Allan Hall, Holocaust Survivor
About Allan Hall
Allan was born in 1935 in Krakow, Poland. He grew up in a loving, middle-class Jewish family until the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939. When German troops entered Krakow, the family fled on foot over 200 miles to Lwow (now Lviv, Ukraine), which was then under Soviet occupation. After the Germans invaded the Soviet-controlled region in 1941, Jews in Lwow were forced into ghettos under increasingly brutal conditions. Allan’s family managed to escape deportation and went into hiding—first in an attic above a theater, later in a basement beneath a factory, and ultimately in Warsaw, where Allan and his mother hid in an office two floors below German Luftwaffe headquarters.
During this time, Allan faced repeated danger. At one point in the Warsaw ghetto, he was nearly deported to Treblinka but narrowly escaped after a transport was delayed. His younger brother, Andrew, was born in hiding during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising. After the war, Allan’s father was arrested by Soviet authorities, and his mother instructed him to flee with the baby to avoid being captured as hostages. For months, Allan carried his infant brother across war-torn Europe and sought to immigrate to Israel. His family eventually reunited, and together, they immigrated to the United States in 1947.
