Kestenberg Archive

MZ was born in Milerow (near Rostov), USSR in 1941. Her parents, who were Jewish, met in Lodz, but settled in Gdynia before the war. Her father was a shoemaker and they were poor. Her parents, who were both Communists, fled to Russia when the war broke out. MZ's father tried to encourage other family members to join them thinking that it would be safer. Both her parents were able to pass themselves off as Polish because they had blond hair and blue eyes. In Milerow, her mother worked as a seamstress making navy uniforms. In 1942 when the Germans invaded Russia, a woman informed the Gestapo that her father was Jewish. He tried to tell them that he was not Jewish; he did not look Semitic and had Polish working papers. However, the Germans saw that he was circumcised, and executed him in a mass killing in the forest. At that time, the Germans were killing only Jewish men, so she and her mother were able to avoid being killed. ; Her mother arranged for a Russian friend to adopt MZ, but later changed her mind. Most of their extended family was killed. In 1945 or 1946 she and her mother returned to Poland where she lived among a group of Jews who had survived the war. Her mother remarried. She and her brother attended schools that were attended mostly by Jewish children, although for quite a while her brother did not realize he was Jewish. In later years, MZ and her step-father did not get on, because he never gave up his Communist ideals, which she (and her mother) came to see as a broken system. MZ's daughter knows she is Jewish, because MZ did not want to hide that from her even though it created some problems for her in school. She wanted her to hold her head up and see being Jewish as something to be proud of. One of the social issues that MZ brought up was Jewish connections with Communism and Russia. She also talked about how many Jews refused to accept that Hitler intended to exterminate the Jews around the world. She also talked about how her mother's war experiences influenced her view of men.