Born: Mirjam “Mirele” Miasnik
Warsaw, Poland
March 10, 1935
Miriam Brysk was born in Warsaw, Poland, where her father worked as a doctor and surgeon. Brysk was only four years old during the German invasion of 1939. Soon afterward, the family fled to the city of Lida in the Soviet Union (today Belarus). However, in the summer of 1941 the Nazis reached the Soviet Union and Brysk’s family was forced into the ghetto in Lida. About one year later, Brysk and her family, along with thousands of other residents of the ghetto, were rounded up and forced to march outside the town. Brysk and her family were saved from execution into mass graves only because at the last minute someone recognized her father as a doctor.
In the fall of 1942, when Brysk was only seven years old, her family escaped from the ghetto into the forest, where they lived amongst partisans sabotaging the German war effort. Initially seen as a hindrance in a group that was constantly on the move, Brysk soon became adept at cleaning the partisans’ automatic weapons, getting her own pistol at age 8. The area was liberated by the Soviet army in 1944.
After the war Brysk’s family moved throughout Europe and learned that the rest of their family had perished in the Holocaust. In February 1947 they emigrated to New York City, where Brysk entered the fifth grade. She married her husband, Henry, in 1955, and obtained her doctorate in bacterial physiology from Columbia University at the age of 32. After being offered a position at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) in Galveston, Brysk moved to Texas in 1979. In 2007 Brysk published her memoir, Amidst the Shadows of the Trees, and continues to pursue her passion as an artist, writer and poet.
Parents:
Chaim (Heniek) Miasnik, survived
Bronka Zablocki Miasnik, survived