The Yiddish Book Center's

Wexler Oral History Project

A growing collection of in-depth interviews with people of all ages and backgrounds, whose stories about the legacy and changing nature of Yiddish language and culture offer a rich and complex chronicle of Jewish identity.

A Shared Cigarette: Siblings Secret Goodbye During World War Two

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Victor Gilinsky, son of Medem Sanatorium co-founder, recounts being hunted by the Soviets as well as the Nazis because of their Bundist political affiliation. He describes his family's creative methods of communication while fleeing, with the help of Chiune Sugihara.

This is an excerpt from an oral history with Victor Gilinsky.

This excerpt is in English.

Victor Gilinsky was born in Warsaw, Poland in 1934.

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This interview is part of the Beyond the Books: Yiddish writers and their descendants series.

Other video highlights from this oral history

"The End of Poland": Boyhood Memories of the German Invasion

3 min 39 sec

The Yeshiva Was My Father's Gateway to the Secular World

2 min 44 sec

The Evolution of the Medem Sanatorium

3 min 43 sec

It Wasn’t Clear Which Side Was Better: A Family of Bundists Escapes Poland at the Beginning of WWII

3 min 57 sec

Afraid to Speak Yiddish in the Jewish Autonomous Oblast

2 min 14 sec

A Japanese Diplomat Saved My Family During WWII

5 min 12 sec

More information about this oral history excerpt

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