Bill Morgan: 3 Lives 4 Countries 4 Names

“I was punished from the day I could walk by my gentile friends. I was always called a ‘no-good Jew’ and therefore I was always either beaten up or kicked or stoned. My parents didn’t do any explaining. The answer that I got from my father is that G-d will punish them, and we are supposed to be the Chosen People . . . and I was always waiting for them to be punished. In the meantime, I got beaten up pretty good.”Wolf 'Yossela' Margulies was born in Czerniejow, Poland, to very pious parents who struggled to put food on the table for their seven children. Although his mother and father rarely had the time or energy to show him physical affection, Bill knew that they loved him and his siblings. After all, they gave the children food from their own plates when they were hungry. When Soviet troops arrived in Ceranow in September 1939, most Jews looked on them as the lesser of two evils. Bill and his family did not know much about Hitler, but they were certain that German occupation would be far more awful for the Jews. Less than two years later, Germany invaded, confirming their worst fears: “The first week I remember they drowned a religious Jew, cut his beard and drowned him, threw him in the water. And my grandfather had a long beard and they were pinching him so he couldn’t walk down the streets,” recalls Bill. Together with hundreds of other Jews, the family was jammed into the ghetto of nearby Stanislawow. One day, the Germans ordered Bill to dig holes in the cemetery. Then they brought in a truckload of Jews, shot them, and let them fall into the pits. Horrified, Bill returned to his family and told them he was going to flee.

Dimensions: 6.5x0.07x9