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.

"The Notion of Jews Being in a Position of Strength was Strange to Me": Living through the 1956 War

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Samuel Ponczak—Holocaust survivor, polyglot, and translator—remembers feeling proud that the Jews had a state shortly after the creation of Israel while he and his family lived in Poland among anti-Zionist sentiment.

This is an excerpt from an oral history with Samuel Ponczak.

This excerpt is in English.

Samuel Ponczak was born in Warsaw, Poland.