Kestenberg Archive

DS was born in Lvov in 1935. She was an only child. Her father was a lawyer and her mother worked in administration. DS is resentful that her mother worked when she was a young child, although the war later brought them much closer. Theirs was a modern secular Jewish home. DS had many Polish maids who used to beat her and take her to church. DS's mother would not allow her to play with the Christian children in the neighbourhood. When the war began, they fled to cross the border but returned home, deciding that “it would all blow over”. DS's father was imprisoned for a short while by the Russians and then returned home. Shortly after the Germans entered Lvov, DS was sexually assaulted by a German soldier. The family were then sent into the ghetto. DS describes the hunger and fear of ghetto life, and how they hid underground from the round ups (atkion). DS escaped the ghetto with her mother in mid-1942. They lived in a village under false Catholic identity, and DS had to go to church and play with the local children. DS's father was sent to Janowska camp where he was killed. In 1944 when the Russians came they returned to Lvov to look for DS's father. It was very difficult in Lvov as there was no organisation to aid them. They left for Sweden and there DS went to school. ; DS was also in hospital for a while to recover. In 1946, DS was raped in a Jewish refugee home (she later met this same man in Israel in the 1980s). Her mother married a man who helped them to move to America, but he was very unhealthy mentally and used to beat her. DS's mother died shortly after moving to America of cancer, when DS was 17. DS's parents' old boss was in Los Angeles and supported her at this time, financing also her college education. DS is involved in an unhealthy relationship with her husband and has three sons. She has suffered many forms of rejection, and seems to have constantly experienced abusive and disloyal relationships with men.