Between the first and second World Wars, Warsaw, Poland was a vibrant urban center, full of life and culture and character. No one knew this better than the young Mieczyslaw Borkowski – born in 1919 to a large, well-to-do Jewish family. Mieczyslaw experienced much that the capital of Poland had to offer between two world wars. In his autobiography, he vividly describes his extended family and many experiences as a young man in Poland, including events that were unique to Jews living in Poland during this time.
Mieczyslaw’s story shares the events of his youth in Poland, which went from a land of promise after World War I to a place of terror and hatred as World War II gripped the country and the world. While most of his family perished in the Polish Ghettos and Nazi Concentration Camps, Mieczyslaw counts himself among the lucky, having survived by living through internment in a forced labor camp in the Soviet Union and then later working on a collective farm in what is now the Ukraine. Through a maternal aunt who had emigrated to America before the war, Mieczyslaw was able to escape post-WWII Europe. Upon arrival in the United States, he shed his Polish name to become Mitchell Borke and proceeded to build a successful life in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
While Mitchell ultimately found his home in Pittsburgh—his new land of promise, where he lived until his death in 2008—he never forgot his origins. And he never stopped sharing his history with his children and friends. Spend some time with Mitchell’s Reminiscences and enter the vibrant world of an urban Jewish community in Warsaw, Poland, during the early decades of the 20th Century.