[sings in Polish] And I don't know where this line percolated up in my head.

I don't remember knowing it, but in the last couple of months it percolated into my head.

And it's a song that's addressed to war.

A song being sung to war.

In Polish, war is wojna and here it's wojenko.

It's being addressed to war in the diminutive like it's feminine.

Nice little war.

Nice little war.

What kind of woman are you that all these young men chasing after you?

I was born in Warsaw in 1944.

In other words, during World War II.

So that song has resonance for me.

And also it led me to think about the fact that the name of Warsaw in English, in Polish it's "varshava," and I don't think it has meanings, but in English, Wars "saw war."

I find that amazing, too.

My parents were both born in Krakow, Poland.

My father, in 1911, my mother in 1913.

And they were Jew, my family is Jewish.

In Krakow, there wasn't a completely drastic separation of Jews and non-Jews.

And although there were quotas at the university, so quotas for how many Jews could be admitted, my father got into the university, into the law school the Jagiellonian University in Krakow.

He went to law school.

And when he was in law school, there were things going on where there was a Jewish fraternity and sometimes a right-wing fraternity would come and attack the Jewish fraternity.

And my father would go to find his who was in the socialist fraternity.

And that fraternity would come and fight the attacking fraternity and and help the Jews get through it.

So my father became a lawyer in Poland.

And then on September 1st, 1939, the Nazis invaded Poland.

My father went to join his army regiment because he was enlisted.

When he got there, he discovered that the regiment had been disbanded.

I don't know the story of how, but it was disbanded so he couldn't be with them.

And he concluded that the only thing to do was to go back home to Krakow and ask my mother to marry him.

So he went back home, apparently against a tide of people who were So he traveled against this tide back to Krakow, and he asked my mother to marry him.

And they got married on Septemb There were restrictions placed on Jews, different restrictions.

One was they couldn't move.

They couldn't change residences as of 1940, and they c ride in trains.

And then also sometime in 1940, there was an edict that they had to move into a ghetto.

And my parents did that.

They moved into the ghetto.

And at first the ghetto provided relative security only because of the huge danger outside the ghetto.

If they were caught outside the ghetto without, you know, some kind of work papers that made it legal, they could just be shot in the street.

So the ghetto was relative safety.

However, it was also an illusion, I guess, of safety.

And my mother didn't talk to me as I was growing up very much about the horrible things that happened.

She, I think she was sparing me, but she did have one memory from when they were in the ghetto of seeing an older woman shot and her brain and eyes splattering against a wall.

And it seems like that experience made them decide they had to leave the ghetto.

I know very little about my grandparents.

I never met them, or at least not, not when I was old enough to understand, to recognize that.

They were killed in the war.

But what happened was, when my parents left the ghetto, my father forged fake I.D.

documents for him and my mother, and he did that for the other people in the family.

But the grandparents, because they were older, felt it was too risky to try to An d they stayed in Krakow in the ghetto.

I heard I heard almost nothing growing up.

My parents didn't talk about what happened to them.

And amazingly, it was my uncle, my mother's younger brother, who told me and my and I was probably I was in my twenties or thirties or somethi And he was old and heading to disappearing.

And he there was what they called an action in the ghetto.

My parents were no longer in the ghetto, but the grandparents were still t and one of his sisters was there.

And, and I, I hadn't heard about this.

And he also told me that he had bu the apartment where they lived, he had built a hiding place under a ceiling.

So I guess a fake roof and space above it.

And they stored pillows and food and water in that space.

And when the action happened, they went up And he but he left.

He was only 18, and he scrambled out to disappear from the action.

Then he went back maybe the same day, even, I'm getting that or maybe the next day.

And he was ecstatic because the Germans were gone and actions usually lasted a few days.

He was very happy that they were gone.

Then he went to the apartment and they weren't there.

And he told me he never saw them again.

My father took the name, his name had been Henryk Tanz.

And the name he he, he took Szwienczicki.

So a classic Polish name, a stan Szwienczicki was a very Polish last name.

But not only that, the root word of that name was saint.

You know, saint is a is a And this one is derived from the word saint.

So it was as Catholic as you could be.

And that my father managed to get a fake ID and that was with help from people who, who you know, An d I still have that.

Mieczylaw Szwienczicki.

And then later when I was born, four years lat I was Krystyna Maria Szwienczicka.

So I was part of that same false identity and had Krystyna Maria and and later I got the name Tanz back, but I was still Christine Maria.

Stuck with that.

They had this fake identity, but they could get away with that for several reasons.

One is that, well, one thing that helped was that my father was blonde and had blue eyes.

My mother had dark hair and brown eyes, but my father, my father's coloring wasn't typical Jewish coloring.

They also they spoke both Polish and Yiddish, but they spoke Polish without a Yiddish accent, which helped made made it conceivable for them to pass.

And they also exercised enormous caution, like whe to Warsaw from Krakow, they went by train, Jews weren't allowed to be on t They were in the same wagon so they could see each other.

But my mother sat in the ver And they never sat together on a train during the war because they tho the evidence of their appearance or the way they communicated might be clues and give them away.

But also they felt it was safer not to be together so that if one of them ran into a problem, the other one could in some way intervene.

And there was an occasion when on the street once, they were walking, but not together.

And my father saw my mother being surrounded by a group of men, and he was at a distance of 50 feet because they kept that kind of distance when they So he didn't know exactly what was happe And he he went over and he offered a bribe to get her out of there.

And they took the money and and my my mother and my father got away.

So they were they there were preconditions that applied.

They were young, they were strong.

They were brave.

They they gave each other essential support.

They got married again every time there was so that they would have a marriage So I believe the story is that they got married four times during They never got divorced, but they got married four times.

And one amazing thing in recent life, I don't I don't think I have my mother's ring that I know of anymore, but I must have My my son met my my mother.

So he knew his grandmother a tiny bit.

But he saw her wedding ring and he saw that there were initials in it, and they were initials from one of the fake identit When my mother's brother left Krakow after that action wher where his parents and sister vanished, he joined my parents in Warsaw.

He followed them there and they took him in.

But they kind of kept him in hiding until he could learn to manage his speech to to maintain a disguise better.

They managed to keep him hidden and to coax him and train him to avoid those expressions that would give away the fact that he spoke Yiddish.

In Warsaw, my father started a business and he had been involved with paper and he had he was shrewd about sort of what people needed and he felt he could to get paper from the sources that he was familiar with.

And the paper was for greeting cards, cigarette paper.

But my, my uncle, who was younger and hadn't been as much as well-known in the commu he he wouldn't be automatically identified.

And so he would, he took on the job of going to Krakow, to these sources of paper and collecting the paper and bringing it back to Warsaw, where my father managed to sell it to people and make a little bit of a living on paper.

There was danger from many directions in Poland, and not just from the Nazis, but from Polish officers in the police and just people in the public.

And one time in Warsaw when my father was walking in the street, a man said to him, I know you.

You're a Jew.

And my father punched the guy and hit him hard.

My father was strong and had done some amateur boxing.

He immediately punched him and people kind of knocked him down.

People gathered around, he said I was a Jew.

And then he walked away.

Another horrible story.

Six men, six Polish police officers came to their door and said they heard there was a Jew living there.

And he said, I'm not a Jew.

I'm in the underground army, in fact.

And they said, well, show us your documents.

And he said, anybody can have fake documents, but take a look.

I don't He said, look in my pants.

And and what it was, was Jews were circumcised and Poles were not circumcised.

But incredibly enough, he had had some surgery to hide the fact that he was circumcised.

So he used that to escape from these six officers.

After that terrifying incident with the six officers, they decided they had to leave.

And they told their landlady that they were just going off on vacation.

And they crossed the river, the Vistula river, in Polish "viswa," to a town, a little town on the other side called Otwock.

So they were located there.

And soon a there was the Warsaw Uprising.

And my parents were away on the other side of the river.

They could see smoke rising and they could see And so, amazingly, they had been saved because of this invasion by six Polish police officers that had scared them out of Warsaw.

So that that's how my the way my father would tell me the story that that that horrible experience of the six Polish pol had contributed to saving their lives in the end.

When my mother went into labor, they tried to get some help and they were walking in just, you know, farming territory and a man in a horse and buggy passed them and they got a ride with this man in the horse the horse and buggy.

And he took them to what had bu t was now a small Russian military hospital.

And so I was born there in this little military hospital in the country And the doctor who delivered me asked them if they knew what day it was, and they said no.

He told them it was Yom Kippur.

And so one, that was a revelation.

But the other aspect of it that was extraordinary was that clearly that doctor realized they were Jewish and he was sharing Jewish information without any hint of threat.

And it turned out that he was a Russian Jew.

So he was working in this little military hospital in Poland, and that's who delivered me into the world.

And it was just after I was born an d we were living a kind of peaceful existence there.

And I remember being told about the things that we had in our lives that we hadn't had.

We had a goat and I drank the goat's milk.

The goat was in the basement lived in the And one dramatic moment in my life was when I went to the basement.

I was just three and And so I screamed.

So we we had some possessions.

I had a buggy and until then, me, and had a sled in the winter to play with.

And we had that goat.

They decided that they should leave Poland because of worry about about Russian occupa Because the Nazis were gone.

And so they decided to go to France.

And in 1948, we, we left oh, my brother was born in Poland in Danzig in 1948.

So I not only had a goat and a buggy and a sled, I had a little brother, my wonderful little brother.

Then that group of four of us moved to France and lived in Paris in a suburb of Paris called Enghiens-les-Bains, which had a casino and my father managed to earn some a bit of a living in a casino.

They had hidden money in an armchair on the trip to France.

And the chair had had succeeded.

And so they had some money, but not enough to live on for very long.

He needed to get work.

He wanted to get a job, but you couldn't get a job without a work permit.

And you couldn't get a work permit.

The government wasn't letting him get a work permit, so he came up with a scheme and I was his partner.

He took me along to the Ministry of Labor, at that point I was about five, I think.

He took me to the Minist that he needed a wo and he presented me as evidence of his fatherhood and said that his other child was at home and that And he said that if they didn't give him a work permit, he would celebrate the upcoming 2000th anniversary of Paris by jumping off the Eiffel Tower.

And he got a work permit and therefore got was able to get jobs.

He had work and things were manageable.

They they had to learn French and my brother and I had to learn French.

So we did learn French.

I started school in France started learning how to read in French, but my father, who had whose judgment had been so excellent, started worrying that Russia was maybe going to invade Western Europe and felt that we better get out.

And we were going to go to Australia.

And they had belongings, you know household stuff that I remember was very know household stuff, teacups, dishes, stuff that seems hard to travel with anyway.

But they pack their belongings because I think that's one thing that migrants do if they can, because they're their household goods.

So they packed our belongings and shippe and we were going to follow and then visas to the US came through.

I don't know what made that change happen, but they got visas to the US and decided to come to the US.

And as a little girl I used to think about who was using our dishes, who was drinking out of our teacups in Australia though we were never reunited with our teacups.

When we came to the United States, we were in New York and our life was still kind of disordered.

But my father had trouble getting work and we moved to Chicago and settled there and then began kind of engaging in the institutions of life in the United States.

So my parents joined a synagogue and my brother and I went to Sunday and learned about Jewish traditions.

I don't know how old I was when I learned about family members getting killed.

My parents didn't talk to me m and who their parents had been As I say, I learned facts about that when I was a young adult from my uncle.

I think in some ways they were grieving.

But I also marvel I also came to marvel despite the incredible hardships they had gone through, they managed for one thing to give my brother and me a happy childhood.

So they so they were not pouring their grief into us.

And I considered that an astonishing thing.

And I have funny little bits of memory.

I remember being.

I have this specific memory of my father when I was very young, and I don't know if that was still in Poland or in France, direct to look at th And it was it was a very beautiful, sharp shadow.

The tree didn't have leaves.

So it was its articulated branches projected onto the wall.

And my father did that a lot with me, directing my attentio to the beauty of nature, and that has stayed with me so much.

I'm a hoarder of seashells and mesquite pods and all kinds of treasures from nature.

And I am an obsessive- compulsive photographer, and take pictures of of nature almost every day.

And I learned that from my father.

And I think it was a way for him to to get past what what they had suffered.

The fact that I was a Holocaust survivor wasn't an active part of my identity as a as a kid.

Partly because my family didn't talk about it a lot, partly because I didn't know other kids who had that background and experience.

So it was pushed away and gradually it became more part of my life as I started reading.

Even as a kid, I read, The Diary of and and was given somehow the information that that re I don't know how old I was.

It was in school t But amazingly it still wasn't such an active part of life.

So I had the strange experience.

I finished college in 1965.

I had left Chicago and gone away to Harvard and Radcliffe, you know, left my family behind.

And that's that's been a revelation about academic, you know, university.

Going to college in the USA.

So often people want to go away to college, and it involves leaving your family and friends behind.

And that's that that's such a widespread phenomenon here.

But I went back for a 30th reunion for college.

And in our discussions at that reunion it emerged that people I had known, I was friends with, weren't necessarily specifically Holoca they were born, like me, in wartime.

And that we had that experience.

Our families had had that experie And it wasn't something that we had been very conscious of when we shared life in college.

And we were discovering it at our 30th reunion.

And it was dramatic to share it.

And Harvard and Radcliffe draw people from across the People come from far away.

So there are people who had had experience beyond, you know, certainly well, just throughout Europe and other parts of the world, too.

So it was it became a very dramatic part of our reunion.

And the idea sprang up that we should write our stories and put together a book.

And that book ended up being assembled.

And the title is "Born Into a World at War."

And everybody who wrote a chapter was in my class and their families had experienced the war I came to Tucson to take a job after I finished my Ph.D. After college, I went back to Chicago and got a Ph.D. at the university there.

And it was interesting how my earlier life fed into my decision about what to what to study in grad school My first language was Polish and when I was 4, we moved And then when I was 7, we moved to the US and I learned English.

And another factor was when I was in college, the university had started a program called Freshman Seminars.

And as a freshman in this new place in the world for me, because I left home in Chicago, left my family, I had a seminar with Erik Erikson, who is a wonderful and very famous psychologist, who who invented the term "identity crisis."

And I learned about identity crisis I learned about identity crisis from Erik Erikson himself as I was experiencing an identity crisis as a new student far away from home.

And I ended up being interested in psychology, developmental psychology.

And then language fed into that, too, because of learning three languages in a row.

And in a way, I was the first in the family to become fluent in those languages.

Because my mother was at home, my father was working, I was at school.

I learned French faster, I learned En I became very interested in how kids learn to talk.

And that became part of my life.

And I did my dissertation on child language acquisition.

And got, when I applied for jobs, there was a job here in the psychology department an and I got it.

So I came to Tucson and I was teaching developmental psychology and psych psycholinguistics, and I had friends.

I had a friend who a linguist and her husband who taught in the linguistics department, her husband taught in the and her husband was friends with Jean-Paul.

So through those connections.

Jean-Paul wasn't at th but through them I met Jean-Paul and we got married and we had in common that we were both immigrants.

But I was Jewish and he wasn't Jewish.

But neither one of us is very religious, so that didn't become a big issue.

My parents didn't make it an issue, and I think that they weren't just not making it an issue to be kind to me.

I think they liked Jean-Paul a lot.

And and we had some interesting things, deep things in com because we were both from another country and I pondered that that and haven't come to full grips with it.

But I think it's it might be a factor in how our marriage took shape and evolved.

And with our son, he actually hasn't had very much of a religious background.

He and he in fact is he's a native Tucsonan and a citizen of the world.

Well, it's an important part of my identity, in fact.

And I've now joined the board of the Jewish History Mu And I want I want that history to be part of the world.

I think it's important for for people to know about that extreme genocide.

And but not only the genocide.

I think there are wonderful th in Jewish tradition, as in other religious traditions.

And I think it's it's va for various aspects of these traditions to continue and be known, but not to fight with each other.

My life here in Tucson took an amazin My my work at the university ended.

And but I was I was very fascinated to learn about the field of public art and excited at the prospect of possibly joining that.

And one one of the things that helped me was contemplating drastic changes was that my parents also had reinvented themselves numerous times.

And I learned from them about reinventing oneself.

But I also felt that the to people reinventing themselves.

And I wanted to launch into public art, but I didn't have a background, I didn't have training, but I had lots of ideas and I was fascinated by it.

And well, I loved looking at it and in the process of getting involved in it, I felt that I was growing deep roots in the place where I lived.

So I had I had been forced out of places so I've lived here much longer than anywhere I've lived.

And I've had the opportunity through the public art to celebrate the place where I live, because my I do public art and it focuses on places in the community.

The first piece is called The Sun Circle.

And of course, in Tucson, we live with the sun so intensely.

And there are cultures elsewhere that have structures that follow the sun and inform people about it.

And we didn't have that kind of thing here in Tucson.

It's a little bit and oriented to the positions of the sun.

As the sun moves or the earth, it's changing its position.

So and it has eight walls with little windows in them, trapezoid and square.

And for example, at the equinox, when the sun rises it shines through a square window in one of the eight walls and projects a square of light on the opposite wall.

And so you can celebrate the passage of the year and learn about how how those changes happened.

It's a kind of calendar built in the environment.

The project at the airport is called Silver Linings and it's photographs of clouds painted onto steel.

It draws on the phrase every cloud has a silver lining.

And originally it was built as a concourse divider.

And it was built so that as you went towards the flights, you the the the the wall that the clouds were cut into and painted on got a little bit shorter.

So as you walk towards your airplane, you rise above the clouds.

"Joining Hands" is an an cut in steel and it And the figures come from a ceramic pot that was made by people of the Hohokam tribe.

So a thousand years old and it has survived.

And it's a celebration of community, I take it that way, people joining hands.

And it was a joy to to be able to do that as an image of our community, too.

Joining hands.

My family's life was so profoundly affected by conflict between different elements of the community in some sense.

I mean, okay, it wasn't a it wasn't a close community.

It was was Poland and Germany and Jews and non-Jews.

But this horrible conflict, devastating conflict that destroyed so many lives, that it gives me great joy to have been able to make a celebration of the opposite of conflict.

Of cooperation and mutual aid.

And it gives me great joy to use imagery from the population, the ancestral population, here, to use their imagery of community, When I think about my life as a sur for me now there's more joy I rejoice that after the enormous hardships th that I ended up having a happy childhood, that I've ended up having a productive adulthood with, you know, my my family and and the community.

And I feel so rooted in this community and feel like I contribute to celebrating what this community has to offer.

And that I rejoice about that.