Janina Wiener with her cousin Anna Sznap and her husband’s cousin Irena Gal

This picture was taken by my husband Maurycy in the courtyard of Collegium Maius [the oldest building of the Jagiellonian University in Cracow] in the 1980s. 

I’m standing in the middle. On the right is my second-degree cousin Anna [Niuka, daughter of Toncia and granddaughter of  Adolf, my grandfather’s brother on my mother’s side], and on the left is my husband’s cousin Irena Gal from Jerusalem. Both of them were visisting us. After the war Niuka emigrated to Sweden.

As far as my family is concerned, Niuka, her aunt Irena and myself are the only survivors of the Holocaust. From such a huge family. These two girls. I in Russia and she here, under the occupation, on false papers. Irena survived in Poland, but soon, right after the war ended, emigrated to Switzerland. She had a seriously ill daughter who could be helped only in Switzerland. Apart from her, my whole family perished. Without exception. I learned about their fate from Marysia Jodlowska, my childhood playmate. I had written letters to my grandparents' address, to our own address, and so on, and those letters somehow found their way to her. And she wrote me back.

My cousin Niuka died three years ago in Stockholm. She visited me twice, I think, in Cracow, but when she was visiting Poland, it was usually Warsaw, because that's where she had lived before settling in Sweden. She got married and took her husband's surname, Sznap. Her son lives in Stockholm, has three kids. Her daughter has one son.