In commemoration of Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, which is tomorrow, I am posting this interview with the descendants of Itzhak Kotkowski. His son Doron and grandson Eitan talk about Itzhak and the impact he had upon them.
Itzhak fled Warsaw as a young man immediately after the Germans occupied the city. He could feel in the way the soldiers behaved that something was very wrong. He fled east and, although conditions were brutal and death was never far away, his experience was dramatically different form that of many other Holocaust survivors.
Itzhak wrote that "I started Writing these memoirs in 1944, well after I had already been exposed to a multitude of dangers. The main reason for writing was to leave a trace of myself in case I should be killed in action before the end of the war."
"Starting on a little scrap of paper, and proceeding with great caution, I began to put my tales together. As I wrote, I was constantly aware of the possibility that my story could fall into the hands of the communist authority, which could have meant catastrophic consequences for me. Such was not the fate for me or my memoirs, however. I survived the war and rebuilt my life."