This account is from a new project called “Beyond the World War II We Know,” a series from The Times that will document lesser-known stories from World War II. Though much of the project will focus on the end and aftermath of the war, our second dispatch takes place in 1941, when the Germans were planning a surprise attack on the city of Lvov in Poland, which was annexed by the Soviet Union two years earlier. Celia Kener was 6 at the time. She would eventually be detained and sent to Lvov’s ghetto and then separated from her entire family, but it’s the events that followed the German assault that continue to haunt her today.

I was very excited about an upcoming ballet recital, which happened to be taking place the day the Germans invaded. The recital was canceled, and I was extremely upset about it. More than that, my father was drafted into the Russian Army on that same day, and my mother and I didn’t know if we would ever see him again. But we were still in our own home in Lvov; we had not yet been forced into the ghetto. When I went outside to play a few days later, my friends not only stayed away and pointed at me, but they called me names, like parszywa Zydowka, which translated to “smelly Jew.” I was only 6, and I didn’t understand what was going on.

My friends’ teasing attracted the attention of an officer, who grabbed me and shoved me onto a truck. I couldn’t call my mother because he was dragging me by my arms and hair. Other children were already detained on the truck — behind chains, vomiting and crying out of fear. I latched onto the legs of another officer who was manning the vehicle and spoke to him in Polish, asking if he had children of his own who were innocent like me. I don’t think he was German, because he understood Polish, but he had on a uniform and was perhaps working for the Germans. I must have touched a sensitive note in his heart. He grabbed me by my long blond braids, threw me down off the truck and told me not to leave my house during the day, which was when the Germans came around without warning to search for Jews to take away to unknown destinations. By the time I returned to the apartment, my mother had already been mourning my death, because nobody came back from those trucks.