Hanna Feldman and Dawid Bachner before the war

These are my sister and brother. This photo was taken in Lublin by a professional photographer. It must have been after my sister’s wedding in 1937, but before 1939. It was sent me by my brother in 1942 or 1943. 

My sister Hanka was born in 1912, me in 1917 and my brother Dawid in 1918, all of us in Warsaw. My sister did not finish school; she was the lazier one, that is. She went to a Polish school, to Matyskowa. The school was near Koszykowa Street [in the center of Warsaw, outside the old Jewish district], but I don't know what the name of the street was, because it was quite far away from us. In the 5th grade something came over my sister and she said she wouldn't go to school any more and nothing could make her. 

She took some accounting courses and found a job. She worked for a few years. Then she got sick, mentally sick, I should say. She was afraid to go out on the street. She once fainted on the street, so she later had these fears. But finally she got married in 1937. I don't know how they met, they dated for a short time. His name was Abram Feldman and my sister renamed him Adam, though at the beginning she did call him Abram. I know very little about him, because he was from Radom. I know he was a tradesman dealing in metal products, ovens for farmers or something like that. I have to say that at their wedding I was only a spectator, I didn't take part in all that commotion. The wedding took place in a room rented from a rabbi from Norway or somewhere. That rabbi, if he was a rabbi at all, was wearing plain clothes, no robes or anything, only, I have to say, he did wear a hat. I don't know, I guess he prayed in Hebrew. It was a very secular wedding because my brother-in-law was a leftist and he didn't go in for that stuff. (He didn't say the Kaddish for his mother when she died, for which his sisters never forgave him.) I know he did break the glass at the wedding. My sister was wearing a beautiful white striped suit. It's difficult for me to say what kind of people came, because I hardly knew anyone. I only remember that my mother forgot to serve the salad with the dinner (back at home). The next day she found the salad on the windowsill. Those are the things you remember. 

After the wedding, my sister and her husband went to Lublin. In 1937 or 1938, more likely 1938, my nephew Gucio was born. He was born in Warsaw, because it was a complicated delivery. Then they went to Lublin, but not right away. They stayed in Lublin until the war. 

My brother was a good boy, really. He went to a secondary school where most of the students were Jewish, too. The school was called 'Spojnia' and was a teachers' cooperative, somewhere at Dluga [a street downtown, on the border of the Jewish district]. It was a school for boys, rather leftist. My brother didn't want to go to college, because he didn't like studying, but he did graduate from high school. I remember I went to stand at the door of his school when he was taking his matriculation exam, because I was very worried about him. Until the war he worked in our father's leather store at Franciszkanska. 

I lived with my family at Leszno. That was in the Ghetto during the war. In September 1942 I got out of the Ghetto. I was in hiding in Warsaw, then in Konskowola [around 100 km south-east from Warsaw] at the home of a woman called Zaba, one of my brother’s friends. While I was there I received this picture from my brother, who had stayed in the Ghetto.