Summaries courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, the UC Irvine Libraries.

Name:                                                  Bors, Stanley

Birth:                                                    1912

Birthplace:                                            Sosnowiec, Poland

Religion:                                               Jewish

Age Group:                                          Adult

Type of Exp:                                         Ghettoes, Hidden

Left Family Home:                                1939

Camps Occupied:                                 N/A

Parents Survived Occupation:               Neither

Number of Siblings:                              3

Sibling(s) Survived:                               0

Stanley Bors first encountered anti-Semitism in high school, but universities, he says, were "the worst place in Poland for Jewish people;" he describes verbal abuse and actual building lockouts.  When the Germans invaded Poland, he and his wife fled to Russian-occupied Eastern Poland, where he was able to work as an agricultural engineer.  In 1941, they returned to central Poland and discovered that both their sets of parents had been killed.  They moved to the Warsaw ghetto with a cousin.  Stanley describes the social groups that formed this ghetto, along with the bureaucratic agencies created within it.  Aware of possible liquidation, Stanley arranged his and Irene's escape through a relative who had married a gentile. Given false papers by the underground, they spent the rest of the war posing as gentiles, fearful not only of the Germans but of paid Jewish informers.

Stanley recounts his wartime survival clearly and concisely and relates the role of anti-Semitism in his pre- and postwar experiences.  He also tells an interesting, and possibly representative, anecdote about American relatives who bribed a consul in an attempt to get Stanley and his wife into the U.S. through Cuba.

See also: #14 (Interview with Irene Bors -- wife)

   Play Video