Repatriation, they called it. But we were not going home to Poland, the country in which we had once lived. To the contrary, we were leaving the only home we had ever known.

A Yiddish-speaking U.S. Army officer interviewed us about our origin and migration. He put us at ease that we were eligible for entry to the camps.

In the Rynek you could get almost anything—for a price. I saw people buying and selling everything from sacks of flour and sugar to gold and jewelry to packs and cartons of American cigarettes.

We were taken by Brichah from the Polish city of Szczecin into the Soviet zone of occupation and then to Berlin, which was by then a divided city with separate U.S., British, Soviet and French sectors of control.

Bytom’s old Jewish cemetery was in tidy order, as if a local shames like my grandfather were still tending to the dates and names of every resident. Would that it were so!

I was sickened but struggled to keep a straight face. I told her I did not have the tools to extract the gold fillings, and preferred to deal only in jewelry.

We were the surviving remnant of a once-great Jewish civilization—thousands out of millions—rolling into an unknown Poland and an uncertain future.

At this time in my young working life, I knew a lot about tin. But now I was about to get an education in a more valuable metal, gold.