"Two close calls in one day were enough for me. I realized that the uprising was not like the games I played with Jóózek before the war. This was a very real battle, in which people were being killed and wounded."
Arthur Ney, a 12-year-old smuggler outside the Warsaw ghetto walls when the ghetto uprising began in the spring of 1943, fled to the countryside with false papers to work on a farm. Almost a year later he returned to Warsaw and faced the realization that his family was gone. Under the protection of the Salesian Fathers as a "Christian" boy, he struggled with loneliness, guilt, fear and indecision regarding his "dual identity." When the Warsaw Uprising—codenamed W Hour—began on August 1, 1944, then-14-year-old Arthur Ney joined the barricades and fought the Germans for liberation.
