Lillian Polus Gerstner has honored her father, Moses Polus, who was born in Warsaw, Poland, on May 24, 1909. Before the war, he worked as a salesman in the family business. When the war broke out, he fled Warsaw before the Jewish ghetto was established. After a stay in Bialystok, where he had hoped his family would join him, he walked east towards Russia. Not long after, he was arrested and sent to a Siberian labor camp, Vorkuta, where he spent two and a half years. When the war ended, he managed to return to Warsaw, and later to Berlin, at which point he sought refuge at a Displaced Person’s camp. Here, he met Gerstner’s mother, whom he later married. The couple was sponsored by the Jewish community in Nashville to come to America in 1949, where they settled and had a family.
The Nashville Holocaust Memorial