Hiding in Plain Sight: Allan J. Hall's Memoir of Surviving the Holocaust

"Allan Hall was born in Cracow, Poland, in 1935. He led a charmed life until September 1939 when the Nazis marched into Poland. Seeking safety, the family walked over 200 miles to Lvov where Allan was the first child picked up in the children's pogrom in the Lvov Ghetto. With false identity papers, the family fled to Warsaw where Allan and his mother were arrested and taken to the train station to be sent to Treblinka. When the trains briefly stopped running, Allan was marched to an orphanage in the Warsaw Ghetto. Allan's father, passing as Aryan, rented an office in a high-rise building which housed German air force headquarters. Allan and his mother spent two years hiding in the closet in that office. During the Warsaw Uprising the family crawled under sniper fire to a bomb shelter where Allan's mother gave birth to a baby boy. When the war ended, Allan's father was arrested. Knowing the children would be used as hostages, Allan's mother instructed Allan to take the baby and make his way to Palestine. For months, hunted by the Soviets, eleven-year-old Allan carried his baby brother across Europe trying to get to Italy and a ship to Palestine. In 1947 the family emigrated to the United States. Twelve-year-old Allan, unable to read or write, and not speaking a word of English, began school. He went on to graduate from the University of Florida and the University of Florida School of Law. He and his wife, Lori Gold, have three daughters and four grandchildren"--