Quite a while ago, my Language Arts class did a project called My Story which is supposed to talk about a story within your family. I talked about my Great Grandpa in the holocaust.

• Where did you first hear it? 

When I was about 9 years old my parents told me about my great grandpa but I don’t think I was old enough to really comprehend it then.

• Who told it? 

My parents first told me it but it turns out they did not know the full story and my grandpa did.

• Why is it important to you? 

Because I find it very interesting that something that big and serious happened in my family.

• How did the story make you feel?

It made me feel relieved that he was so lucky to be in the position that he was in but also I felt bad for others who were not as lucky as my great grandpa.

• What makes the story special or important?

It is special to me because a lot of people in my family talk about him and it is something very significant in my family

Born in what was Poland then and Minsk, Belarus now, Irving Parker was born to a poor family. Growing, up he had a relatively rough childhood but not much is known about his early childhood. Once he grew up, he was starting to study to be a pharmacist before the war and had a wife and kids who were later killed right in front of him during the Nazi invasion.  When the war started out,the Russian and German armies invaded Poland,  and he was taken over by the Russian army and was under Russian occupation for a while. But after the Germans attacked Russia and occupied all of Poland, his land was taken by the German Wehrmacht. Once his land was taken over by Germany, he was immediately taken to a couple different concentration camps and then ended up at Auschwitz. While at Auschwitz, the German SS were looking for a pharmacist who could read many different languages because the German army needed the medicine to be translated that the prisoners brought in. According to my grandpa, if he could not transcribe the medicine, they probably would have killed him shortly after he arrived at the camp.  After the war, his concentration camp was liberated by the Russians and shortly after learned that his whole family was dead. After he was liberated, he was shipped with other survivors to the a camp where his objective was to regain his health after being only 109 pounds after Auschwitz. After the rehab camp, he was shipped to the United States along with others where he worked for a pharmacy distribution business and kept that job the remainder of his life where he had a family with a daughter (my great aunt). 

Side story: According to my grandpa, after the war he would go out and look for former Nazis while riding in a sidecar of a motorcycle while he gunned the Nazis down with a machine gun.