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I studied and worked. There was a gynecologist whom I knew from the period when I had been with my husband. He made procedures and he offered me the job of his assistant. I applied anesthesia, made intravenous injections, reportedly with great skill. Then I went to a knitting cooperative and got a job - I brought home huge bags of unfinished gloves and sewed up the fingers. I was officially registered as a knitter, had a labor union ID. I sat until two, three in the morning, but it was still good, I felt so happy.
I also gave people injections. Once a dentist I knew called me and said he had a penicillin patient for me - those days you administered penicillin every three hours, so if I had a patient, I had to move in with them. And I was allotted a very nice room on Gdanska with a Jewish family, the Feldons. Those were very wealthy people, they quickly made big money after the war. They had four grown-up sons and one of them fell ill. I moved in with them and they were greatly impressed: such a young, pretty girl and working so hard. They offered to pay me a scholarship so that I wouldn't have to work so hard. They very much wanted to ensnare me, but that was the gilded youth of Lodz, I wasn't interested in that.
Many people were eager to help me, but I was doing great myself. And at the end of my freshman year at the academy I was given a role - a Film School team visited us and they hired me for a movie they were making. It was a group of young filmmakers who were shooting a production with the assistance of their professors. They came to the Theater School in search of nice girls. And they chose me. The movie was a terrible bore, called 'The Two Brigades', really nothing to talk about [a 1950 production shot by the students of the directing faculty of the State Film Art College under the artistic leadership of Eugeniusz Cekalski]. Well, but what did I care - I had something to do, I could earn some money, and the very fact that from among all those girls they had chosen me meant a lot in itself. So I no longer had money problems.
I also gave people injections. Once a dentist I knew called me and said he had a penicillin patient for me - those days you administered penicillin every three hours, so if I had a patient, I had to move in with them. And I was allotted a very nice room on Gdanska with a Jewish family, the Feldons. Those were very wealthy people, they quickly made big money after the war. They had four grown-up sons and one of them fell ill. I moved in with them and they were greatly impressed: such a young, pretty girl and working so hard. They offered to pay me a scholarship so that I wouldn't have to work so hard. They very much wanted to ensnare me, but that was the gilded youth of Lodz, I wasn't interested in that.
Many people were eager to help me, but I was doing great myself. And at the end of my freshman year at the academy I was given a role - a Film School team visited us and they hired me for a movie they were making. It was a group of young filmmakers who were shooting a production with the assistance of their professors. They came to the Theater School in search of nice girls. And they chose me. The movie was a terrible bore, called 'The Two Brigades', really nothing to talk about [a 1950 production shot by the students of the directing faculty of the State Film Art College under the artistic leadership of Eugeniusz Cekalski]. Well, but what did I care - I had something to do, I could earn some money, and the very fact that from among all those girls they had chosen me meant a lot in itself. So I no longer had money problems.
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Interview
danuta mniewska