Her closest friend is Viennese physician Dr. Charlotte "Lotty" Herschel, who as a Jewish child escaped Nazi-Annexed Austria. Dr. Herschel treats Vic's various illnesses and combat-related injuries and is, in effect, her surrogate mother. With both actual mother and surrogate mother being refugees from the Nazis, Vic outspokenly identifies herself as being Jewish, though not religious and not member of any organized community. She has deep identification with Jewish history before and during the Holocaust. Having a typical Polish name and having grown up in a predominantly Polish American neighborhood, she is sometimes mistaken for a Catholic. In fact, her relations with the Catholic Church are complicated and ambiguous. Her childhood was overshadowed by a particularly tyrannical, bigoted, and racist Polish parish priest. In one book she gets into head-on confrontation with a manifestly criminal Cardinal with the Church hierarchy solidly behind him, and whom the Chicago Police - with a preponderance of Irish and Polish Catholics - dare not touch. On the other hand, Vic has a warm and affectionate contact with a Progressive Catholic priest working in a slum neighborhood who appears in several books and who can always be relied on to give discreet help and provide refuge to various fugitives and wayward youths which Vic encounters. The same distinction between "Progressives" and "Reactionaries" is also made in Vic's encounters with various Protestant clergy.