Kestenberg Archive

MK was born in Lvov in 1928. During his early childhood, MK spent a great deal of time with his parents. When he was approximately six years of age, his parents divorced and his mother remarried. He subsequently went with his mother and stepfather to live in Warsaw. MK's father, who was a trained but non-practicing mathematician, moved to Lodz after the Divorce. In Lodz, MK's father maintained an economic consulting office for Poland's textile industry, focusing on trade between the Polish and English textile industries. MK recalls encountering very little antisemitism in school. During the September 1939 invasion of Poland, German bombs destroyed their house in Warsaw. MK's stepfather was ordered to serve in the Polish military, which led him to Eastern Poland. MK and his mother, escaping the Nazi occupation of Poland, fled to Bialystock and then, together with his stepfather, fled to Lvov, where they resided with MK's maternal grandparents. MK befriended a younger maternal cousin while living with his grandparents. MK saw his father for the last time during the summer of 1939. The interviewee's father was later interned in the Warsaw Ghetto, where he married his fourth and final wife, and worked for the Warsaw Judenrat. ; During Operation Barbarossa, Nazi Germany conquered Lvov. However, MK's stepfather and grandfather harbored deep antipathy toward the USSR and therefore refused to take the family into the Soviet Union to escape from the Nazis. MK explains that his stepfather and grandfather believed, due to the Soviet regime's long pattern of violence, that the family would suffer less under the Nazis than in the Soviet Union. MK is not familiar with his paternal family, although he is aware that his father's relatives resided in Russia during the Second World War. MK's mother, stepfather, and extended family, did not survive the Holocaust. The interviewee subsequently emigrated to the United States and has since visited Poland multiple times. However, as he explains, he does not feel a connection to contemporary Poland, yet he does feel a part of Poland's past. Simultaneously, MK considers himself to be part of contemporary American culture but feels alienated from the history of the United States.