Helena Manaster memoirs

Helena Manaster was the eighth of ten children born to a Jewish family in the town of Lesko, Poland. Her father was a landowner. When Helena was a young girl the family moved to nearby Orelec, where they had a summer home. As there were no schools in Orelec, Helena and her siblings continued attending school in Lesko. Later, Helena traveled three hours by train daily to attend the nearest high school, which was in Przemysl. Following the German and then Soviet invasion of Orelec in 1939, Helena’s family was forced from their home, which was then looted by locals, and moved to Lwów. Following the German invasion of the USSR, Helena and her new husband made their way to Kraków posing as non-Jewish Polish refugees. She was pregnant and was placed in a Catholic monastery. When she was in labor at a hospital, a monastery official went for a midwife. As it was past curfew, the Gestapo stopped them as they returned and insisted on seeing Helena. Bent with labor pains and sure she would be killed, she presented herself to the Gestapo who soon left. Helena and her son fled the monastery in 1944 and survived in Kraków until liberation in January 1945. She lived in Poland until her immigration to the United States in 1968.