When Nazi soldiers marched into the Polish city of Nowy Sacz on September 6, 1939, one of them stopped and offered four-year-old Marcel Anisfeld some sweets. The child’s mother, thinking they might be poisonous, forbade him to take any. Her instincts were correct. Faced with a choice of living under Nazi or Soviet occupation, the family headed east. And though they were lucky to escape with their lives over the next six years in the Soviet Union, they survived to return to Nowy Sacz in 1945, when they learnt that all of their relatives who had remained in the city had either been shot or gassed at Auschwitz.
Marcel and his sister Jacqueline pretended to be orphans so as to be able to take a