Ben Shapiro guided a tour of Poland with Michael, Elaine, Harry, Barbara and Alicia in the summer of 2018. The plane for Poland left the same day as Sheldon had a total shoulder replacement surgery, so Sheldon was unable to join. This is Ben's summary of my Dad's story. He helped us connect the dots.

The writer of the report from the "center" writes that Aron Levenstein was born in Bialystock in 1929. Your Uncle Leib Levenstein was born in Tykocin where your grandparents had apparently lived before you dad was born. They may have moved to Bialystok from Tikocyn after Leib moved to America.

(We saw the place where the Tykocin Jews were murdered in the forest of Lepochowa in August, 1941. )

Your grandparents and their son Aron and daughter Sarah were forcibly moved to the update: the Bialystok ghetto in 1941 along with the other Bialystok Jews after the Germans got there and threw the Russians out.

From Warsaw your grandmother and Aron's sister were transported and killed in Treblinka in the summer of 1943 according to the writer. Although we know that the Warsaw ghetto was destroyed after the uprising of April 1943. So it must have been earlier than summer 1943 that Aron's mom and sister were sent to their deaths in Treblinka. Aron and his dad were sent to Lublin to work after the Jews of Lublin had already been murdered in Majdanek, which we visited, between 1941 and 1942.

From Lublin they were moved to Bleisen. I dont know of any Bleisen. Is it possible that the writer meant Bergen-Belsen? They were there for a year before the were sent to Auschwitz, where your dad was separated from his father who was sent to Buna. Interestingly I just read Eli Wiesel's first book "Night" in which he writes of his experience being almost separated from his father in Auschwitz, because he was sent to Buna.

Aron was then sent to Oranienburg and Sachsenhausen and finally to Ortroff. Of these last three, I know only the first two. Could Ortroff be a mistake for Ostrow, Poland?

... It's absolutely Ohrdruf.

Thanks so much for bringing it to my attention, Elaine . your father's journey of horrors from Bialystok to liberation in Ohrdruf is deeply disturbing. he picked up his number tattoo probably in Birkenau at the "sauna" building we were at. he ended up being liberated in Germany because the Germans (with their Jewish and non-Jewish prisoners) retreated back to Germany as the Russians and the other allies advanced on German positions. your dad was liberated ... update: by British forces. My mother and her sisters were liberated by the Russians in Trutnov, Czech Republic, which I drove through on my way back to Wroclaw, Poland to return our van after I left you guys at the cafe in Prague.

I'm not sure what to make of the "center" report. In my last email, I just took the report at face value and assumed its accuracy I just now looked at the link to the US Holocaust Museum's archive. The "center" report is part of the papers of Rachel Greene Rottersman, an American (Jewish, I presume) social worker who was in charge of the orphanage Aron was at after the war. She would have written the report based on what a traumatized 16 year old Aron had reported about his trials and tribulations from the age of 10 (when the war broke out). Coming from Seattle, Rachel was almost certainly not familiar with Polish place names and almost certainly didn't have a precise schedule of the horrific events of the war which at that time were not yet fully understood. So she wrote that Aron was born in Bialystok. Maybe he told her he was born NEAR Bialystok, because she never heard of Tykocin? Then she wrote that he was in the Warsaw ghetto because she didnt realize that the Jews of Bialystok (and its surroundings including whoever survived the Tykocin massacre) were all herded into the Bialystoker (not the more well known Warsaw) ghetto? Lucy certainly showed us the Bialystoker ghettos.

But maybe, unlikely as it may have been, your family actually did get to the Warsaw ghetto somehow. The rest of the report can pretty much accommodate either version.

Both the Warsaw Jews and the Bialystok Jews were murdered in Treblinka, which is about two hours from either place by highway today. So Aron's mother and sister were sent to their deaths either from Warsaw (unlikely, and in any case BEFORE the summer of 1943, since the Warsaw ghetto was liquidated after the uprising of April 1943) or Bialystok. Just as my aunt refused to give her baby to my grandmother in Chrzanow (maybe at the very house i showed you in Chrzanow when we passed through on our way from Krakow to Oswiecim [Auschwitz] and was gassed, baby, mother and grandmother in Auschwitz.

And Lublin- that beautiful old city, with its famous yeshiva that we visited and its ancient cemetery, where we met the Hassidic guys who had come to Poland to buy and slaughter cattle to ship to Israel) and where your father and grandfather were sent to work in 1943 (after the Jews of Lublin had been annihilated in Majdanek, where we meditated on the pile of ashes of 200,000 Jews)- that Lublin was equidistant from Warsaw and Bialystok. So Aron and his dad might have been shipped there from either place.

Then maybe with the coming of the Russians, Aron and his dad were sent to Bleisen (Bergen-Belsen?) for a year. Followed by Auschwitz and finally the German camps at Oranienburg, Sachsenhausen and Ohrdruf.