SIESTA KEY – The year is 1941, and in a small town, one family had big luck. Everyone was fleeing in the same direction, but something told Robin Rapaport’s mom to take a different path, which is why he’s here to tell his story.
He was born February 6, 1941.
“If you begin a story with first breath, my story began in a small town in Poland, Lithuania at the time, called Glubockie,” Rapaport said. “The town no longer exists; it was destroyed in the war.”
Summer 1941 was the heat of the destruction and conflict.
“My mother, God bless her, for some reason, she had kind of a survivors compass,” Rapaport said. “Everybody was heading west. She decided she was gonna go east, and everybody that headed west waltzed into the arms of the oncoming German army and perished, or ended up in concentration camps.”
Robin, was five or six months old. He, his mother and his aunt headed east, on a 2,400 mile journey to Tashkent, Uzbekistan.
“We spent all the years of the war in Tashkent. We were taken in by a group of tartars, who were Suni Muslims. I refer to them as ‘righteous Muslims,'” Rapaport said.
From Tashkent they went to two displaced persons (DP) camps in Austria. Robin’s father was in the Polish military and was taken as a prisoner of war. Robin and his mother were reunited with him in one of the camps.
“My aunt saw on a tree a note from my father asking whether anyone had seen his family,” Rapaport said.
