He is a short man with a long memory.  Abraham Shulman, 97, remembers events that are set on three continents, span close to ten decades, and use two World Wars as bookmarks.  The pictures in his mind's eye include a ghetto in Warsaw, a concentration camp in Lodz, Poland, and a slave-labor camp in Austria.

Sitting upright on a chair in his ninth-floor studio apartment in Eastwood, Shulman could easily pass as a 75-year-old man.  It is as if he aged up to a point - and then stopped.  Time does not seem to have much meaning for him anymore.

He stoops slightly when he walks but he does not use a walking stick.  His frame is small, his face bright and he speaks with long pauses.  "History," says Shulman, as he gets up to pull out papers from five plastic bags, "these bags are full of history."

He takes them out one by one, handling them gently and with fondness.  A lease agreement for a six-bedroom apartment in the Bronx, dated 1946.  Three diplomas for evening classes from a high school in Brooklyn from the 1950s.  Black and white pictures of his family in Poland.  Then, the one document that helped change his life - a certificate from the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society that sponsored his immigration to the U.S. and recorded the date of his travel from Austria as November 8, 1948. 

"The 42nd Rainbow Division of the U.S. Army liberated me in 1945," recalls Shulman.  "The Russians liberated my son Louis and daughter Zophia at about the same time and we moved to New York three years later.  My wife and a younger daughter never came back from the concentration camp in Treblinka."

Born in Serokolia, Poland, in 1904, Shulman's earliest memories are of life in a rural township.  He lived with seven siblings in a house built by his father after their original home was burned down in the first World War.  "My mother used to carry me on her back to take me to a Hebrew school.  She would pack pumpernickel bread with crystal sugar for me to eat at school," says Shulman.  "There was a water mill in the village and I remember being whipped with a leather strap by my teacher for having gone swimming in its waters with my friends."

A more tragic memory is of his parents' death in 1916.  "My mother was not told that my father had died in the morning.  When his body was being taken away, she was told he was being taken to the hospital.  The same evening, she died right after nursing the baby.  I think both my parents died of cholera."

The family fell apart after that.  Shulman's oldest sister went to work in Warsaw as a nurse's aide while his oldest brother joined the Czar's army.  The baby was given to a childless couple, and five other children, including Abraham, were sent to live with an uncle.

Restless and unhappy, Shulman ran away to Warsaw to his oldest sister, who then sent him to live with a shoemaker's family in Grodzisker.  Shulman began to work as an apprentice.  At the age of 19, he joined the Jewish soccer team in his town.  A picture of this team, torn at the edges, hangs on the wall of his apartment.  "The team was like my family," he says.  His son, Louis, 73, says Shulman's fondest memories are of that time.  "He is an old man and he forgets a lot but this period is etched clearly in his mind."

In 1925, Shulman got married and had three children.  He was working as a shoe salesman at the time.  "The women drove me crazy because they could not decide what they wanted to buy.  So I started selling men's army boots," says Shulman.

With the German invasion of Poland in 1939, the Shulman family's troubles began.  "Our town was bombarded on the first day itself," says Louis Shulman.  "My father was an air-raid warden and he herded several families into a shelter in Warsaw.  The Germans bombarded Warsaw for three weeks and we were burned out.  We were forced to evacuate and were taken to a ghetto.  When the Germans discovered my father was a shoemaker, they put him to work."

Every morning, Abraham Shulman was escorted out of the ghetto to work for the Germans and then sent back at night.  "I was not allowed to walk in the middle of the street and had to take off my hat when I saw a German soldier," says Abraham Shulman.

On November 9, 1939, a day the older Shulman remembers very clearly, 19 men from the ghetto were rounded up and taken to a freight train.  German soldiers boarded up the windows and the captives were taken to an empty kerchief factory in Lodz near Warsaw.  "More than 1500 of us were locked up in that five-story factory.  We were constantly beaten and kicked and had no idea what would become of us.  We were fed rice soup in which you could count the grains of rice in the bowl."  Shulman recounts this experience with clarity and calm, but it is easy to tell that it was an experience that altered his very existence.

Six weeks after being captured, Shulman was moved to Krakow to a detention camp.  He escaped one night using false documents.  "We moved to Eastern Poland to a town where people were hiding Jews," recalls Louis Shulman.  "The Gestapo was raiding towns for Jews.  It was like a hunt for animals.  The townspeople were asked to deliver 150 Jews at a time for execution, and the first to be handed in were refugees like us.  There was constant movement and we were running from town to town to try to save ourselves."

In 1942, the family split up.  Abraham and Louis were sent to work for the Germans in Austria.  Abraham repaired shoes at a veterinarian depot while Louis tended and then slaughtered fowl for the German soldiers' meals.  Shulman's wife, Hinda, was unable to work as she had a small child with her.  Hinda, along with her two daughters, Zophia and Liebe, was put on a train to the Treblinka concentration camp.  On the way, Hinda pushed Zophia, the older daughter, off the train in an attempt to save her from certain death at the camp.  Her ploy worked.  At the end of the war, Abraham managed to find Zophia in Poland and the three of them - Abraham, Louis and Zophia - sailed for New York in 1948.

Abraham set up a shoe shop and was happy to stay in New York, but Zophia wanted to move to Israel.  So, in 1949, father and daughter went to Israel.  Abraham joined the Israeli army while Zophia worked as a nurse's aide.  Abraham preferred his life in New York and, after a couple of months, returned to the United States.  He worked as a shoemaker, earning $30 per week.  He lived with his son for a few years until Louis had a second child and the space became too tight.  "I began to work in a button shop in the garment district," recalls Abraham.  "Many of my co-workers called me a refugee and resented the fact that I had been given a position of responsibility receiving supplies, but I did not care.  I worked until 1972 so that I would be eligible for a pension and now I get $120 per month from them."

When he heard about the development on Roosevelt Island in the early '70s, Shulman went to the management office, at that time located at 50th Street and Madison.  "After I decided to move here, I came to visit every Sunday to see my building being constructed.  I was one of the first to move in.  Management gave me 123 keys and asked me to choose the apartment I wanted to live in.  I chose this one because I can see trees and the Church from my window."

Enjoying retired life on the Island, Shulman says he constantly brushes off his daughter's attempts to move him to an assisted-living facility.  "I have a family here.  If I don't go down to the Senior Center to eat on any day, someone knocks at my door to find out why.  I want to live my own life here."

A friend and neighbor, Joan Matula, says Shulman treats everyone he knows like a family member.  "He is a remarkable man who worries about everyone.  I have known him for 25 years.  He is a kind man," says Matula.

Having been through all the hardships he has, Shulman is a non-religious person.  "Where was God when millions of Jews were being killed?  It is easy saying millions were killed, but my whole family was wiped out.  They were not just a number for me.  I don't have any philosophy of life.  I don't like to think about my past.  At the end of my life, I will say to my children and grandchildren that they should live like I did - an honest, hardworking life, that is all."

Though he shies away from discussing his beliefs, it is clear that he feels very strongly about the madness that engulfed the world during the wars.  In a poem he wrote several years ago, Shulman offers some clues to his mindset:

They all met the same fate
because of one man's hate.
The agony and pain
must never happen again.

The world must care,
the shame it must bear.
Never forget or forgive
as long as we live

What one man can do,
be he Christian or Jew,
for it could happen to you
and you and you.