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."
Read more about this topic: Michel Mirowski
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early and/or life:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“To be candid, in Middlemarch phraseology, meant, to use an early opportunity of letting your friends know that you did not take a cheerful view of their capacity, their conduct, or their position; and a robust candour never waited to be asked for its opinion.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“Throughout the history of commercial life nobody has ever quite liked the commission man. His function is too vague, his presence always seems one too many, his profit looks too easy, and even when you admit that he has a necessary function, you feel that this function is, as it were, a personification of something that in an ethical society would not need to exist. If people could deal with one another honestly, they would not need agents.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)