Miriam Brysk (Miriam Miasnik) was born in 1935 in Warsaw, Poland. She and her parents were interned in the Lida ghetto and survived the ghetto massacre of May 1942, after having been selected to die (the Nazis still needed her father’s surgical skills). She was later entrusted to the care of a gentile woman when it was rumored that all Jewish children were about to be killed; Miriam returned to the ghetto when the rumor proved false. The Miasnik family escaped the ghetto and joined the Russian partisans in December 1942. Her father ran a forest hospital staffed by Jewish doctors and nurses; he was later awarded the Order of Lenin for his work in the partisans. To protect Miriam from rape, her hair was shorn and she was disguised as a boy, proudly wearing a pistol on her side. After liberation in 1944, the family first lived in Belarus then escaped to central Poland. Traveling as refugees, they traversed most of central Europe and came to America in February 1947.
Miriam obtained a Ph.D. in Biological Sciences from Columbia University. After further postdoctoral training, she went on to become professor of dermatology; microbiology and immunology; and human biological chemistry and genetics at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. Her research, with over 80 publications, focused on the biochemistry of skin. The mother of daughters Judy and Havi, and grandmother of five, Miriam now lives with her husband Henry in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she is an artist, writer, and lecturer on the Holocaust; she also has recorded the songs of the Holocaust for Michigan Media. |
