I have read Yakov Szurek’s testimony, which sits at the Ghetto Fighters’ Museum, more times than I can count. This time, one line struck me: “coincidentally born at Mila 18.”

“I was coincidentally born at Mila 18,” he says. “Most of you might know that that’s where the bunker was. Ziv Lubetkin and the headquarters were located there, and that house was located inside the ghetto. That street was a street that contained 99% Jews before the war, only the servants and the housekeepers were Polish and a few families here and there.”

This word, from a man who survived what most of us cannot imagine. A man raised in a house full of a loving family, a family mostly murdered. A home that became one of the most infamous addresses in the history of the Holocaust.

A man recounting his testimony to be preserved at Lohamei HaGeta’ot, the Ghetto Fighters’ House, which he helped found alongside Warsaw Ghetto Uprising survivors Zivia Lubetkin and Yitzhak Zuckerman. A man who casually testifies that his childhood home became the command bunker of the ŻOB, the Jewish Combat Organization, during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

On May 8, 1943, the Germans surrounded the bunker. Three hundred people were inside. The civilians surrendered. The fighters stayed. The Germans siphoned in gas and threw grenades, and about 120 died, many taking........

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