The Forgotten Jews of the Forest

On an unseasonably cold night in August 1942, Miriam Rabinowitz pushed her way past a wooden fence topped with barbed wire and broke out of the ghetto in Zdzięciol, Poland. She wasn't alone. The 34-year-old woman led her two young daughters, her sister, a cousin, and a handful of others away from the underground bunker where they had hidden for three days while SS squads rounded up some 2,500 other Jewish men, women and children, marched them to the edge of town, forced them to strip naked and shot them into waiting pits.