“It was beshert”, she wrote. “Meant to be.” How else could she explain why she had lived, while millions had perished?
My mother’s story is a heroic tale of a young woman who survived, against all odds, as a child and teenager in Warsaw from 1917 till 1939 and as a young woman in Soviet Russia and Uzbekistan from 1939 till 1946. Her manuscript pays tribute to Jewish life in Warsaw in the interwar period, to the thousand yearlong Jewish history in Poland and to Polish Jews who sought refuge on Soviet soil at the outbreak of WWII.
On the day of her death in 2006, I found the box containing the pages of my mother’s diary, covering thirty years of her life. In a thin, shaky handwriting she recalled heart-searing memories that began with being born a Jew in Warsaw in 1917 and ended with WWII, her return to Poland after surviving six years throughout remote corners of Soviet Russia. I proceeded to translate her story from Polish to English, quickly realizing how important it was that the stories of her life, as well as the legacy of Jewish life in Poland be remembered by generations to come. This memoir is an important source in the historical investigations of the social history of Eastern European Jewish women and Jewish families between the years of 1918 and 1968.
I thank my family, friends, and colleagues and at the advice of a literary agent for inspiring me to work on the book. They all believe this is an important story, both historically and on a human level. I want to bring my mother’s book out of obscurity so that future generations have a way to remember my mother’s vanished world, and to pay tribute to a thousand yearlong Jewish legacy in Eastern Europe.
