Hersz Aron Broniatowski

Hersz Aron Broniatowski was born in Lodz, Poland, in 1921. As a young man, he briefly worked as a shoemaker. As the Nazi armies advanced in 1939, he escaped to the Soviet-controlled city of Bialystock where he was conscripted into the Soviet Red Army. He was relocated to Barnaul, and then Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, and eventually imprisoned by the Soviet NKVD for attempted desertion, who put him on the front lines of the Soviet Red Army. While fighting in Germany, he met his first wife, Kseniya Gavrilova Vasilina, when liberating the women's concentration camp Ravensbruck, where she was interned. At the end of the war, he returned to Lodz, where his son, Michał, was born. He wanted to go to Israel, although Kseniya preferred to return to her native Ukraine; Consequently, they divorced. He later remarried, moved to Israel, and eventually, moved to the USA, where he settled in New England in 1969. He died there in 2005 at age 83.