This picture is best viewed in "Original" size. My mother is second from the right in the fifth row. I have placed a small red dot above her head.

Although she and her family were Jewish (apparently more assimilated than my father’s family), her parents sent her to a predominantly Catholic girls’ school. The photo is signed on the back, presumably by her classmates. Also written on the back is “V Klasa – 1923” (5th grade, 1923). Either children started school later than they do these days or the classes were numbered differently than in the U.S., because my mother would have been 14 or 15 years old in 1923. (Fifth grade students are usually about 11 years old in the U.S.)

In one of her autobiographical essays written when she was in her 70s, my mother wrote the following about her school experiences: “My first day in school was very painful. As we assembled in the classroom in the morning, the first thing the home room teacher told everybody was to kneel down and recite the morning prayer. I knew that the prayer was a Christian prayer, and I remained standing. The teacher was very annoyed and sharply repeated the command to kneel down.

“I was scared, but I had no choice – I gathered all my courage and said loudly, ‘I am Jewish and I am not allowed to take part in Christian prayers!’ This time, the teacher let me and other Jewish girls stand up during the prayer, but from then on I became a target for a lot of comments and harassment from her and later from some of my classmates.”