This is a very very very brief biography of Rabbi Shmuel Birnbaum, quoted in this weeks exciting "On the Parsha" vort.

HaRav Shmuel Birnbaum was one of the students of the Mir yeshiva who traveled to Shanghai during the war. He later moved to America and eventually became the Rosh Yeshiva of Mir in Brooklyn.
One anecdote that I heard at a hesped of his after his passing, was that in his later years, he was discussing life in the heim with a fellow war time talmid of the Mir.
They spoke of the poverty that was part of life in the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe before the war. His fellow said, that since R' Shmuel had a Ketzos HaChoshen and a Nesivas HaMishpot, (two very important works written about 200 years ago used extensively in yeshivos), as a youth in yeshiva, he presumably came from a relatively well off family, (seforim were a luxury out of reach to many in those times). R’ Shmuel replied that on the contrary, his family was very poor, but that his mother had sold, (literally), every piece of movable property that they possessed, in order that her son should be best able to succeed in his yeshiva studies!
This was only four generations ago!