Ada Winsten, of Providence, speaks at Bryant University on Wednesday.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Ada Winsten still speaks about her time as a refugee in Shanghai during the Holocaust through the lens of a child.

Winsten, now 82, shares disturbing stories of her eight years in China with complete calm. The memories "don't bother" her, she said. More disturbing to her are her memories of her early years in her homeland of Poland, where neighbors cut off their sons’ thumbs so they couldn’t carry a gun and be drafted into the war.

In Shanghai, on her walk from the factory where her family lived to the elementary school she calls a second home, she passed dead babies left out on porches and wrapped in “little bundles of straw.” Sometimes she and her sister Susan, five years older, would peer into a neighborhood crematorium, where they saw “dead bodies splattered.”

Passersby sometimes hurled rocks at her head of curly brown hair. While Ada would run and hide, Susan carried an umbrella to ward off attackers and give them a “whack,” Winsten said, smiling.

“People expect more horror from me and my sister,” said Winsten, sitting in her ornate living room on Providence’s East Side. “But that’s all we knew. That was my day-to-day experience.”

Winsten was 5 years old when Russian soldiers confiscated her family’s lumber business and home in Baranowicze, Poland, and told the family of four to be out within 48 hours. They grabbed a few belongings — a silver cigarette box, a powder mirror, jewelry, and candlesticks, now prominently displayed in Winsten’s living room — and went across the street to her aunt’s house.

There her father — MichalKuszner, who was a soldier in World War I — decided they would run. He and her mother, Gasza Kuszner, begged extended family members to come with them, but “they said they were crazy,” Winsten said.

“I mean, no one expected a Holocaust,” she said.

In November 1939, the Kuszner family was among 15,000 Polish Jews who, according to historians at Bryant University, left Poland for Lithuania. They said goodbye to family members, many of whom would be killed, and to a stable upper-middle-class life.

Winsten remembers approaching the border in her father’s arms, staring at him, acutely aware of the danger of getting caught.

“I remember the feeling I had,” she said. “I had to take him all in, in case I didn’t see him again.”

At the border, she saw the guards standing in front of them with bayonets. Her sister fell to her knees and begged not to be killed. It is there — at the border — where her memories stop, and don’t pick back up for another year, when the Kuszners ran again, this time on a train across Russia to Japan.

“I learned to tell time and to knit in Lithuania,” Winsten said. “So I figured, I was a smart kid."

It wasn’t until her mother was dying, years later, that she realized she’d blocked out an entire year of her life, said Winsten, who is a psychotherapist. To this day, she doesn't know how they made it through or passed the guards.

From Japan, where Winsten learned English, her family moved to an abandoned factory in Shanghai, where the four of them lived in a 14-by-20-foot room for years, she said.

She remembers a happy life in China, where she says she was a Ping-Pong champion and classmates would line up to play against her. She was “a pretty girl who a lot of boys had crushes on,” Winsten said, sharing photos where her dark round eyes and thick eyebrows seem to leap from the frame.

She dressed elegantly, in clothes her mother sewed out of scrap fabric. The dresses and bows were quickly torn, Winsten said, during games of marbles, when she would lie on her belly, and "get covered in dirt.”

The happy times were possible because of “the incredible strength” of her parents, she said. Both in their early 30s, the couple moved their family to an unfamiliar place with a foreign language, and learned to scrounge for food.

“They didn’t tell us things because they didn’t want us to worry,” said Winsten. “My parents were warriors ... I tend to be too.”

The Kuszners left Shanghai in 1948, eventually settling in the Bronx, in New York City, where a 15-year-old Winsten encountered her first stove and refrigerator.

Her family stayed close, learning American customs, and adjusting to a stable life. Winsten went to school, made many close friends, and married a man from Rhode Island, eventually moving to Warwick.

But her father never really recovered, Winsten said. In 1959, he died of a heart attack.

“He couldn’t handle the tension. He lived with it from the moment they left Poland to the moment we got to the States,” she said. “He was always in danger of being pulled back and killed. He never got past that.”

Despite her misgivings about the concept of God and the afterlife — when she dies, she said, “this is all there is, I’m done” — she still embraces her Jewish heritage.

“Being Jewish is who I am. It’s like I have dark hair and dark eyes,” she said. “It’s deep in my soul. You don't forget that.”

— jtempera@providencejournal.com

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On Twitter: @jacktemp