When her family was forced into the Lodz ghetto, Miriam was in her second year of high school. When the ghetto schools closed, Miriam went into the workshops, toiling in a sewing factory. In the ghetto, she coped by writing prose and poetry in Polish. She also spent her free time as a member of the Gordonya Hakhsharah, a youth group. For her family and the youth group Miriam set many of her words to melodies and sang them.

In August 1944, Miriam was deported to Auschwitz. She was later sent to work in a factory in France before being taken to Bergen-Belsen. Miriam was liberated in April 1945 from the labor camp Muhltuer. After liberation she returned to Lodz to discover that she had lost all of her family except two sisters. In 1948, she moved to Israel where she got married and raised a family.