Sigmund "Siggy" Boraks lived in the Polish city Wielun with his parents Chaim and Golda, and his younger sister Basha. Chaim was a barber. Siggy was fourteen years old when the Germans invaded Poland. His family was expelled from their home and sent to the Krakow Ghetto and then to the Czestochowa Ghetto. In September-October 1942, Siggy's parents and sister were sent to the Treblinka death camp. Siggy was sent to a Nazi labor camp at Blizyn, Poland. In 1944, he was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. As a slave laborer, he was assigned to the 'ramp' at Birkenau, where he witnessed the arrival and destruction of Hungarian Jewry. He was later assigned to a Sonderkommando working in one of the four gas chambers at Birkenau. In late 1944, he was sent to the Kaufering labor camp near Munich, Germany. In the last weeks of the war, he survived a "death march" between Kaufering and Dachau concentration camp. He was liberated by American troops on April 29, 1945.
After the war, Siggy married a German-Jewish girl. In 1950, they moved to New Orleans and raised their four children.
This series was funded by the Rita and Harold Divine Foundation, the Siggy Boraks Family, and made possible by the generous contribution of video production services of WDSU-TV in New Orleans.