Witold Nieznanowski’s wedding

This is my son Witold’s wedding. He got married to Valerie. She is English. On this picture you can see my son, his wife, me, my wife and the parents -in-law of my son. It was taken in Uppsala, Sweden, in the 1980s.

Our daughter Ewa was born in 1953, and a son, Witek, followed in 1954. 

My son, Witek, is in Sweden. He had been going there to earn money by picking berries, went again in 1980, and never returned. He worked at the psychiatric hospital in Uppsala. He started as a paramedic, but the doctors appreciated him and he was promoted, ran the psychiatric outpatient clinic. Last year he got promoted again and is the manager of the municipal department of psychiatry in Uppsala. So he ceased being a doctor and became an office worker. He attended English courses at the British Institute, where he was taught by his future wife. She obviously taught him to become her husband, and so they got married. His wife's name is Valerie, she's English. I went there, the wedding was in grand style. They traveled the world for 10 years, and after 10 years they got married. Then came the children. They have two daughters, Chana and Rebecca. Chana is 15, and Rebecca is 8 years old. Unfortunately, they don't speak Polish. 

My son started questioning me, 'Dad,' he says, 'the girls are supposed to write school essays about their roots, their descent, draw their genealogical tree. Start writing.' So when they asked me to record [for the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation], I gave the whole tape to my son. He translated it into English or Swedish, and now they're proud of their grandfather who lives in Poland.

There is no problem in his family whether he's Jewish or not. I was in England, to visit his parents-in-law, I was received by an Anglican priest. Everyone knows my parents were in the ghetto. The notion of anti-Semitism doesn't exist there at all, and we got really close with his wife too. My son, in turn, has been more and more interested in his Jewishness. How so? Well, he's connected to Warsaw there through the Internet, reads the Polish press, and he's really absorbed with all those things. So I started sending him books, magazines.

Photos from this interviewee