Tag #107765 - Interview #101359 (Helena Najberg)

My son changed his faith [to Catholic] several years after he got married [he got married in 1972 to Anna Gizgiez-Nawronska, a Pole, a medical student]. At first he changed his name, even before he got married. I don’t know why he decided to do that. He asked us for permission to change his name. I think that was because of his wife. So I said: ‘It’s your will, you’re an adult, you have to decide, we have nothing against it. It’s your business.’ Today his name is Nagorski [Polish translation of the last name Najberg]. They baptized their child in a church, so they’re a Catholic family. I even attended the christening. My husband didn’t want to go. His wife is Catholic, of course, but he was an is an even greater Catholic than she is. My daughter-in-law sometimes complained that he used to wake them up, that is her and their daughter, a 6 a.m on Sundays to go to church. She’d say she could go later, that she doesn’t have to go in the morning. But he insisted. Yes, they must go to church every Sunday, no getting out of it. He’s a real neophyte.

My son didn’t explain what he did. He asked for permission about changing his last name, but he only informed us about changing his faith, he said that he’d read a lot of newspapers about this religion, that he liked it a lot and that’s why he decided to change his faith. Well, it’s his life, he’s an adult man. All in all, I didn’t have anything against it, if he thinks that’s what best for him, then why not. My husband wasn’t that tolerant. He worried about all this, although he didn’t practice religion himself. But what were we to do? Sometimes we talked about it, that it was perhaps our fault that it all turned out like that. We didn’t teach our children any rules and we didn’t follow them ourselves.