Saved by my face - Jerzy Lando

Jerzy Lando was born in 1922 into a wealthy middle class Jewish family in Poland. However his happy family life was shattered in 1939, when the Nazis invaded Poland. Lando and his family were moved into the Warsaw Ghettowhere they were forced to live in appalling conditions. Lando later escaped and with the help of non-Jewish Poles, fake documents and his undeniably Aryan features, began a new life under a Christian pseudonym. Still only a teenager, he and anyone who helped him faced the death penalty if he was discovered. In 1942, the Nazis began a liquidation of the ghetto and thousands of Jews were forcibly transported to Treblinka where many of them perished in the gas chambers. Lando escaped this fate and on his return to Warsaw, he joined the underground resistance. He took an active part in the Warsaw uprising of 1944, but two months later was taken prisoner and spent the last months of the war in POW camps where he and fellow prisoners were left on the brink of starvation. Lando survived but his father and many of his other relatives did not.