Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Miriam Monczyk-Laczkowska Ferber - December 7, 1999

So he wanted you to go back home.

Right. I want you to know--and this is not a joke--that I totally forgot about it. I forgot about the incident, what happened. I, like, like, had an amnesia. I thought it was a bad dream. I never remembered that, until I was sixteen years old and my mother told me I was Jewish. Then all the flashes.

It all came back.

It came back. Until then, I didn't remember this. It thought it was a dream. I didn't remember what happened. Later on it came to me like, [snaps fingers] like the puzzle that was missing, you know, some pieces, all of, all of a sudden came back.

That's when you were five.

Yeah, nineteen-forty...yeah. Q:'47. Your mother must have been panicked out of her mind.

She was very panicked and she was always afraid that they gonna get me. They're gonna, because now she understood where they were coming from. They didn't care. I mean--you know, I love my Jewish people, but you know, in the name of God. And we know the history of the war. That, in, more people died in the name of God than anybody, you know. So, in the name of God they were taking me-- they didn't know where. Probably some place to a kibbutz in Israel and so on. Uh, which maybe would have been good. But maybe wouldn't have been so good, "cause I wouldn't have anybody. I wouldn't have any family. I would have been a real orphan, because at the age of five I would not remember

Yeah.

Polish family.

So this would be twice that you'd been sort of displaced.

Right.

In, in five years.

So now...

Now you're sixteen again.

Sixteen, yes. Sixteen in '58. Now I'm, I am having good time. 1960 comes, 1960. Another miracle happens. Exactly, exactly on my eighteenth birthday I finished my high school diploma. There's a special exam that you call matura.