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Monday, June 10, 2013

Holocaust Survivor Speaks At Jewish Historical Museum

A Holocaust survivor, who wound up as Dean of Science at U-N-B from 1986 to 1996, spoke in Saint John at the official opening of the Jewish Historical Museum on Leinster Street.

Despite being forced to hide in an attic behind a false wall at the top of a flour mill for two years along with 8 other people, Dr. Israel Unger considers himself lucky because he was so young at the time the Nazis swept into Poland and didn't fully appreciate the enormity of the brutality, degradation, humiliation and mass murder that was taking place.
 

He also was in town to launch his memoirs entitled "The Unwritten Diary of Israel Unger" and talked about seeing two Nazis come to take away his grandfather, kick him down a flight of stairs and shoot him to death.
 

Dr. Unger says the mass murder in Tarnow, Poland, where he was hiding, took place in 1942 and the street around the Town Square had to be washed down because of all the blood that was flowing from the torture and killings of Jews. 

There were 25 thousand Jews in Tarnow at the beginning of the war with only 700 surviving.