The Merry Flea

S1 E2: On the very day Germany invaded Poland in September, 1939, all the men in Ada Lichtman’s town of Wieliczka were rounded up by the SS, taken to a forest and shot. One of them was Lichtman’s father, a cobbler. From then on, she was possessed by a single question: “how will I be killed?” Every day, the Germans selected more victims for execution; the survivors of these massacres, including Ada and her first husband, were driven from village to village to perform forced labor. Eventually those still alive were deported in cattle cars to the extermination camp at Sobibor where more than 250,000 Jews from across Europe would be gassed. Among only three women selected for work in the camp, Lichtman washed laundry and repaired dolls taken from Jewish children for export to Germany. The dolls forever evoked memories of this travesty.