Norval Reece, Community Contributor
Peter Wiesner, author and film maker, will discuss Bipolar Refugee: a Saga of Survival and Resilience about holocaust survivor, Mary Kotoczynski, with the adult class at the Newtown Meetinghouse, 219 Court Street, on Sunday, March 16 at 9:45 a.m. Meeting for Worship in the manner of Friends will begin at 11 a.m. The public is invited to attend both events.
Bipolar Refugee is the frank account of a Holocaust survivor who fought to create a life freed from her past while battling bipolar disorder. Mary Kotoczynski’s story is a celebration of luck, perseverance, and survival of a Holocaust survivor who left Berlin on the Kindertransport in 1938, a program that saved the lives of approximately 10,000 lucky Jewish children who would not be among approximately one million children who were murdered during the Holocaust.
In the telling of Mary’s story, Wiesner will mention the role of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) as well as other religious organizations that supported efforts within the Jewish community to help Jewish refugees to flee Germany.
After her desperate parents put their teenage daughter on the Kindertransport in 1939, Mary Krotoczynski sought to rebuild her life by becoming a nurse in England. Culturally and emotionally adrift and devastated after learning of her parents’ fate at the hands of the Nazis, Mary looked for stabilizing relationships. She met a circle of free-thinking Oxford intellectuals, became a single mother, then fell in love with a German POW who asked her to return to the place that had been her home. Mary went to East Berlin with her child to marry her unlikely love and to reclaim the vestiges of her Jewish past. When the marriage failed, Mary, now with two children, immigrated to America where she faced limitations as a single mother coping with bipolar disorder. Gregarious and charismatic, she proved her resiliency during bouts of illness and recovery with help from relatives and the support of the Jewish community.
Mary mingled her ties to the Judaism with her pantheistic outlook and cosmopolitan politics opposed to prejudice and bigotry. Bipolar Refugee is built around Mary’s writings recounting loves, trials, and her own brand of feminism. Written by her son and including the stories of those who loved and knew her well, this frank, unusual memoir attests to the diversity and complexity of Holocaust-era survivors.
Peter Wiesner has worked as a writer, artist, educator, and documentary film producer. Born in England in 1945, he spent childhood years in Germany before emigrating and spending most of his life in the U.S. He studied History at UC Berkeley and completed graduate work at the University of Pennsylvania and Rutgers University. He is the author of the dystopian novel, Xtremus: a Bionican Quest in the Wake of Cybergeddon, Montag Press, 2015. He lives with his wife in Newtown, Pennsylvania and has two sons and five grandchildren.