Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Miriam Monczyk-Laczkowska Ferber - December 7, 1999

And how did your friends react?

Professors knew. All my professor.

Your friends, how did they react?

That's fine. I mean, whatever said behind my back, I don't know. But uh, I was, I was Jewish. The only problem is that I was poor. [laughs]

[laughs]

If I would have had few good, you know, things to put on, good clothes from my uncles I would have been [laughs] much more popular.

Except you had a hundred dollars for a dowry.

Yes and I also had a beautiful dress that my--you know, I was a very good student, so I also got scholarship. So I bought myself a very nice material and the dressmaker made me a red skirt and a white blouse and that was my outfit. So everybody remembers me. And because the Polish flag is white and red, they always told me, oh, Mirka, Mirka goes in the, the colors of the [laughs] Polish flag. White blouse and a red skirt. It was very typical.

But, I mean, you heard the whole story then in one...

Yes.

in one day.

Right.

And did you then start to think about what that meant?

I didn't hear in one day. I kept asking her for weeks and weeks and weeks...

And did she tell you any more?

all the details. Yes, she told me, but she didn't want to tell me. She told me and she didn't want to tell me, Si...she was and sometimes we had argument and she would say to me, "You know what? What kind of a mother did you have that left you with me? I would never leave my child." And you know what? I kept hating my Jewish mother, until I got married. Until I had my own children. I realized what a courage. It is so much easier to take your child in your arms and go into the ovens or wherever she went or get shot, then to actually give your child away. So, um. I understood it later. But until you don't have your own child, you don't, you know. So that was her only argument against my mother.