Brysk, Miriam

Miriam Brysk was born on March 10th, 1935, in Warsaw, Poland to Chiam Noah Miasnik and Bronka Zablocki. Her father, also known as Henry Mason, was a prominent gastric surgeon in Warsaw before the war and was referred to as the “king of the poor” by the poor Jews. After Germany invaded Poland, Miriam and her parents escaped to Lida, where her father worked as the head of surgery at the municipal hospital. In the summer of 1941, the Lida ghetto was established, where Dr. Miasnik was forced to operate on wounded German soldiers and Bonka worked in a leather factory run by the Germans. Having survived the slaughter of Lida Jews on May 8, 1942, Miriam and her family joined the underground Russian partisans in the forests in Belorussia. Dr. Miasnik was assigned to build a hospital on a small remote island surrounded by swamp where he operated on wounded partisans as chief and the only surgeon of the hospital. After their liberation by the Russian army in 1944, Dr. Miasnik was made chief of a hospital run by the Russians in a small town in Belarus before the family managed to get away from the Russian control and escaped to Poland. They travelled as refugees through Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Austria and finally reached Italy. In February 1947, the family immigrated to the United States and settled in New York where Miriam’s parents established their medical practice. Miriam finished her high school and went to New York University, where she met her husband, Henry Brysk. They have two daughters and five grandchildren.