Wacek Kornblum with his wife Janina Kornblum

This is my and my wife Janina in our house in Saska Kepa in Warsaw, 1993

After the war I spent a long time in the health resort in Otwock, I was very sick with tuberculosis, in both lungs. There was no streptomycin back then.  And I had a friend in that health resort, Michal Janik, a boy my age, who unfortunately died of tuberculosis. I want to say that in the health resort everyone knew I was a Jew and there were four of us in the room, then six, and I absolutely cannot say anything bad about other patients.

They sent us to a dentist. And there was Mrs. Filipowicz, a dentist, also a Jew, who survived. And my future wife used to come to that dentist as well, a young woman, who also had sick lungs. Mrs Filipowicz set up our visits in such a way, that I used to meet my future wife there.

Jasia, or Janina, maiden name Aneksztejn, was born in Warsaw in 1923. She was the only child in an assimilated family, her father worked in the American Embassy and was far from Judaism, like her mother Helena Aneksztejn, nee Finkelblech. She went to a Polish gymnasium on Miodowa Street, but had Jewish friends. She had aunts, one in Holland, and another one, who survived the war in Russia, then went to London with her husband, we used to go there. We got married in 1950.

I spent a few years in the health resort, then I took extramural correspondence courses in economy and bookkeeping and I started working in the Department of Internal Trade. And we stayed in Otwock. I used to commute to Warsaw by train, it was a hassle. And my wife didn't work.

Photos from this interviewee