The World the Nazis Made. This page contains disturbing images and graphic content and should not be shared with children. Please take care.

When exploring the abandoned military base where I live and work, I entered many enormous, completely dark, sealed rooms. It was disorienting to walk from the world of light through an entryway and be plunged into a darkness that sounded, smelled, and felt like another world.

Once, walked into a room that seemed full of ghosts. Beings flickered across the walls. Trees shimmered, upside down. Fort Ord’s buildings seemed alive again. My heartbeat was louder than the sea wind hitting the plywood that covered all the windows.

After a beat, I realized this room was a camera. A small knot in the boards had been blown out, creating a pinhole. A beam of light pierced the darkness, throwing a projection of the world it knew.

I stayed there a long time, thinking about wars and ghosts. All that’s lost and all that’s left.

A brief recap: I found a box in the basement after my mother died. Each object contains a mystery. This part of the story starts in Chapter 7.

From right to left, Grandpa Ben, Great-Aunt Yanina, Great Aunt Hanka, Great-Grandma Felicia in pre-war Lwow, Poland.

Before

My grandpa was the middle child. He had two sisters, Yanina, the oldest, and little Anna. His dad was a famous mathematician and beloved educator. Ben had trouble living up to his father’s towering reputation and his genius older sister’s accomplishments. He was 12 when his mother fell ill and died.

*Ben carried this picture of his mother everywhere, tucked into his pocket.*

As a teenager, my Grandpa Ben was terribly lonely. At home, he had new twin baby brothers, but he didn’t like his new stepmother. His older sister, Yanina, had married her teacher and fled Lwow.

Outside, the world was becoming increasingly restrictive for Jewish men. Hitler’s rhetoric enflamed people with fury against Jews. It was hard to find work. The Soviet occupation meant they were often hungry, and had to beware spying neighbors.

At last, Ben found love. At age 23, he was a newlywed with a young wife.

Nazis

On June 30 1941, the Lwów Linden trees were at peak bloom, exploding with sweet-scented flowers as the German forces entered Lwów. As the Soviets fled, their secret police murdered everyone kept in the local prisons.

The Nazis blamed the Jewish community for the murders and forced them to clean up the oceans of blood and bury the bodies...

in mass graves.

*Mass grave of NKVD murdered prisoner in Lvov.*

Immediately, massacres of Jews begin, encouraged by the Germans and executed with the help of local nationalists, following the discovery of NKVD-murdered prisoners.

Ignacy Chiger in, Under the Lightless Sky (2026):

"Beaten, maltreated, and mutilated, Jews were corralled in prisons where they were forced to carry out the corpses of the prisoners murdered by the Russians and to clean the cells of blood and excrement...the Jews who — after finishing their job — were murdered in the prisons they had already cleaned."

Within days, the Nazis had murdered all of Szymon’s Polish colleagues at the University.

My Grandpa Ben’s wife was taken by the Nazis and murdered, as were his stepmother and twin baby brothers.

In November 1941, Ben, his father Szymon, and his sister Anna were forced to abandon their possessions and move to the Lvov Ghetto. It was a cramped open-air prison, a slave labor and death camp created in a section of the Jewish neighborhood.

Ghetto registration cards for Szymon, Ben and Anna blader.

Simon Wiesenthal, who had attended the same high school and later had the same forced labor assignment as Szymon, would survive the Lvov Ghetto and spend his life hunting Nazi war criminals. He wrote:

"Each of us was carrying around his own death certificate, from which only the date was missing.”

"Ben’s father, Szymon, the great mathematician, brought only a pile of papers.

Ben observed, “When I saw he only brought papers, I knew, then, that he would not survive.”

The conditions of the Lvov Ghetto are difficult to describe. Jews were forced into slave labor for German companies. Soon it was also where Jewish people were sorted and then murdered at the death camp Belsec. It was also a death camp where approximately 135,000 to 250,000 Jews were murdered.*

You may have seen movies about WWII that approximate what it was like (ie Schindlers List). But it is perhaps impossible to depict a place where people are starved and worked to death. Where dead bodies are everywhere, hanging from light poles, thrown in piles.

Where Jewish babies were tossed in the air and shot by Nazi soldiers like skeet.

Where children starved.

Their mothers, separated from them, became prey.

Warning: The following link contains historical film footage of extreme violence against Jewish people during the Lwów pogrom of July 1941. It was recorded by the perpetrators, seized by US forces after the war, and used as evidence at the Nuremberg trials. It is among the most disturbing documents of the Holocaust. Please take care.

Pogrom in Lwów, July 1941 — US Holocaust Memorial Museum

The Nazis controlled Jews by showing them that if they disobeyed, 10 or more innocent people would die as a result.

Most people executed in the L’vov ghetto were taken to a place called “The Sands” and shot.

David Kahane in his Lvov Ghetto Diary:

"The phrase 'you'll end in the sands' entered common parlance and was used by everyone in a casual fashion."

Soon after, like other formerly prominent Jews, Ben’s father, Szymon the mathematician, disappeared.

Ben’s teenage sister, Anna, meanwhile, made contact with the Jewish resistance. Realizing that she could pass for Aryan with her light eyes and hair, and her perfect Polish and German, they got her a job in a Nazi bar so that she could collect intelligence.

Ben saw his father one last time.

He saw him in a prison uniform, cleaning a curb. “Papa!” he exclaimed.

His father commanded Ben to take his sister and run. “RUN.”

Struggling not to sink into a wet cement pool of grief and guilt, Ben hid his father’s papers in a wall. They included scraps of paper that his father had stolen moments to work on.

This would be Szymon’s final work. It appears to be about the mathematics of using the stars for navigation.

In June 1943, after the final “liquidation” of the Lviv ghetto, the Nazis hung a sign that said “Jew Free.”

Ben and Anna survived because they ran. Later, Ben risked his life to retrieve his father’s papers, including his final work.

These are what I found in the box, and what I’m bringing to the Yivo archive next week.

* (End Note) The Holocaust was a (perhaps lead-poisoning-fueled) expansion of the systems of extermination developed in 19th-century California. It was the mechanized humiliation, enslavement, and extermination of Jewish people, Romani people, Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender people, and brave souls of all backgrounds who dared to fight back - may their memory be a blessing.