Access to current news was almost nonexistent in small villages throughout Poland in the late 1930’s.

“My family was the first in our town to have a radio. I was very curious about what was happening in the world, and I loved to put on the headphones and listen to the news,” Henry Aizenman recalls. “I also enjoyed reading the newspaper each day.

“I recall hearing Adolf Hitler’s speeches on Polish radio. My parents would talk about the propaganda being broadcast and worry about the effect it would have on our lives.”

One of Hitler’s frightening speeches Henry’s family might have heard was broadcast in January 1939. In that speech, Hitler boasts:

In the course of my life I have often been a prophet, and have usually been ridiculed for it. During the time of my struggle for power it was in the first instance that the Jewish race only received my prophecies with laughter when I said that I would one day take over the leadership of the State, and with that of the whole nation, and that I would then, among many other things, settle the Jewish problem.