Irene Sobel - September 8, 1998
Mother Survives the War
Your mother seems to have gotten well.
Well, she is, when you say she has gotten well. She moved around and she survived the war. But her health was--and after the war she had some major, she had surgery which eliminated the cyst which thereafter, she was told it was the size of the head of a baby. But she survived the war and she was able to do something for us, I remember, again, I remember, she took up some blanket she'd had, there were, blankets were available, those like military dark color green, khaki blankets. And she cut up a blanket and made like a jacket for my sister and for me. And there was one girl we very much befriended and I asked my mother if she could make a jacket for that girl too, and she did, by hand of course.
Any discussion about your father?
Well, strangely, how I accepted my father's death without long lasting pain at that stage. So many things were happening that everything was accepted as another blow that you have to live with. The greatest loss of my father's death I experienced after the war. Where many, when we returned to Poland--'45?--and many of the children found their parents and returned and lived with their parents, I had to go to an orphanage. My father was dead, my mother's health were extremely poor. She was sick.
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