Gizela Fudem with her sister Tauba Grunberg

Here you can see me and my older sister, Tauba Grunberg. This picture was taken in Tarnow in February 1928, when I was four years old. My sister was eight at the time. I was born on 24th November 1924 in Tarnow. I lived in Tarnow before the war and for the first two years of the war. When it comes to my siblings, I had a brother - Mojzesz - four years younger than me, and a sister - Tauba - older than me, also by four years. I come from a religious family, even very religious, my father was a pious Jew with a beard, and never tolerated anything that wasn't kosher. During the times of my early childhood, I remember, my grandfather had a wine bottling plant. He owned a house on one of the more beautiful streets in Tarnow, on the corner of Folwarczna and Goldhammera Streets. It was a big house, two-storey, I think. It was quite elegant, with additions, there was a fish market, and in the yard there was a carpenter's workshop, and near that a little house for the caretaker, and there was the wine bottling plant. There's a story in our family that when I was young, when I was going to school, I used to drop by at Grandpa's and the workers there would let me drink some wine from a barrel with a rubber hose. Later I couldn't eat my dinner. I started attending school when I wasn't quite six years old yet, because my sister was already going there and a few years earlier my cousin, who had the same last name as I, graduated from that school. Later she lived in Lodz, but at that time she still lived in Stopnica, and there was a six-grade school there and in order to do the 7th grade she came to Tarnow. And since the cousin had a good reputation, and so did my sister, I asked them to let me in earlier. I was first going there when kids were playing in the school yard, and I was waving my arms too, when they were doing some exercises. So I wasn't even 13 when I graduated, and later I went to a one-year business school.