On the 23rd of November 1939, German civilian occupation authorities required Warsaw's Jews to identify themselves by wearing white armbands with a blue Star of David. The German authorities closed Jewish schools, confiscated Jewish-owned property, and conscripted Jewish men into forced labor and dissolved prewar Jewish organizations.

On the 12th of October 1940 German authorities had decreed the establishment of a ghetto in Warsaw. The decree required all Jewish residents of Warsaw to move into a designated area, which German authorities sealed off from the rest of the city in November 1940. One of the Jews imprisoned in the ghetto was Yehuda Lerner and his family.

Between 1940 and mid-1942, 83,000 Jews died of starvation and disease. When a resident from the Warsaw Ghetto passed away, their families would place the body in the street and it would be picked up in the morning by a funeral cart that made its rounds every day. From the 22nd of July until the 12th of September 1942, German SS and police units, assisted by auxiliaries, carried out mass deportations from the Warsaw ghetto to the Treblinka killing center, 52 miles away from Warsaw.

Yehuda and his family were rounded up on the first day of the mass deportation on July 22, 1942. Whilst Yehuda was deported to work in Smolensk working at a military airport, his family was deported to the Treblinka death camp. Yehuda never saw them again. After two months of watching people starve to death or be shot by the Germans as a type of sport, Yehuda decided that he had to escape.

He fled with a friend, sneaking out of the barbed wire fence and running through the adjacent fields and forests for two days before encountering anyone. Only then was he recaptured and taken to a different labor camp. As he said, he simply had nothing to lose and did not want to die of starvation. Yehuda was beaten often, and bedridden for long periods, yet managed to appear at roll calls so that he would escape the execution that the sick were subject to.

One of the camps in which Yehuda was imprisoned was the Minsk ghetto. He was far too frail to work, and thus was put, by his Jewish comrades, into the Russian prisoners of war camp nearby. All of these Russian prisoners happened to be Jewish. Yehuda contracted typhus and was bedridden for several weeks. Once healed, he was taken back to Minsk. One night in September 1943, everyone in the camp was taken by train to Lublin, at what would be the Majdanek concentration camp.

However, after waiting for a day at the camp gates, they were told that there was no room and they would be taken to Sobibor. When Yehuda’s transport arrived in Sobibor in September 1943, everyone was herded off the train. The Germans demanded sixty strong people, and reasoning that food would be needed to do hard labor, Lerner volunteered. He was given good clothes and blankets, obviously from the previous convoy, and allowed to eat all he wanted.

They would do hard work digging underground munitions warehouses. In talking with other prisoners, he learned that there was no escape from Sobibor and during the year and a half that Sobibor was operational, several attempts were made by the prisoners to escape.