“I still see the Sabbath candles”

Itka’s story
begins in the small town of Ciechanow, Poland, about 56 miles north of
Warsaw. She was born April 15, 1926, to an actress mother and a father
who switched from dairy work to photography and picture framing. She
was the oldest of three children, and her beloved maternal
grandmother—someone who was “always looking for a mitzvah (good deed)
to do”—lived with the family. A religious family, they spoke Yiddish at
home, Polish everywhere else.

She had her first anti-Semitic
encounter at age 12, walking home from school. “I noticed a group of
boys and girls looking at me very angry,” she said. They closed in
around her, shouting insults. “I was crying terribly,” she said. “I
didn’t know those kids, they didn’t know me. How come they hate me so
much?” They let her go, and once she got home, her mother consoled
her—and then asked how she responded to them. When Itka told her that
she had said nothing, her mother approved. "Your menschlichkeit"
(humaneness) was of utmost importance because it does not depend on how
others treat you but on how you treat others, she was told.
“Menschlichkeit is the highest form of religion, education, and
achievement,” so the bigger punishment would have been if she had
talked back to them.

Her mother’s words became a creed by which
she lived, even though she would later learn that “menschlichkeit
doesn’t shield me from attack or going through pain.” And she embraced
a saying she learned from her grandmother: “You only have what you give
away”—which would come to have more meaning for her in later years.

(Click Silver Star Itka Zygmuntowicz Photo Gallery to see pictures of her early life and relatives lost in the Holocaust.)