Estusia Beitner

This is a picture of my cousin Estusia (Estera) Beitner. The photo was taken in the 1930s, but I don’t know where.

Estusia was my favorite cousin. Her father, Tobiasz, was my father's brother and her mother, Mania, was my mother's sister. We loved each other very much.

I remember how once I went with her and her mother to Krynica. We were there in the summer, in a hotel called Tel Awiw.

Krynica Gorska was a health resort. Estusia was some ten years older than I. She graduated from a gymnasium in Sosnowiec. I don't remember if it was a Polish of Jewish one. She wasn't married.

Estusia was a charming, intelligent girl. She was self-taught and she was very radical, progressive. Progressive - I mean her father was very religious, he had this long beard, but she sympathized with the communists.

She didn't belong to the party, but she had a whole group of friends with whom she met and discussed political issues. Her leftist views were well known in the family. Her parents were pious Jews, but they didn't mind her communist views.

Politics didn't play any role in my friendship with Estusia. She was the one with communist sympathies, I was a member of a Zionist organization. She didn't try to convert me to communism.

My brother Natan, yes, she did. She had influenced him, but I was too stupid, too naïve. I was a child. Estusia died in Auschwitz. Together with her parents, she was deported from the ghetto in Sosnowiec.

Photos from this interviewee