Testimony of Haviva Luba (Propkovitz) Stern, born in Stoczek, Poland, 1931

Testimony of Haviva Luba (Propkovitz) Stern, born in Stoczek, Poland, 1931 Testimony regarding her parental home; residence in Warsaw; antisemitism at school; Drafting of men, September 1939; her father’s being taken captive by the Germans; bombings; looting; hunger; German occupation, 1939; trucks distributing food; anti-Jewish legislation; abuse of Jews; her father’s return from German captivity; forced labor by her father and brother; escape from the city with her father and two siblings; bribing the border patrol; crossing the Bug River; living in a synagogue; her father’s return to Warsaw; capture of her mother and siblings by the Germans; her father’s return to the Soviet Union; transfer by freight train to Posiolok Poteiracha; life in Siberia; attendance at a Soviet school; hunger; release of the Polish citizens following the establishment of the Wanda Wasilewska Brigade; life in a kolkhoz in Kazakhstan; Return to Poland by freight train; time in the Słońsk Dolny Slezia camp; meeting with aliya emissaries; joining Dror Habonim; move to Wagstadt, Austria; training at an aliya training camp; waiting for aliya at a farm near Marseilles; illegal aliya to Eretz Israel on the ship, “Theodor Herzl”, early 1947; seizure of the ship by the British; resistance; one casualty and wounded among the Olim; deportation to Cyprus; life in Youth Camp 65; aliya to Eretz Israel, late 1947; absorption and rehabilitation.