Zev Was A Five Year Old In 1939

Germany invaded Poland in 1939, when Zev Kedem was 5 years old. The family abandoned a vacation and headed to Kedem's grandparent's home in Krakow. "It was dark and, as a five-year-old, I was fairly afraid," 

Nazis Ship Zem To A Polish Ghetto

Within a year, Zev Kedem's family was rounded up and brought to the Crakow Ghetto with 30,000 other Jews. Barbed wire surrounded their world.

Nazis Roundup Jews For The Gassen Chambers

In the spring of 1943, the final deportation of Jews from Crakow began. Zev, his older sister and their grandparents hid in a padlocked pigeon coup as Germans inspected the abandoned ghetto.

Nazis Shooting Jewish Children In Their Hospital Beds

Zev could hear the sirens blaring out warnings of death to those Jews who did not give themselves up. He heard dogs barking and people being shot. He heard shots ringing from the hospital nearby. "I have no doubt that the Germans were executing children in their hospital beds that were too weak for deportation," Zev says.
 

Zev's Momma Bribes A Guard

Later Kedem's mother bribed a Nazi truck driver to smuggle her son into a camp so as to avoid having him scrutinized by Nazi guards, who would have unquestionably sent Zev immediately to the gas chambers.



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Zev Was At Six Camps

Zev Kedem passed through several more concentration camps - then Oscar Schindler came into the picture with his "most wondrous of plans to create a fictitious factory in Czechoslovakia."

Zev Was Marched To Mauthausen.

The war ended for Zev Kedem on May 3, 1945, when the U.S. Army liberated Mauthausen - two weeks before his 11th birthday. He was liberated by a Schwartzer (black) soldier.

After The War

Young Zem wandered Europe for months until some Limeys shipped him to Britain where Zem winds up in a orphanage. After the orphanage, he went to Oxford, then Israel, and finally gets married.