Lisa Nussbaum was born on December 25, 1926, in Raczki, Poland, a town about three miles from the German border. Lisa’s family, who was Jewish, had lived in Raczki for generations.

Lisa’s parents were Herschel and Gittel Nussbaum. She had an older sister, Pola, and a younger brother, Bóżek. Hershcel exported geese and lumber to Germany and Gittel owned a fabric store.

Lisa’s family experienced antisemitism long before Nazi Germany occupied Poland. Non-Jewish neighbors avoided the Nussbaums' businesses because they were Jewish owned. Lisa attended a public school in Raczki and when she was in fifth grade, schoolmates grabbed her hair, pinned her to a wall and said, “We’ll crucify you like you crucified Jesus.” This accusation came from the long held antisemitic lie that Jews (as opposed to the Romans) were responsible for the killing of Jesus. Lisa was afraid to return to school after this violent incident.

Germany started World War II by invading Poland on September 1, 1939. By the end of September, Germany and its ally the Soviet Union divided Poland into two occupation zones. Lisa’s parents believed that the family would be safer on the Soviet side. They fled east and found accommodations in the town of Augustów in northeastern Poland. Lisa and her sister began attending a Russian-language school. They eventually moved further east, to Slonim (today part of Belarus), which had a long established Jewish community. On June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, putting the Jews in Slonim in mortal danger.

A few months after the Nazis established the ghetto, its inhabitants heard rumors that another shooting massacre was imminent. In November 1941, when Lisa was 14 years old, her mother arranged a hiding place for Lisa and her sister Pola with a Polish Christian woman outside of the ghetto. Gittel instructed her daughters to remove the Jewish star badges they were required to wear and helped them crawl through the barbed wire fence surrounding the ghetto. They arrived safely at the Christian woman’s house and hid in her basement.

The next morning, a neighbor knocked on the woman’s door to inform her that the Slonim ghetto inhabitants were being killed. The woman became frightened that she would also be killed for sheltering Jews and forced the two girls to leave, betraying her promise to their mother. Terrified, they hid in the nearby woods.

While hiding in the forest, the sisters happened upon the mass killing of most of Slonim’s remaining Jews by the Einsatzgruppen, or mobile killing squads, comprised of German as well as local Latvian, Estonian, and Ukrainian shooters. A forest ranger discovered the two girls in the woods and assumed they had escaped the shooting. He forced them to stand in line with those slated for murder, but the pair were somehow able to escape, finding safety with a different Christian woman until the massacre was over.

The teenage sisters felt they had no option but to return to the decimated ghetto, where they learned that their mother had been killed in the mass shooting. Because so many of the town’s Jews had already been murdered, the footprint of the ghetto was reduced. Lisa, her siblings, and their father lived together in one tiny crowded room. Lisa’s neighbor introduced her to Aron Dereczynski (Derman), who would later become her husband. Aron helped Lisa and her family survive by bringing them extra food and other necessities when he could.

In June 1942, after another massacre in which almost all of Slonim's remaining Jews were killed, including Lisa’s sister Pola, Lisa and Aron escaped the ghetto together. They sought refuge in the Grodno and Vilna ghettos before fleeing in 1943 to the Narozh forests of Belarus to join partisan fighting units. For the next year, they took part in sabotage and armed combat missions against the Germans, and also tended to wounded and sick resistance fighters.

Lisa’s younger brother, Bóżek, was caught in a round-up in Vilna and deported first to a labor camp in Estonia and then to the Stutthof concentration camp near Danzig. Lisa’s father joined her in the forest.

In 1944, the Soviets took control of the area in which Lisa’s resistance unit was operating, liberating Lisa and her fellow partisans. Both Lisa’s father and brother also survived the Holocaust.

Antisemitic violence in Poland led Lisa and Aron to look for a new place to rebuild their lives. Lisa and Aron married in a synagogue in Rome, Italy, in 1946. In March 1947, they sailed to the United States. They settled in Chicago, Illinois, where they had three sons and several grandchildren. Lisa was president of the Holocaust Memorial Foundation of Illinois from 1999-2002. She died in 2002, while sharing her testimony at a storytelling festival. Her last public words were, “Please remember this story and tell it to others because I don’t know how long I will be here.”