Early Life
Mirowski was born as Mordechai Frydman on October 14, 1924, in Warsaw. When Nazi Germany invaded Poland in the fall of 1939, his father renamed him as Mieczysław Mirowski to try to protect him from the anti-Semitism of the time. Later, his French wife, Anna, would call him Michel, by which he became known.
To escape the Nazis, Mirowski fled to Ukraine, and for the next five years survived under the most appalling conditions. By 1944 he was an officer in a Polish regiment and returned to Poland where, as the war ended, he registered as a medical student at the University of Gdańsk. "Warsaw had been completely destroyed, including its ghetto," he remembered. "None of my family was left. I couldn't even find our old home." Mirowski attended medical school there for a year, but gradually came to believe, "I had to leave Poland. I had become a Zionist. After all that had happened and that I had seen, the Jews had to have a country of their own to survive. As far as Poland was concerned, it had become a cemetery for me. I told myself that I would never return."
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