The Birencwajg family

This is my family, my mom, Gustawa Birencwajg, my dad, Dawid Birencwajg, my sister Cetka and me. This picture was taken in Pieszyce in the 1940s.

After the war my uncle, Chaim Poltorak, organized us an apartment. It was on Bieruta Street. And that's where we settled. There were children in the city and they started organizing a nursery. Because my mom had worked at a nursery in Russia, they took her as the director, to organize that nursery, because nobody knew how to go about it. Nurseries did not exist before the war. She organized it, there was a doctor there who was a Jew, and she took in young children, under three years of age, she organized the staff and it was all very good. This was in Piotrolesie. Near Dzierzoniow. She worked there for some two or three years, I don't remember exactly. This orphanage for Jewish children was next to the nursery, they picked these children up in the forests. They were alone. The director asked her to transfer to that orphanage, as the hostess. His name was Kozlowski. He later died in Israel. Anyway, she transferred there and worked as hostess. And my father was working in a boiler-room in a factory.

One day my father went to Warsaw, he found many friends there who told him they'd get him a job. We were very happy, he had already left, we stayed behind. He finally wrote us that we could come. Well, mom started packing, we had some pots and pans, perhaps something else, so she took what she could. I was in gymnasium in Dzierzoniow, but because I had gone to a Russian school in Russia, and I didn't manage to get much of an education before the war, I decided I wouldn't leave that gymnasium. And so I spent the year in Dzierzoniow, I lived in a dormitory. And later I went to a college preparatory school. Those were two-year schools. They gave you a secondary school certificate and the possibility of entering university without having to pass additional exams. And I left for Wroclaw. And they were by then in Warsaw and I stayed one more year in Wroclaw, also in a dormitory.