The Birencwajg family

This is our entire family: me, Gustawa Birencwajg, my husband Dawid Birencwajg and our two daughters: Halina Leszczynska (nee Birencwajg) and Cetka Wojcik (nee Birencwajg). This picture was taken in Pieszyce, in the 1940s. After the war my husband and I got an apartment in Pieszyce and that's where we settled with our two daughters. There were children in the city and they started organizing a nursery. Because I had worked at a nursery in Russia, they took me as the director, to organize that nursery, because nobody knew how to go about it. You see, nurseries did not exist before the war. I organized it, there was a doctor there who was a Jew, and I took in young children, under three years of age, I organized the staff and it was all very good. This was in Piotrolesie. Near Dzierzoniow. I worked there for some two or three years, I don't remember exactly. This orphanage for Jewish children was next to the nursery, they picked these children up in the forests. They were alone. The director asked me to transfer to that orphanage, as the hostess. His name was Kozlowski. He later died in Israel. Anyway, I transferred there and worked as hostess. And my husband was working in a boiler-room in a factory. My older daughter, Halina, was in gymnasium in Dzierzoniow, but because she had gone to a Russian school in Russia, and she didn't manage to get much of an education before the war, she decided she wouldn't leave that gymnasium. And so she spent the year in Dzierzoniow, she lived in a dormitory. And later she went to a college preparatory school. Those were two-year schools. They gave you a secondary school certificate and the possibility of entering university without having to pass additional exams. And she left for Wroclaw. And we were by then in Warsaw and she stayed one more year in Wroclaw, also in a dormitory.