Miraculously, my mother did what almost no one else in her large family could: She survived WWII.
She arrived at New York’s Ellis Island in 1946, still a teenager. Orphaned, dispossessed of everything and knowing no English, she lived first in Toronto with her older sister, Jean, who’d left Poland a decade before the war when my mother was still an infant.
A seamstress in a factory, Jean became the devoted, sometimes nagging, older sister my mother had never known.
But my mother’s new life would be built on her own terms.
After six months, my mother returned to New York. She shared an apartment in the Bronx with three other women, took evening classes at City College and worked at Barton’s Candies.