Interview with Micheline (Micky) Leroy Monfe Satkowski

I was born in France as the third child after two boys. I lived in France, in a small rural town, until I was twenty years old. During my time here, I experienced WWII where I remembered coming home from school and witnessing bombings and destructions from the German forces. My older brothers at the time were to be drafted and one of them evaded the German forces by going into a safe house for two years. My other brother did in fact join and was able to survive the war with little to no injuries. At home, I was in desperate need for a surgery while the war was approaching closer and closer to my rural town. My parents made the decision for me get the surgery, and although it was a risky move, it saved my life. When I found out the war was over through newspapers and through other people, it was the happiest day of my life. Liberation was something that felt so far from me, yet it finally happened. After the war, I married an American soldier who was at France at the time. I learned how to speak English through him and came to New Jersey to marry him. For the first five years of my life in America, it was such a different environment and I learned the most important life lesson here, to be able to adapt to different places. I had the help of my mother-in-law and I worked as a teacher here, and through these actions, I became comfortable with my life here.

A part of me wanted to survive in America to keep the memory of my mother alive. She was an orphan in the 1800s, and was brought on the Orphan Train from Paris to different parts of France where she would later be chosen by a young couple. They were thankfully nice to her, but she struggled to ever gain an education and had to live through WWI and WWII while taking care of me.