Mitzi Minc

It's my uncle's, Bernard's, wife - Maria Minc called Mitzi.

My father's older brother, Bernard, completed his medical studies in Vienna around 1908-9.

There he married Schwester, I mean the sister superior whose name was Maria (people called her Mitzi).

She was a native of Vienna, and although there are many Catholics in Vienna, she was a protestant.

She was not Jewess. Until 1926 they lived in Lodz, at 6 Plac Wolnosci [Freedom Square].

They were childless, but since they loved children, they always had Christmas parties at their house and all the children of my mother's sisters would come visit them.

Bernard and Mitzi could afford this, they were quite wealthy. Bernard was the head of a ward in a hospital, and he also worked in a doctors' co-operative called Sanitas.

Since we were also doing quite well, the gifts he gave us were rather modest.

But my mother's sisters were not so well off, so for them he would prepare more meaningful presents. It was all very nicely arranged. Bernard had never been baptized and his wife was a protestant.

When the war broke out, Bernard Minc had already retired, he left the city and he died in 1939, as early as September I think, in Mszana Dolna.

His wife had the body brought back, and had him buried in the Rakowiecki cemetery in Cracow.

She survived the war. After the war she lived at 6 Kolberga Street in Cracow. . I got in touch with her after the war.

She was the one who was given all the family photos to keep through the war. Why her? Because, due to her birthplace - she was born in Austria - the Germans decided she was not a Volksdeutsch, but rather a Reichsdeutsche [native German]. And not only that.

Because she was a qualified nurse, the Germans recruited her into the military, to the Wehrmacht. She got all the way to Kiev; she worked in one of the field hospitals in Kiev and she kept helping her family and relatives, and if she could manage to help anyone else - she always did.

In one of the first [post-war] rehabilitation trials she was immediately rehabilitated, and, moreover, her house was returned to her, and everything else, too.

She was a wonderful human being. Later she made a living by knitting sweaters... She died at the turn of the 1950s and 60s.