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Hitler and the Nazi Party are telling the world that "Jews are a diseased race".
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Lola was born
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A German officer is killed in Paris by a Jew. Sets off a blacklash known as the Night of Broken Glass.
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Czortkow starts having rolling blackouts. All the streetlights are turned off, and Jews tape black paper over the windows so German bombers can not see them when flying overhead.
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Hitler invades Poland, where 3.3 million Jews live.
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Lola is free to walk around the marketplace with her mother. The Russian soldiers arrive.
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The Russians take over Czortkow.
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Lola is six and a half and is going to nursery school at her father's cousin's house. There are about a dozen other kids there, too.
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Hitler comes up with a plan to execute all of Europe's Jews. It's called the Final Solution.
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It was a Sunday, and the Germans arrived in town, marching with guns and tanks, wearing goggles, tall black boots, and leather jackets.
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The Germans made a law that anyone providing shelter to Jews, giving them food, or even selling them food, was to be killed.
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The Jews in Czortkow are confined to a ghetto, a series of streets and buildings where Jews must live. You must have proper papers to leave the ghetto.
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Lola's dad dies at home.
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The first "action" comes. For Germans, it means a day set aside for rounding up huge numbers of Jews and sending them by train to the concentration camps. Lola, her mother, and her grandmother hide in a narrow space between a storage area wall and a wall of another apartment building next door.
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Today is Purim, a Jewish holiday. Lola's mother, a cousin, and 2 other women were killed by a German soldier, Kurt Kollner, enacting revenge for another German soldier going into his territory and "shooting his Jews".
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A few months after Lola's mother is killed, Babcia takes Lola aside right before bed, explaining she will be sneaking out of the ghetto that night. Babcia does not go with Lola. Tekla picks Lola up at the bridge.
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Tekla's son-in-law works in the fields even though it is still windy and cold. Lola is always scared of him.
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A couple of months after Lola arrived at the house, a man and a woman came to the room where Lola was. The dog never barks. Lola pretends to be deaf and mute. The son-in-law says that the next day, he is taking Lola to the Gestapo. Tekla takes Lola in the middle of the night to Anna, where she is put into a 6 1/2 x 6 1/2 foot hole with three other Jews.
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Just after the new year of 1944, Anna tells Lola and the others that the Germans are losing the war and retreating.