In an autobiographical essay written in 1984, my mother described her parents as follows: “My mother was a handsome woman; she had beautiful, serious, very dark eyes. Her prematurely gray hair made a pleasant contrast with her young face. She was an excellent housekeeper, to the point of being fussy, and she expected the same perfection from everybody. . . . She did not have to look for a career, nor did she have to “prove herself” in any other way.

“But my father – how different he was. He had gray eyes with a twinkle, as if he was always thinking of something funny and pleasant. He . . . had to start working at the age of fourteen and had not had a chance to get a formal education. But he was ambitious and determined to accomplish more in life than merely earn a living. He was an avid reader and . . . he taught himself to read, write, and speak German and he traveled extensively in Russia and Europe. By the time I was born, he owned a wholesale yarn business. . . He became a prominent member of the Jewish community in Warsaw and he served as president of the Jewish Businessmen’s Association for many years.”

The Warsaw telephone directory for 1937-38 lists his business as “wool, cotton, yarn, thread” and his business address at Nalewki 24.

Although it’s not mentioned in her essay, I’ve been told that my mother’s father was one of leaders of a boycott of German goods in the late 1930s and was shot by the Nazis shortly after Warsaw surrendered to the German invasion on September 28, 1939. My mother’s mother died later either in the Warsaw ghetto or in a concentration camp – we never learned which.