Frederick Weinstein papers

Fryderyk Winnykamien (later Frederick Weinstein) was born to Leopold Lipa and Isabella Bajla Gerszange Winnykamien in Biała Podlaska, Poland, where Leopold worked as a dentist. Fryderyk was the middle of three children, with an older sister named Pola and a younger sister named Rysia. The Winnykamien family lived in Łódź and all three children attended Jewish schools. After Germany invaded Poland in 1939, the Winnykamien family fled Łódź for Warsaw, with the intention of escaping to the Soviet Union. Unable to find work in Warsaw, in 1940 the family moved briefly to Otwock, a small town near Warsaw, where Leopold tried unsuccessfully to practice dentistry and Fryderyk earned money by smuggling food into Warsaw. Later, Fryderyk and his family moved to Gniewószow, a large village in the vicinity of Radom. There, Leopold practiced dentistry on well to do peasants and Pola returned to Warsaw to continue nursing school. In 1942, upon the German establishment of a ghetto in Gniewószow and shortly before the liquidation of that ghetto, Fryderyk and his parents hid with a family friend and were smuggled back to Warsaw, where Fred lived in the Warsaw ghetto and worked as a mechanic in the Ursus factory. In 1943, Fred fled the ghetto and went into hiding with his parents on the Aryan side of Warsaw under the assumed identity of a Roman Catholic man by the name of Mieczyslaw Ambryszewski. His mother and father lived under a false names of Maria and Józef Giziński. The family was forced to flee the building in which they were hiding after it was set on fire by SS guards in retaliation for the Warsaw ghetto uprising in early 1944. Fryderyk and his father spent the remaining days of the war as forced laborers building an outpost on the Soviet front until the Red Army liberated them in 1945. Fryderyk and Leopold were reunited with Isabella in Warsaw but learned that Pola was killed by an SS guard while tending to patients injured as a result of the uprising in the ghetto hospital where she worked as a nurse and that Rysia was killed in 1945 during the American Air Force bombing of Berlin, where she was working as a forced laborer. The surviving members of the family traveled around Europe and eventually settled in the Düppel displaced persons camp near Berlin. There, Fryderyk met his future wife, Ruth Cohn Chotzen and together, they immigrated to the United States in 1946 where they married and settled in New York. Upon their arrival, Fryderyk obtained work as a machinist for Beacon Machine Works and Ruth as an operator for the Atlantic Pad Company. Leopold and Isabella immigrated later to the United States.