 At the beginning of the Nazi occupation his father and brother tried to escape eastward, but his father was shot by the Germans when his convoy was attacked.A few months later his mother moved with her four children to her parents' house in Warsaw, which was situated in the ghetto that had been established in November 1940 in the heart of the Jewish Quarter.A year later, in autumn 1941, when conditions in the ghetto had worsened and tens of thousands of its residents had died or were killed, this spurred him to escape from the ghetto with the assistance of a smuggler; Freiberg escaped to the remote town Turobin in the district of Lublin, where the Jews, including the family of his father, lived with a sense of relative calm.