My family left Lodz in time. We even left the Warsaw ghetto before it was completely sealed off. We still had some money, jewelry, and wool from our store in Lodz. In the fall of 1941 began the widespread slaughter of the Polish Jews and my family realized that there was neither place to hide nor anywhere to escape. In 1940, my family moved to Ozarow. The Jews of Ozarow were deported to Treblinka in 1941. My father began teaching me how to make the sign of the cross. He gave me a piece of paper in which the Lord’s Prayer was written in large block letters. He also informed me that from then on my name would be Marysia Kowalska. He ordered me to call every woman I was with ‘mama’ and every man as ‘tata’ and to never admit that I was Jewish. At age 8, I was given by my parents to a Jewish woman named Cesia from Lubicz. Cesia, in a chance meeting on a train, handed me over to a Polish woman named Maryla. I spent the war hiding in Lwow, then in small villages in the region of Tarnow and Rzeszow-Czudec, Wola Rzedzinska, Stylow, Hucinko, and Ranizow. I changed my name to Maria and became a Catholic. After liberation, I returned to Lwow with Maryla, lived briefly in Lublin, Pruszkow, and finally settled in Zabkowice (1945-48). I stayed in an orphanage for two years. I graduated from high school in 1951 and in 1959 from the Advanced State School for Theater. I married Romuald Orlowski and bore a son before immigrating to America in 1969. In 2004, I found two surviving cousins in Israel—my only surviving family.

 

Miriam Winter (Maria Orlowski) is the author of a book, “Trains: A Memoir of a Hidden Childhood During and After World War II.”