Aleksandra Leliwa-Kopystyńska
Aleksandra Leliwa-Kopystyńska, born in 1937 Don’t tell anyone! Who am I? I don’t have a birth certificate. Not a real one. The most reliable document, according to which I was born in Warsaw on August 20, 1937, is a certificate from the Obstetrics and Gynecology Ward of the Military Hospital on Aleje Ujazdowskie. This fact was […]
Adam Nowicki
They began rounding up Jews to the Vilnius ghetto on September 6, 1941. The incessant flow of people poured down the road filling it from sidewalk to sidewalk. I remember a Lithuanian policeman clubbing a young woman carrying an infant. He was doing it with all his strength, ruthlessly and for no reason. Ten people […]
Katarzyna Meloch (2)
On March 2, 1946, almost a year after the war, I wrote the following in a Jewish psychological counseling center for children at Szeroka Street in Warsaw: “My wish is to move to the second grade because if I don’t, I will have wasted a whole year and my work will have been for nothing. […]
Lidia
I was born in 1929 in Białystok. My mother was Jewish. I was raised by her parents, my grandparents, the Melchiors. I look back very fondly at my childhood there. My grandparents weren’t wealthy, but they surrounded me with love and did everything to alleviate the separation from my mother. I suspect that my grandmother […]
Maria Kowalska
I was born on December 26, 1939, in Vilnius to a family of lawyers, as the first and only child of Jakub Abramowicz Fajnsztejn and Chana Nasielewna Fajnsztejn née Zusmanowicz. I was named Masza. My father was born in Vilnius on February 27, 1908. He earned his law degree from Stefan Batory University in Vilnius. […]
Andrzej Kaźmierczak
Memories, memories and then these blanks. How much can you enjoy your life if you’ll never meet your mother? I was born in August of 1944 in the Stutthof concentration camp near Gdańsk in the hospital of the women’s “Infirmary” of the Old Female Camp. It’s not easy to write about yourself not knowing the […]
Hanna Kleinberg
I come from a very large Jewish family that settled in Kraków generations ago. There were many families like that in Kraków and other cities and towns in Poland. They were part of the community of these cities. Jews lived and worked among Poles; this was their homeland. And this could have continued if it […]
Danuta Hawel
I remember, I remember very well the events and people, although I was only 3-and-a-half years old when I was escorted out of the ghetto (in Zawiercie). Now I’m 66 and I worry that I will forget. My granddaughters, even the older one Maja, to whom I wish to pass on my memories, are still […]
Halina
I never reflected on whether I am a Jew or Pole. There’s no doubt that I was a spoilt Jewish child. My father impressed on me that we were Polish. He said about himself that his nationality was Polish and religion Jewish. He was a Polish patriot. As a young boy, he tried to enlist […]
Frank Dobia
A reportage of Katarzyna Meloch On November 28, 2001, the Day of Young Israel was celebrated for the first time at the University of Warsaw. It was sponsored by the rector of the university, Professor Piotr Węgleński. Mrs. Bat Aden, chargé d’affaires of the State of Israel, awarded Israeli medals to a few Poles distinguished […]