Teenage Annelies Herz saw that fellow Jewish forced laborers were disappearing. So to survive in wartime Germany, she and her twin sister went underground: they secured new identities and never stayed in one place for long.

Isaac Zieman was a passionate young Zionist with plans to make a life in Palestine. Instead, the Nazi invasion of Latvia propelled him on a years-long journey that took him across the Soviet Union and Europe and finally to the United States.

High school teacher Sally Frishberg used her childhood experience of being hidden for two years with her family in a Polish farmer’s attic to create one of the first public high school classes on the history of the Holocaust.

Hear excerpts from the second season of “Those Who Were There,” featuring testimonies drawn from the nearly 600 interviews conducted by the Museum of Jewish Heritage in affiliation with the Fortunoff Archive.

In October 1945, Celia Kassow gave birth to her son Sam in a German displaced persons camp. Seventy-five years later, Sam Kassow reflects on his mother’s life and an astonishing journey of discovery to his mother’s hometown in Eastern Europe.

When Nazi troops seized the Polish farm where Celia Kassow was in hiding, she fled once again—this time into the forest, where she joined the Soviet partisans.

When Nazi bombs fell from the sky, Celia Kassow fled her Polish boarding school and sought help from a classmate who lived nearby.  The response? “Get away from here, you dirty Jew.”

Leonard Linton's story spans half the globe—from Japan to Germany, France, New York, and back to Germany, where as a 23-year-old U.S. soldier he happened upon a concentration camp called Woebbelin.

Renee Hartman was just a child when the Nazis swept into Czechoslovakia.  Her parents and sister were deaf, so she became her family’s ears, alert to the sound of the Gestapo’s boots.

Eighteen-year-old Arne Brun Lie answered the patriotic call to join the Norwegian resistance.  But instead of fighting for his nation’s freedom, he found himself in the hands of the Nazis, fighting for his life.