a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto testifies

This ghetto was the antechamber of death for all the Jews who passed through it. Some 480,000 people were locked up in the Warsaw ghetto during Nazi Germany’s occupation of Poland. Larissa Cain is one of them. “Everything there was organized for survival, even [dans la vie] of a small child like me. All was [pensé] to shelter, to dress, we had no rest”remembers this survivor, interviewed by France Télévisions.

Like many other ghetto children, Larissa Cain remains in hiding. Then, at ten years old, she escapes. Under cover of night, she scales the ghetto wall and flees. “I had to leave, my father told me that I would have something to eat. And I was always hungry”she says. “I jumped off this three meter wall and there was a friend of my uncle who came to pick me up, who took me to his houseshe continues. I lived to see my parents again.”

Many weren’t so lucky. Beginning in 1942, more than 300,000 Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto were deported and killed in Nazi extermination camps.