Kestenberg Archive

AJ, the third of six children, was born in March 1931 in a part of Poland that the Nazis did not reach until Operation Barbarossa. AJ remains grateful to the Orthodox priest in her hometown, who protected AJ's mother and infant brother, as well as other Jews, soon after the beginning of Barbarossa. This priest subsequently endured fatal torture for refusing to surrender Jews that he was hiding. By contrast, AJ remains resentful toward the Catholic priest of her hometown who, AJ says, refused to aid Jews. AJ, as well as her parents and four of her siblings, survived the Shoah due to their rescue by Russian partisans. Her other brother died in Ponary after fleeing there from their hometown. The vast majority of Jews in AJ's hometown were killed the day after Yom Kippur in 1942, but AJ and her siblings, in addition to her parents, were spared due to her mother's job as a seamstress for the wife of the town's Burgermeister. During the subsequent winter, AJ and her family escaped into the woods after the partisans liberated her and her family from the ghetto. After the liberation of White Russia by the Soviets, she and her family remained in White Russia for two years, before emigrating in 1946 due to antisemitism in Soviet schools and courts. AJ and her family found refuge in several Displaced Persons camps, beginning with Wasseralfingen, a camp of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. One of AJ's brothers emigrated to Israel, where he served in the War for Independence. The rest of AJ's family, including the interviewee herself, later emigrated to Toronto, where her father died. AJ and her sister both married American men and moved to the United States. Despite initially harboring anger toward "the Poles and the Germans," AJ states that she has subsequently abandoned such anger, choosing instead to channel it into an affinity for humanity in general and particularly for Israel and world Jewry. ; At the time of this interview, AJ resides in Wilmington, Delaware, USA.