Rena Michalowska

This is me today. This picture was taken by a professional photographer in Warsaw before my trip to the USA to visit my son in 2005. We wanted to go to Vancouver and I needed that photo for the Canadian visa. My contacts with the Jewish community are very selective. I go to the Singer days and Jewish Book days. This year a wonderful panel was organized, called ?Assimilated Jewish Families.? Since 1968 or 1969, when Ida Kaminska left with the core of the theater group, I have not gone to a single performance at the Jewish theater, though I used to go before. I don't like ersatz. I understand practically everything in Yiddish. But when I want to answer, my English pushes out my Yiddish. I must have put so much intellectual effort into absorbing English, that it has become dominant. I feel very bad for having stopped speaking Yiddish. I think that if I found myself in a community speaking that language, I would get it back without a problem. Now I'm painstakingly making up for those years when I had no time to read fiction, as the day was only 24 hours long. I used to joke that I'm educated on 'Ekspres Wieczorny' [a popular evening daily, published in Warsaw in 1946-1990]; only the titles, for the smaller print puts me to sleep. When I recently read 'W ogrodzie pamieci' [a book by Joanna Olczak-Roniker, 2001, Znak Publishing House, a saga of four generations of a Jewish family], I was somewhat envious. Those better educated families have had some papers left, some documents, something. And with me, what there was is all gone now. I used to come back to all that in my thoughts very often, but I pushed it away from me. When I read 'My z Jedwabnego' [by Anna Bikont, 2004, Proszynski i Spolka Publishing House: the reconstruction of the Jedwabne pogrom from 1941], I thought, ?My God, why does all of that have to disappear? And I didn't even try to commemorate anything, to recollect it?? That's why I wanted to write up these, somewhat hazy, family memories.

The Centropa Collection at USHMM

The Centropa archive has been acquired by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. USHMM will soon offer a Special Collections page for Centropa.

Academics please note: USHMM can provide you with original language word-for-word transcripts and high resolution photographs. All publications should be credited: "From the Centropa Collection at the United States Memorial Museum in Washington, DC". 

Please contact collection [at] centropa.org (collection[at]centropa[dot]org).