ABSTRACT
By the end of 1944, my father and uncle found themselves in entirely diff erent parts of the wartime social structure. My father had secured himself a precarious but survivable situation in Auschwitz-Monowitz, while my uncle had become an offi cer and interpreter in the Soviet army. Michael’s situation was of course much more perilous, because he was still a captive of the Nazis, and he was about to face the most diffi - cult part of his entire ordeal: the infamous Death March. Meanwhile, Sol took leave from his military unit and returned to Poland to look for survivors. The war’s end would mark the end of this phase of their lives, a turning point that would propel them into a state of limbo or social liminality, betwixt and between the past and the future, on the threshold of something new but not yet of it.1 This chapter recounts their experiences at this critical juncture, up to the point of their immigration to the United States, when the trajectories of their lives would, once again, take a dramatic turn, this time for the better.
