Kestenberg Archive

MB was born in 1938 in Brussels to Polish parents. She has two older sisters and a brother from her father's first marriage and a sister born in 1942. The Nazis came and took her family from their sixth floor apartment (MB thinks that they were taken to Malines, Belgium then to a concentration camp). MB and her father were on an above floor in his tailoring workshop and did not go down to the apartment. She escaped with her father to Liege and put into an orphanage run by priests. She went from there to a convent after the Germans found out that the priest was hiding Jews. She was then transferred to live with three “sisters” (lay people) in a small town. She encountered Nazis in the town of the convent and was almost revealed as a Jew when a German spoke to her in Yiddish. She became very close with these “sisters” and she keeps close contact with them (they never made her convert). She names Esther Goldman as her first rescuer who convinced her mother in law to save Jews. At the age of 12, MB moved to the Brooklyn to live with her paternal aunts but returned for a short time to Brussels to live with her father. MB was a rebellious teenager, when sent to seminary she rebelled against Jewish traditions. MB had an identity problem, not wanting anyone to know she was Jewish and in school in Belgium people called her a ‘dirty Jew.' She was hospitalized three times with hallucinations and depression. MB traveled to Iran and lived there for two years in 1975 and worked as a curator at the Leningrad museum, which helped her get over her depression. She has used an understanding of other religions to come to terms with her suffering during the Holocaust. She has angst with defining herself as Jewish, but against opposition she will defend Judaism. She was married to a Jewish man but divorced after ten years. She has no children.