Milchberg Family
The Cigarette Sellers of Three Crosses Square
Between 1942 and 1944, a group of Jewish children aged from six to sixteen resisted the Germans and fought for their lives in this square.
Here, the young escapees from the Warsaw ghetto scraped a living by selling cigarettes and newspapers. Their courage, ingenuity and solidarity helped them outlast the enemy.
They survived.
Mr. Milchberg’s improbable saga was chronicled in a 1962 memoir by a Holocaust survivor, Joseph Ziemian, called “The Cigarette Sellers of Three Crosses Square.” The square was in the heart of a Warsaw district that German authorities had taken over. A nearby Y.M.C.A. had become a barracks for SS troops, another building was a German gendarmerie and a third building housed Hungarian soldiers collaborating with the Germans. A Gestapo secret police office was nearby.
From “Irving Milchberg, Who Smuggled Guns Under Nazis’ Noses, Dies at 86”
Click to open an Oral History Interview with Irving Milchberg (1990) on United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Click to open an Oral History Interview with Irving Milchberg (1993) on United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Click to purchase The Cigarette Sellers of Three Crosses Square on Amazon
Click to purchase The Cigarette Sellers of Three Crosses Square on Amazon
Irving Milchberg, left, in 1944 with a fellow cigarette seller from Warsaw nicknamed Conky.
This page was generated by Artificial Intelligence. Please contact us with corrections, changes and elaborations as well as additional photos. Thank you.