By the age of 13, Shipper was living with his grandmother in a ghetto in Lodz, Poland. His parents had divorced – deemed shameful in the Orthodox Jewish community – and he’d falsely been told his mother had died. After his father escaped to the Soviet Union in 1939, he never saw him again.
In 1942, all the children of the community – including Shipper – were sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. At this infamous combination of concentration camp and extermination camp, Shipper had to survive unimaginable hardships.