Dossier 2 - Oral history interview with Irena Bakowska

Irena was born as Irena Borman in Warsaw, Poland in 1924, to Jan Bakowski and Helena Dobrejcer, who were both dentists. She was raised and educated in Warsaw until the war interrupted her high school education. To hide her Jewish identity, she assumed the name of Irena Bakowska throughout the war. Irena received her Lyceum education in an underground school in Warsaw and earned her Certificate of Maturity (i.e., Baccalaureate degree) In 1941. From 1941 to 1942, she studied in the underground medical school in the Warsaw ghetto as a medical student. During the massive deportations she and her family managed to get out of the ghetto and went to Zakrzowek, a village in Lublin. In January 1943, she was deported to a slave labour on a German farm in Lorraine. Surviving the war, Irena received education in France as a lawyer, and then migrated to the United States in 1955, where she continued her studies in law and as a librarian. Irena spent the last two decades of her professional career as a professor of Law and Law Librarian at Queen's University, Faculty of Law, in Kingston, Ontario, Canada.