Matylda Wyszynska’s daughter Katarzyna

This is my daughter Kasia, Katarzyna. She is a painter.

1950s I got a divorce and I married an actor called Wyszynski, he was an actor in Czestochowa, then in Opole, in the Thirteen Rows Theatre of Grotowski.

We weren't long together because he drank a lot, an artistic soul, essentially.

He was a Pole but he knew I was Jewish. I never made it a secret. I mean, I made it a secret from others but I told him. We were together until 1970.

Then he went into rehab at the psychiatric hospital in Opole. I was behind with my work at the labor inspection because of all that and I was called to Warsaw, to my boss, who gave me an ultimatum: it's either Wyszynski or your job.

Well, I chose the job. In 1959 I was moved to Gdansk. But he came in my wake.

Said was no longer in theatre, was clean, undergoing therapy. I, the idiot, believed him and was with him again, and I even fixed him up with a job.

There's this Sailor Club in Gdynia, a café, a restaurant, a nightclub. He got a job there as a technical manager and started doing some theatre work there on the side.

And there he started drinking even harder than he used to. And we split. My daughter Kasia was born 1962.

It seems to me I told Kasia that I was Jewish only after my divorce with her father.

And she became interested in those things. She went to the head of the Jewish Community and said her mother lived in Gdynia, on Warszawska.

He told her to tell he mother to come. I didn't go for a long time, didn't want to hear about that.

I was afraid, afraid to come out, the fear's still in me. My children aren't afraid and I'm still afraid.

My daughter feels very Jewish. She have two children.

Photos from this interviewee