
In September 1942 we were assigned to the 'Big' ghetto of Vilna. A year later the people from the 'small' ghetto were shot into a ravine in Ponar. My mother and my brother Joseph were killed in 1943.
In 1943, my father and I were interned in three different camps in Estonia (Aredaa, Narva, Yarva). The cold at night froze my hair to the wall of the barracks.
One Christmas morning in Narva a drunken SS ordered the prisoners outdoors. We wore only shorts and clogs. For four hours in the bitter cold, the commandant amused himself and his guests by beating them, and killing three.
At Areda my sick father urged me to escape with 19 other prisoners. That was the last time he saw my father. We were in the woods for five months before being freed by the Russians.
I met and married his my wife Anne, who was also a survivor, in a German Displaced Persons camp in 1946. On August 9, 1949, we came to the United States.
My cousin David and I are the only survivors from a family of seventy. When someone blocks out memories for forty years they remember certain things … but I couldn’t even speak about what had happened even ten years ago.
NATHAN KRUGMAN