I was born in Warsaw, Poland in March of 1935 to parents Bronka and Chaim Miasnik. We escaped to Lida, in Soviet-occupied Belarus after Warsaw fell to the Nazis in September 1939. Lida fell in 1941, and its Jews were herded into a ghetto. In the great slaughter of March 8, 1942, a Nazi Einsatsgruppe shot most of the Lida Jews. My family was at first selected to die, but at the last moment the Nazis decided to spare us because they needed my father's surgical skills to operate on wounded German soldiers. That summer I was sent to live with a Christan woman because it was rumored that the Germans would kill all the Jewish children in the ghetto. I returned to the ghetto when the rumor proved false. In December 1942, Russian partisans rescued us from the ghetto and brought us to the Lipiczanska forest. In early 1943, a partisan hospital was established in a remote part of the forest, staffed by Jewish doctors and nurses, with my father as chief of staff. My hair was shaved and I wore boy's clothing to protect me from rape. On my eighth birthday I was given my own pistol as a present. We were liberated in the summer of 1944. In early 1945 we escaped Belarus and went to central Poland. Traveling as refugees, we traversed most of central Europe to flee the invading Soviets. Soldiers in the Jewish Brigade brought us to Italy, where we stayed for two years as DPs. We came to America in February of 1947 and settled in Brooklyn.