Miriam Winter said goodbye to her family when she was only 8 years old. From there, she was moved from village to village in the Polish countryside, keeping her Jewish identity a secret, and being careful never to cry.
“What happened then was traumatic and freezing. I was like a stone. I was like a frozen potato,” she told The Collegian, while sitting in her Jackson, Mich., home.
“My life all those years — it was nothing. It was completely nothing.”
Winter, 81, is one of the few remaining survivors of the Holocaust. She, her husband, and her son immigrated to the United States in 1969, and she has now lived in Jackson longer than any other place in her life.
“And I’m not moving,” she said, smiling. “They can carry me out by my legs, but I’m not going.”
In 1997, she published “Trains,” a book documenting the story of her survival. She will be sharing some of her story with students on Hillsdale College’s campus on Friday, Jan. 24 at 4 p.m.
Professor of Politics Robert Eden attends the same synagogue as Winter, and after reading her book, wanted her to come to Hillsdale College’s campus.
“When I read it, I was blown away,” Eden said. “I could tell that it had taken tremendous concentration to recover her childhood experiences. I was very, very impressed by the quality of her writing and by the content of the book.”
That’s one of the most noticeable things about Winter: her intensity is inescapable. She talks like a teacher and a mother, thoughtfully selecting her words, watching your eyes, making sure you’re catching her meaning. Though her accent is still strong, her elocution is excellent.
“The older I become,” Winter said, “the more important it becomes to me, as it does for other child survivors, to make sure that people know what happened and don’t forget.”
When Winter was 60 years old, she began the process of digging into her past, revisiting memories of her childhood, and attempting to recreate her story. In a journey that took her all the way to Israel and through the concentration camps of Poland, she pieced the fragments of her past together.
Though her story contains much suffering, her talk on Friday will focus on the brave men and women whose courage stands in brilliant opposition to the cruelty of those years.
Winter was 6 when German forces swept through Poland and forced her family into the Warsaw ghetto. But her memories there are of her loving family, who she said shielded her from much of the pain of that place, and other Jews who worked to make life good for the children.
“In those cruel conditions, there were people who risked their lives to teach the Jewish children in the ghetto. I didn’t even know that the school was illegal,” Winter said.
Winter likely would not have survived the war had it not also been for the bravery of two women, Cesia and Maryla.
Cesia smuggled Winter out of Ozarow, the city to which her family had fled from the ghetto, onto a train. Maryla met Cesia there, and took Winter off young Cesia’s hands, finding work for her in rural villages until the end of the war.
Those years were especially trying for Winter — she had to endure winters without a coat, and sometimes without shoes — but her love for reading helped get her through.
“I think that books saved my soul,” Winter said. “I was reading a lot.”
After the war, Winter finished high school and went on to college, where she earned a degree in theater. She met her husband at 29. They married, and later moved to the United States, where she lived in several places before moving to Jackson.
These days, after earning her doctorate at age 59 and teaching at Michigan State University and Jackson Community College, she is now retired. She keeps busy with writing, volunteering, exercise, and sharing her story when possible.