Mojsze Sznejser with friends from the Social and Cultural Society of Polish Jews in Legnica

This photo was taken during one of the meetings of the Social and Cultural Society of Polish Jews in Legnica. All those people are dead now with the exception of myself. I?m the last one sitting on the left side of the table. After the war there were a lot of Jews here in Legnica. The synagogue was on Chojnowska Street. I used to go to the synagogue on the holidays. I didn't go on Sabbath. There were lots of people, see, and sometimes I was at work. Now on Saturdays I go to the synagogue, well, got to help keep the ten up [the minyan]. I know how to pray: I've got my prayer shawl here too, and I put it on, but not all of it, because I've forgotten it now. Back then there were lots of people. There was a synagogue and a SCSPJ club [Social and Cultural Society of Polish Jews]. I went to both. I always went to the SCSPJ on an evening: we'd come, play dominoes, and there was a buffet bar. Life was different - lively; we'd go to the club, to the park, once in a while to the cinema. The club was on Nowy Swiat Street. You could go every day of the week. They'd have an act come in and play; there was a Jewish theatre. The theatre was on Nowy Swiat Street as well. They'd come from Warsaw, from Wroclaw; the shows were in Yiddish. There were Poles that sang in Yiddish there too. One time they came up from Wroclaw, and I said: 'Listen up, I'll sing you a song, but without the piano, so everyone can hear.' And I sang for them, and they clapped. Here in Legnica everyone always knew, and still does, that I'm a Jew. I've never really had any problems. On Kartuska Street, where my workshop is, everyone knows me well. I tell them, 'That's who I am, and I'm not going to change.' People who know me call out to me from a long way off. There's this one Pole who's been going mushrooming in the woods with me for 40 years. 40 years, and he won't go with anyone else, only me! It was he who taught me to pick mushrooms. Like a brother, he is; once I needed him to go for my daughter to Swinoujscie, because she was coming back from Denmark, so I ask him if he'll go, and all he asks is when. I told him 'today', so he got straight in his car and went. He's known me so many years and to this day he comes into my shop every day. He came to have his shoes mended once and we got talking. And it's 40 years now.