Janina Wiener

Janina Wiener
Cracow
Poland
Interviewer: Jolanta Jaworska
Date of interview: July-August 2005

Mrs. Janina Wiener is 83 years old and was born in Lwow. She talks about herself and her family – a family with the sense of a Jewish identity, yet culturally to a large extent integrated into Polish society. The history of her family shows how rich and diverse the Jewish world was. It refutes the stereotype that the Polish Jew was poor and simple, wore payot, or was a communist, or that he was so assimilated that only anti-Semites saw a Jew in him. Here we have a culturally very rich Polish and European family of Jews, where children are given Polish names and at the same time attend Hebrew lessons at the Tarbut 1.

My name is Janina Wiener [nee Bodenstein] and I was born on 13th April 1922 in Lwow. I remember my great-grandmother, because she died when I was already ten years old; that was in 1932. I remember her very well. She was my maternal great-grandmother, the mother of my maternal grandmother. Her name was Klara Urich, but I don’t know her maiden name. Great-grandmother was a very dignified, grey-haired lady. Always dressed in black, with a large black polished bag. When she visited us, she’d sit me on her lap and kiss me, which was very unpleasant, because she probably already had, you know… facial hair. She’d prickle me. She’d prickle me with those kisses, and she’d treat me with paradise apples, the small, red ones, which she’d take out of her polished bag. And I felt miserable, literally miserable. Whenever she came I’d run away however I could. I’d hide away in some tight corner so that they wouldn’t find me and take me to Great-grandmother.

Great-grandmother was a widow. About her husband – my great-grandfather – I know virtually nothing. Great-grandmother’s latter years were affluent and prosperous; she had this companion with whom she lived and who’d escort her to us, even though Great-grandmother was physically and mentally sound, really OK. I remember that we spoke only in Polish. I don’t remember which street she lived on; I don’t think I ever visited her at home. Usually it was her who’d come to us. I have no idea whether she was religious. She is buried in the Jewish cemetery in Lwow.

My maternal grandmother’s name was Charlota [Singer, nee Urich]. I don’t know how they spelled it, but everyone called her Loti. Oh, she was a great person. She was short, she was plump, always with a smile on her face. A warm person, of whom it was said in the family she had the ‘white liver,’ [a composed, cool person] because grandfather – Jakub Singer – was a pyknic [Editor’s note: Mrs. Wiener means he was explosive], an impulsive personality. Grandfather was very impulsive. And when he’d get one of his fits, Grandmother would sit at the table and start eating. As long as he was raging, she kept eating. And they were a couple, Jakub and Charlota. Both were born in Lwow. Moreover, I very much liked to visit Grandmother when she was doing something, and sometimes – though they had a cook – she’d cook something herself. I remember how she used to make those favorite cakes of mine, her sleeves rolled up. Those hands were so plump, with little dimples, and I loved to kiss Grandmother on those dimples. And she would never chase me away from the kitchen. Never.

Though Grandfather was very impulsive, I never irritated him. He’d never yell at me. I remember him as a very large man, powerfully built, with very large hands, yet those hands were so delicate that if something got into my eye or I got a splinter in my finger, I’d run to Grandfather to pull it out, rather than to my mother. Grandfather was grey-haired; his hair was somehow wavy and parted in the middle. He never wore glasses. Grandfather was a very wealthy man. So much so he could afford to spend the whole of World War I in Vienna with six children, his wife, a nanny – which, you’ve got to admit, was something. They returned to Lwow only after the war, not after the regaining of independence [see Poland’s independence, 1918] 2 but a bit later, I think, after that Polish-Ukrainian war [see Battle for Lwow] 3.

After the war [World War I], Grandfather worked as a sales representative for various foreign companies in Poland. Among other things, he was a distributor for Oetker [Dr. Oetker, German maker of baking additives and desserts; the company’s first production plant in Poland opened in 1922 in Gdansk]. A nationwide distributor. Among other things. Then I remember there was a company I was very much interested in: Victor Schmidt und Soehne from Vienna. It was a confectionery company, they made chocolate. Every Christmas I’d get from them a whole box of chocolate figurines for hanging on the Christmas tree. Besides that, I remember I once got from them a tiny Rosenthal dolls’ tea set. I also got dolls from them – so that the company and its name somehow stuck in my memory. I also remember a company called Globin Globus, they made metal-cleaning agents or something of the sort.

Those were Austrian companies and certainly also German ones, because I remember that Grandfather often went on business to Leipzig, Vienna, and Gdansk. He always brought me, his granddaughter, gifts back from those trips.

Grandfather had an office in the house where he lived. The address was 35 Skarbkowska Street [now Lesi Ukrainki], and we lived next door at 37. That was the center of Lwow. Grandfather owned both houses, and that’s why I was so close to them. Both houses had two stories. Like us, Grandfather lived on the second floor. His apartment was very spacious, and from the living room you entered a balcony overlooking the street. The balcony had beautiful metalwork, hammered by some village blacksmith. Grandfather had bought those houses, but I don’t know when. I can’t say whether Grandfather owned any other real estate except those two townhouses.

In the kitchen they had this huge tiled stove with a top plate for cooking. A door led from the kitchen to the dining room, and when you entered, on the right there was a niche, a cabinet set into the wall, with a metal door – all that was wallpapered. There were shelves there, and on the lower shelf stood tins full of cookies. All kinds of cookies: salty ones of the cracker variety with poppy-seed, sweet ones…

It was a Jewish home, of course. It was a home where all the holidays were observed. On the eve of the major holidays, the important ones, we usually had a festive dinner – because a holiday always starts at dusk of the previous day. During Easter [the practice of using the name Easter instead of Pesach to describe the Jewish holiday is widespread with secular, deeply assimilated Polish Jews] you can’t, of course, eat bread, so we ate matzah, and when the holidays ended, we’d eat that matzah with ham. Grandmother’s cuisine wasn’t kosher – nothing of the sort. Neither ours nor my grandparents’ was.

The whole family would gather at Grandfather’s during those major holidays. Grandfather had six children, and all of them were married, both the sons and the daughters, except the youngest son, who still lived with my grandparents, while they all lived in their own places in various parts of the city. They weren’t practicing… Absolutely none of them, unfortunately. Unfortunately, I say… There was no mention of it whatsoever. They never went to the synagogue, but for those holiday dinners they’d all come as one man. Oh yes, they sat respectfully at the table. And those were the holidays, the most important Jewish holidays. Then Grandmother’s birthday, Grandfather’s birthday, their wedding anniversary – those were the days when the whole family would meet at their home.

The Friday [Sabbath] dinners were also held at Grandfather’s. Everyone who could and wanted to could attend. Oh yes. Everyone could come, and I went there too, because I was very fond of Jewish-style fish [gefilte fish]. Grandmother would light the candles. Grandfather would arrive, for he had been to prayer at the Tempel [synagogue built in 1843-1846 on Lwow’s Old Market Place, blown up by the Germans during World War II], and the candles would have already been lit. Then Grandfather would stand up – there was this silver ritual cup, filled with wine – and give the blessing. And that was it; we’d sit down and start eating. A proper dinner.

So it was like that – on the one hand, the major holidays were observed, Grandfather and Grandmother prayed at the city’s most progressive synagogue, the Tempel. They had their benches there, and I remember the metal plaques with their names engraved. I’d also often go to Grandmother’s for those major holidays, because Grandmother was then able to show off her granddaughter to all the ladies. I had to curtsy, of course, and behave. That I remember. Yet in everyday life, it was a very typical home – typical in terms of Polish customs and habits, though, for instance, my grandparents never had a Christmas tree, but we always had one. That didn’t bother Grandfather. Not the slightest bit. Neither Grandfather nor any of his brothers or sisters had anything to do with orthodoxy. They all were very much assimilated. The language in use at my grandparents’ was Polish, though very often they spoke German. Yes… Grandfather and Grandmother might very well talk German at dinner. For Grandfather, it didn’t matter which language he spoke. At the Tempel, my grandparents prayed with prayer books, so they obviously knew some Hebrew. I suppose so, but I’m not sure. I never heard them speak Yiddish or Hebrew. Unfortunately not.

My grandfather was a great fan, to use a modern word, of Emperor Franz Joseph 4. Under Franz Joseph, everything was good. I remember that when I was due to go to school for the first time, Grandfather went with me to a store to buy notebooks, crayons, pencils, and so on. That was 1928, ten years after [the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1918]. And at some point, I don’t remember whether it was about pencils or crayons, Grandfather asked the shop assistant, ‘But don’t you have pre-war ones? From before that war?’ I found the expression ‘Don’t you have pre-war ones?’ so appealing that when one time they sent me for fresh rolls to the grocer’s, which happened rarely, but that one time they did send me, I asked in the shop whether they didn’t have pre-war ones. And when I was already a grown-up girl and passed that shop, the owner would always ask me, ‘Do you remember, Miss, how you wanted to buy pre-war rolls?’ Another detail that has now surfaced from memory. Pre-war ones. So, for my grandfather, everything that came from the Franz Joseph era was simply better than anything else.

Grandfather Jakub had three brothers, Wolf, Adolf, and Ludwik, and two sisters whose names I don’t remember. One lived in Vienna, the other in Lwow. The one that lived in Lwow was married to, I think, an optician. I don’t know about the other one, but I know that she visited Lwow several times and stayed with my grandparents. And I know that her daughter, called Mitzi, also paid a visit to Lwow one time. All of Grandfather’s brothers lived in Lwow. Ludwik Singer, a doctor, died during World War I of typhus, having contracted it from a patient. My grandfather’s second brother, Wolf, operated a fur trading business. The third one, Adolf, was a poet, who had kept a shop, but the business went bankrupt because he didn’t look after it at all.

Adolf was a poet in the metaphorical sense of the word, i.e. had his head in the clouds and cared only for literature. Later my grandfather and his brother Wolf gave Adolf some money to set up a tailor’s shop. And I remember a family row – Grandfather was such a hothead – with him striding around the room and saying, ‘Perhaps I love Heine and Goethe too, perhaps I’d also like to be reading them instead of watching over the business!’ Then that second venture also went bust – and he had six children, that Adolf. Five daughters and a boy. I remember Marysia [Maria], Irena, Dziunia. What Dziunia was short for, I don’t know. One was probably named Antonina, for they called her Toncia. I don’t remember the name of the fifth daughter. The son was the youngest of them, and his name was Henryk.

I was close to Toncia’s daughter, Niuka – she was really called Anna – because we were roughly the same age, were growing up together, our mothers, besides being cousins, were friends, we went on summer vacation together, and so on. All those daughters and the son had higher education. I don’t know how he’d managed – I guess the family had helped him, and, on the other hand, there was this hunger [among Adolf’s children] for knowledge, for studying and making a prestigious career. They could have taken apprenticeships with a tailor or a shoemaker, but in that place everyone wanted a prestigious profession.

As far as my grandmother Charlota’s siblings are concerned, I remember two of her brothers. One was called Joachim, the other Franciszek. Everyone called Joachim ‘Bolo,’ but I don’t know why. Franciszek went by the name Franz, the Galician way [the majority of the population of Galicia spoke German, hence the Germanization of the Polish name]. Both were dental surgeons. They had an excellent practice on Kopernika Street. Franciszek was a confirmed bachelor. He married very, very late. An assistant of his. They had no children. I remember that Joachim had a wife and a son, Henryk, much older than me.

I know little about my paternal grandparents. They came from Vienna. My father’s father was a musician, a music teacher at the Vienna Conservatory. His name was Ignacy Bodenstein. I really know nothing about him. He simply died very early. My father was born in 1892 and grandfather died when my father was 16, i.e. 1908. I don’t know when or why my father’s family moved from Vienna to Lwow, but then it was all Galicia 5 … It was one state. I remember well that there was a cousin in Vienna, who married an Austrian girl, she wasn’t Jewish. They had two children, I think. I don’t remember that cousin’s name, but it was probably the only mixed marriage in our family.

My father’s mother was called Dora Bodenstein, nee Poss, and, if I remember right, she lived at 83 Zolkiewska Street [now Khmelnytskoho] in Lwow. I didn’t like to go there, because the apartment somehow seemed very large and gloomy. Grandmother never had a job in her life, and was provided for by her two sons, my uncle Ludwik and my father. As I see it today, she should have been drawing some pension after her husband, shouldn’t she? But she wasn’t. I somehow wasn’t drawn to her, because she was very… how to say it… she was always admonishing me, ‘Sit like this,’ ‘Don’t sit like that,’ ‘Hold yourself straight,’ and so on. She was scolding a small child, so I wasn’t close with her. Uncle Ludwik had no children, so all her affection was focused on me. Grandmother was assimilated and didn’t even go to pray to the synagogue. Nothing. Neither did my uncle or my father.

My grandparents had two sons: the older one Ludwik and the younger one, my father. Ludwik later became a lawyer in Lwow and lived on Sykstuska Street [now Doroshenka]. He completed his law studies in Lwow. As there were only the two of them, they were very close to each other. With the reservation that Uncle would visit us more often than we would visit him, because as a child I didn’t really have anything to do at his home.

My father’s name was Zygmunt. He was born on 3rd July 1892 in Jaroslaw [some 150 km west of Lwow]. Why there? I don’t know; his family had never lived there. My father completed a… cadet school, I guess, and if not that, then something of the sort. An Austrian one. A military school, simply. Yes, and he served in the Austrian [KuK] army 6 as an Austrian officer. In 1915 or 1916, wounded in the leg, he was taken prisoner by the Russians, and returned only after the war, after the [Russian] Revolution [of 1917] 7, in fact. I don’t know precisely, but I think he spent two years of captivity in Krasnoyarsk [now Russia, third-largest city in Siberia]. He said he had been billeted somewhere, it was not a camp or anything of the sort – a billet. He had an orderly and received 50 rubles a month for expenses – from the tsarist government, as a prisoner of war. All the officers received money, it was like soldiers’ pay. I don’t know how it was with that orderly, whether he paid his expenses? I guess so. I don’t know the details.

Well, he also told me he had had some good time there with the daughters of all those local nabobs… the term is ‘kupechiskaya doch’ [in Russian], the merchant’s daughter. He played the piano very well, danced nicely – that I can imagine… And then he was released. Yes, when the Revolution broke out [1917], he forged his way back to Poland. On his own. I don’t know the details. Later, in Poland, he joined the Polish Army [On 11th November 1918, Jozef Pilsudski took command of the 30,000-strong Polish army. Within two months, he brought it up to 100,000]. He was in the Polish Army, but he never served in the [Polish] Legions 8.

My mother’s name was Henryka, and she was born on 23rd March 1900 in Lwow, I remember the date exactly. Grandfather Singer had six kids. All were born in Lwow. The oldest one, Leopold, took over the business. He worked there first, and then, when Grandfather, so to speak, opted out, he took over. He had studied something, but I don’t remember what it was. Leopold may have been a year or two older than my mother. There wasn’t much age difference between them. My mother was closer with him than with any other of her siblings. Leopold married a very beautiful lady. I was there at their wedding because I remember I carried the bride’s train. I don’t remember her name. The wedding took place at the Tempel. I remember, I was wearing this pink dress, with roses… not hemmed, but arranged in a semicircle at the bottom. I was very proud of that dress, that’s why I remember it so well. I was seven, perhaps eight years old. Their daughter’s name was Ilona. They lived on Kollataja Street [now Mentsynskoho].

After Leopold, Grandfather had daughters. One after another. First came my mother. She studied what today you’d call biology, at the Jan Kazimierz University in Lwow [founded 1817 as Lwow University, 1920-1939 known as the Jan Kazimierz University, famous for its scientific schools, among other things: the Lwow School of Mathematics, the Lwow-Warsaw School of Philosophy, and the Lwow School of Anthropology. Now: Ivan Franko National University in Lwow]. But she never worked a single day in her life. Neither Mama nor any of her sisters. They had help at home. Of course. They had cooks, there was a nanny.

After Mother, two aunts were born: Malwina and Felicja. Malwina was the elder. Felicja was the youngest of the sisters. I don’t know whether Malwina completed any studies. She married Jakub Wueschik. I remember them very well because after getting married they lived for a long time with my grandparents. I guess they got married shortly after I was born. I don’t remember where he worked, but I think it was some office. They had a daughter named Ela who was born late, very late. In the 1930s. Of the cousins, I was the eldest, then came my brother Jerzy, I guess, then Ilona, and Ela was the youngest.

Felicja completed the ‘Kunstgewerbeschule’ in Vienna. That was something like a fine arts college. She was a wonderful embroiderer. She’d make a drawing and then transfer it onto the canvas. She married later than Malwina, much later. I don’t remember her husband’s first name, but his last name was Mantel because I remember her as Felusia Mantel. Her husband was a very nice, affable man. They had no children.

My mother’s brother Maurycy completed the German polytechnic in Brno in Czechoslovakia, after which he returned to Lwow. Mother’s youngest brother was called Edward, and he had a law degree from Jan Kazimierz University. He had graduated and was preparing for his internship exam I guess. I remember him pacing to and fro in my grandparents’ dim bedroom with those books, learning. Edward was a bachelor and until the last moment lived with his parents. I was very close with him, my youngest uncle. The age difference between us was eleven years. I always went to him when I couldn’t solve some homework problem.

I don’t know how my parents met, but it was a marriage of love, that’s for sure. The wedding took place on 29th June 1921, on Peter and Paul [an important saints’ day in Poland]. I remember that because it was an anniversary that we celebrated every year. I remember my parents’ wedding photo. My father was dressed in his lieutenant’s uniform and when they left the Tempel, his officer friends held up their sabers [crossed in a guard of honor above the newlyweds’ heads, for luck]. There was a photo of that at home. I know they were wed by Rabbi Freund. My father had dark blonde hair, blue eyes, and a small moustache. He was extremely handsome. My mother, as I remember her, was beautiful. She had chestnut-brown hair, dark eyes, very fair skin, and beautiful hands. At first she kept her hair in a bun, but then suddenly she started cropping it.

My mother was very kind. Father was firmer, he was the master of the house. I didn’t fear my mother, I feared my father. This means that if I was supposed to be back home at eight, I’d be back not five past eight but five to eight. No one ever hit me or anything, but it was enough when my father looked at me… He was so firm that when I was asking him for something, I’d always say, ‘Daddy, Daddy, please don’t say no at once.’

I don’t know whether it was from the beginning of his military service, but when I was about to be born, my father was stationed in Bedzin [a town in Upper Silesia, some 15 km north of Katowice]. My mother was staying with him in Bedzin, but when the delivery date was nearing, she returned to Lwow to be with her family. Then my father was demobilized, after which he came to Lwow and got a job in bank. I don’t know when precisely, but I suppose it was shortly after my birth [1922]. He was demobilized rather than quitting himself. Eventually, he was promoted to the position of assistant manager, and the institution’s full name was Powszechny Bank Zwiazkowy, Main Branch in Lwow, Headquarters in Warsaw. It was the largest private bank in Poland.

My brother’s name was Jerzy and he was six years younger than me. He was born on 1st August 1928. A tall blonde man with blue eyes, a classic Nordic type. His hobby was DIY. That I remember. Dismantling everything and then putting it back together. We weren’t on good terms, I mean the terms were such that he was very… how to put it… I’d sometimes dress in secret in those very thin stockings, which I bought with my pocket money. That was towards the end, around 1938, 1939. Those stockings often would run, because it wasn’t nylon, after all. And I remember he’d stalk me, and when he saw I had those stockings on, he’d blackmail me he’d tell Mother. I had to give him 10 or 20 groszy. Yes, I got pocket money. I actually got double pocket money: from my parents and from Grandfather. Besides that, I also got money for the tram. Every day, and I always went on foot. So that was extra money that I saved. My brother hadn’t started gymnasium when the war broke out.

Our apartment at 37 Skarbkowska was smaller than my grandparents’: it had four rooms, a bathroom and a kitchen. There was a bedroom, a dining room, my room, and my father’s study, which, after my brother was born, became his room. I remember that in the dining room hung a beautiful mirror in a gilded frame, a very large one, from the floor almost to the ceiling. A huge one. In the dining room there was also a lounge section. There was a table, some chairs, a dining area.

In my room there was a three-section wardrobe with a mirror on the outside. There was a couch, a small desk, a chair. And that was it. The room wasn’t large. The windows overlooked the backyard. Those in my parents’ bedroom and in the dining room overlooked the street. We had gas – I’m talking about the last years. The bathroom had a gas heater, and there was gas in the kitchen. It wasn’t a regular cooker, but just two burners set into a tiled shelf. There was also a standard tiled stove in the kitchen. Dinner was usually prepared on that standard stove, on the hot plate. The bathroom was accessed from my parents’ bedroom. The bathroom had no window, and wasn’t large. There was a bathtub, and a toilet. The entrance to the other toilet was in the hall – no one else lived on the first floor. Only we lived there.

We spoke Polish at home. Initially, when my parents didn’t want me to understand, they’d switch to German. Later they could no longer do that because I learned German. My mother knew French, that I remember for sure. That was part of a good upbringing. A couple of years before the war, not many, say, three years – more or less – my father started learning English. I don’t know why, obviously he needed it for something.

My parents subscribed to Chwila 6. The editor-in-chief of Chwila was [Marian] Hemar’s brother – Marian Hemar 7 was only his pen name. His real name was Hescheles. I’m sure my parents bought Chwila every day. And I remember there was some popular evening paper, only I’m not sure what it was called… Ekspress Wieczorny [Ekspress Wieczorny Ilustrowany] or something like that. My mother was an avid reader, and Father liked to read too.

I remember that every day at 12 noon my mother went to a café that was called Roma, on Akademicki Square [now Shevchenky Prospekt]. There she’d meet with her friends, and then she’d come back home. We, the children, had had our dinner earlier. Mother waited for Father to come back from work. I guess they ate their dinner at three, perhaps half past three. After dinner, Father played patience. He never slept during the daytime. Mother would take a nap, and at seven in the evening they’d go out. That’s how people lived then. [They’d go] to a restaurant, a café, to friends’ homes.

My father had a hobby at home: playing patience and playing an instrument. From his father, a musician in Vienna, he had inherited a good ear for music. Yes, and we had a piano at home. Father was very fond of those Russian ballads, songs like ‘Ochi Chyornye’ [Russian for ‘Black Eyes’]. And he liked to play that. Besides, I remember him playing Schubert songs, and other pieces by various composers. But it wasn’t as though he played every day; it was from time to time. He was a reserve officer, from time to time he was called up for maneuvers. Sometime in the 1930s he went on maneuvers in Kobryn [now in western Belarus, some 50 km from the Polish border] in the Polesie area. And I even remember he was in the 83rd Infantry Regiment.

I remember also that my father was a sports activist. There was a sports club called Hasmonea Lwow 11, and Father was an official there. He had played football as a boy, but after he was wounded in the knee, football became impossible. He had friends. There was a guy named Wacek Kuchar, for instance, a sports activist, and I think they were friends. From early childhood I went with Father to all the football matches. From Hasmonea I remember… Sztejerman [Zygmunt Stauermann, one of the team’s leading players], the name has somehow stuck. Sztejerman [Stauermann]. Perhaps I’m mixing something up, I’m not sure. My father was a believer in sport. I swam and skied. With school we went to a swimming pool called Zelazna Woda [Polish for ‘Iron Water,’ an open-air swimming pool in Lwow]. We often went swimming instead of gymnastics, but that was only in the summer. Or in the spring, if it was warm. In the winter, I skied. I had my own skis, my own ski suit, my own everything.

My father’s political views… above all, he was an admirer of Pilsudski 12. He was a fervent supporter of his, and Zionism didn’t prevent him at all from being so. I don’t remember whether he belonged to any Zionist party. My parents never thought of emigrating from Poland, they never had such plans. But in 1935 or 1936 my mother’s younger brother, Maurycy, left. I think there was supposed to be a Maccabiada [now called the Maccabiah Games, an Olympic-style event first held in 1932 in Palestine] and he left Lwow with the Maccabi 13 team and then got through to Palestine. He returned two years later. Why? Well, he obviously didn’t like it. He married a girl from Cracow there and they returned, but not to Lwow. They went to Cracow, and he worked somewhere half an hour away in a quarry. I don’t remember whether it was Krzeszowice or some other place. Somewhere where there were stone pits [quarries can be found across the whole Cracow-Czestochowa Uplands, also near Krzeszowice]. I don’t remember what that wife of his was called, but I remember from when he came to visit us with her that she was very ugly.

We had a nanny at home, my mother’s wet nurse. In fact, she had been with Grandfather’s family in Vienna, and it was her who actually brought me up. When I was born in 1922, she had been with the family for 22 years. Her name was Jula. What was her last name? I don’t know, to us she was always simply Jula, Nanny Jula. She was Polish, the illegitimate daughter of a landlord and a governess, I remember that, but I don’t remember where her father’s estate was. She lived in the same house as us. We lived on the first floor, and she lived on the second, in something like a studio. She had been given it for life. And she virtually governed the whole house. The relationship was such that she’d give mother a free hand to do this or that, but she wasn’t a harridan. She was simply extremely devoted to my mother and my mother was the most important person in the world for her.

She brought me up, and she brought up my brother. I remember how she used to tell him bedtime stories and I would listen in. And one more thing – all the Polish, i.e. Catholic, holidays were always celebrated at our home. Yes, she always organized them. There was always a Christmas tree. The tree, the Christmas Eve dinner [the high point of the Polish Christmas], the sharing of the wafer [a thin, communion-style wafer, shared with family before eating Christmas Eve dinner to accompany the giving of Christmas wishes]. She’d share the wafer with us. Yes, and the gifts… we never had gifts under the tree. Gifts were given on 6th December, St. Nicholas day. That was the gift-giving day. You had to place all your shoes and slippers in front of your bed, and, in the morning, there’d be gifts there. I was given gifts on my birthday and on St. Nicholas day.

At the Dominican church, I knew all the altars, which one was for which saint. Nanny took first me to church, and then my brother, as there was six years’ age difference between us and, at some point, I stopped going. With Nanny I went to the Catholic church, and with our maid to the Uniate one. That Uniate church [the Greek Catholic Church of the Transubstantiation, originally the Trinitarian church] on Krakowska Street… well, I know every little stone there. They [the nanny and the maid] went there every Sunday, so they’d take us with them. And my parents wouldn’t say anything – no, no! People didn’t devote as much time to children then as they do today. My parents led a very intense social life. And the children brought themselves up at home. There was a nanny, there was a maid, so the kids were virtually on their own.

Besides the maid there was also a cook, but they kept changing. The servants kept changing, but the nanny was always the same. The last cook we had – I remember her well – got married. She slept in the kitchen. There was a recess there, and that’s where she slept. Most of those were Ruthenian women; no one used the name ‘Ukrainian’ back then. [The denomination ‘Ruthenian’ was used to describe a number of Eastern Slavic nations or ethnic groups such as the Ukrainians, Lemkos, Boykos, and Hutsuls.]

On the second floor of our house lived Lila Amirowicz. She was Armenian, and the same age as me. Her father was the director, or vice-director, of the Polish Post Office in Lwow. She played with us in the courtyard and often dragged us… no, wrong word – took us to the Armenian Cathedral that stood at our street [Editor’s note: this cathedral was built in 1356-1363 as an Armenian church to the design of the Italian architect Dorchi; major changes in 1908; mosaics by Jozef Mehoffer, paintings by Jakiv Rosen; returned to the community in 2002.] Only a little way down the street. Lwow had three archbishops: a Roman Catholic one, a Greek Catholic one, and an Armenian one [Jozef Teodorowicz, 1864-1938, archbishop 1902-1938]. Both the Armenian Cathedral and the Armenian archbishop’s residence stood at Skarbkowska. And we often played in the residence’s courtyards and gardens.

My [favorite] playmate at that time was Marysia Jodlowska. She was Ukrainian. Her father had worked as caretaker at Grandfather’s two houses since time immemorial, in any case since before the [Great] War. Later, my grandfather paid for Marysia’s high school, a Ukrainian one that she had been accepted to. Marysia was a year younger than me. We played either outside or at our place. At home we played with dolls. I had a dolls’ house with all the fittings, which I’d been given by Grandmother, Father’s mother. I had heaps of dolls, and because they all had porcelain faces, something was always happening to one or the other of them. And I remember that there was this ‘Doll Clinic,’ this shop where you could take china dolls to be mended. In the yard we played hopscotch, ball, and ‘two fires’ [Polish ‘dwa ognie,’ a team ball game]. Other kids would come to play with us too, but no boys, only girls. Lila would come, too. Because the two houses stood next to each other, there was a wall between them, and in the wall, a gate. The backyard of the house where I lived was small, but the backyard of my grandparents’ house was huge, ending with a wall at Strzelecki Square [now Danyly Halytskoho], so in fact there were two plots. Some very nice sycamore trees grew there.

Yes, I wanted to go to school. It was an ordinary Polish school, named after Stanislaw Staszic. A public school. With a good reputation. Next to it stood the Stanislaw Staszic School for Boys, and the entrance to that one was from Skarbkowska, and the entrance to the one for girls, because it was on the corner, was from either Podwale or from Strzelecki Square. The girls’ school faced the buildings of the fire brigade and the medical emergency service. And from there it was very near to Waly Gubernatorskie [Governor’s Embankment, raised in the 19th century in the place of the former city fortifications, a popular promenade] – something like an uneven levee. You climbed up steps. On the embankment was a very broad, huge chestnut-lined avenue. There was also a historical monument, the Baszta Prochowa [Gunpowder Tower, a powder magazine built in 1554-1556, presently the Architects’ House]. We called it the Powder House, but we never went there. And down there, quite far, it seems to me, on the other side, was a street.

My first reminiscences from school are that I was very happy to be assigned to ‘A’ class, because ‘A’ was for ‘angels,’ and ‘B’ was something bad. But when Mother took me to school for the first time, she met her former teacher there, a Mrs. Madejska, who advised her to move me to the ‘B’ class after all. And Mom moved me to ‘B’ right away.

Mrs. Madejska was my first-grade class tutor. My subsequent tutors included Gertruda Ajrhorn and Zofia Gubrynowicz. In fact, Zofia Gubrynowicz was my tutor for a longer time than Miss Ajrhorn. The latter, despite her German name, was a great Polish patriot. Most of the teachers were, I guess, Polish. But I was simply not interested in all that at that time. Miss Ajrhorn was an old maid, in a long black skirt and a long-sleeved blouse, with a stand-up collar and a beautiful gold cameo. It was actually her who infected me with love for literature. Mrs. Gubrynowicz, in turn, was married and had sons who sometimes visited her at school. She was very cheerful. We loved her very much. We feared the other one [Ajrhorn], and her we loved.

I was actually the best student. I had no difficulties whatsoever. My favorite subjects? Polish literature. I also liked history and natural science. There was even a period when I was wondering whether not to become a naturalist. I had a fantastic memory. I learned to read from Zipper’s Greek myths at the age of four. There was a library at home, and that book stood on the lower shelf, which I could reach, and had beautiful illustrations. I suppose Nanny must have taught me some, because someone had to help me with letters, right? It wasn’t only street signboards… And I also remember that in the second grade my teacher, Mrs. Madejska, called my mother to ask her not to do my homework for me; the thing was that I wrote a composition that started like this: ‘Zeus lived on Olympus, Zeus was the god of the Greeks.’ That was the first sentence and the teacher was convinced my mother had helped me write it. And it turned out that I had already read the whole of Greek mythology.

No, I didn’t have any male friends. The only boys I knew were the sons of my parents’ relatives or friends. I had no other boy friends whatsoever. And girl friends – well, I had them. I had girl friends, classmates, it was always a circle here, a circle there. In my class there were Ukrainian kids, Polish ones, and Jewish ones. The Polish, i.e. the Roman Catholic ones, were the most numerous, then the Jewish ones, and the Ruthenian girls were relatively few. I remember religious classes. My elementary school religion teacher was called Wurm. I don’t remember his first name. There was also a Greek Catholic teacher, and a Roman Catholic one. They’d always arrive all three together. We’d go to the different classrooms, and the lessons took place simultaneously. We learned above all the Torah, and besides that, it was Jewish history. I don’t remember much because I never cared for it. Present in body, absent in mind. I was simply not interested in all that.

My father, who was a Zionist, had decided his daughter should know Hebrew, so twice a week, I think, I went to the Tarbut for two hours to learn Hebrew. The Tarbut was located at Za Zbrojownia Street. It’s easy to calculate – I was six when I went to elementary school, and I went there for six years, i.e. until the age of twelve. During that time, I learned Hebrew, only I don’t remember whether it was for three years or four. Anyway, I studied it for quite a long time. It was a co-ed class. Boys and girls. The teachers were all men, and the classes came in pairs. The first class was based on the Torah, and I remember that towards the end of my education at the Tarbut, we were reading not only the main text but also one of the commentaries, because under the Hebrew text of the Torah there are Rashi’s commentaries in small print. That was the first class, and the second one was based on some [non-religious] texts.

I attended those lessons all angry, because instead of playing with my girl friends, I had to sit there and study. And, in fact, I was probably the worst student in my class. I remember that when I went to high school and met there one of the girls that had been at the Tarbut with me, she was surprised that I was such a good student, because she remembered me as having trouble in school all the time. I simply didn’t want to be learning Hebrew. I was learning it against myself because my father wanted me to. My father didn’t know Hebrew so he couldn’t examine me. Absolutely. No one in the family could.

I belonged to no interest groups or organizations. I didn’t want to, and there was no talk about it at home either. I was all absorbed with school, and I was also going to the Tarbut. I remember that if I went with anyone for a walk as a child, it was to the [Governor’s] Embankment, the High Castle [Lwow’s highest hill with the ruins of a fortress destroyed by the Swedes in 1704], or to the Stryjski Park. Later, as a teenage girl, I had to go to school from eight in the morning, and after school there was dinner, there was homework to do, there were meetings to attend, so I didn’t really have that much time for myself, and at eight I had to be back home. It wasn’t like I could come five or ten past. Discipline was really strict. Of course, during the day I could play in the backyard, but to play on the street – that was out of the question. The street was only ‘there and back.’

My mother chose the gymnasium and high school for me. In fact, she directed my whole education, Father didn’t interfere at all. I took exams in Polish literature and math. It was Dr. Adela Karp-Fuchsowa’s private gymnasium and high school. There were three good private high schools in Lwow: [Zofia] Strzalkowska’s, Karp-Fuchsowa’s, and Olga Filippi-Zychowiczowa’s; my mother went to the latter, but she considered it too far from home. There were twenty-odd of us in the class. There were two classes. Unlike my elementary school, the high school was situated a long way from home, on Krasickich Street [now Ohiyenka]. It was for everyone, not only Jews.

Our class tutor at high school was Wanda Ladniewska-Blankenheim. My history teacher was Halina Poeckhowa. A very eloquent lady, and a very beautiful one too. I remember that the husband of the owner and superior, Zygmunt Fuchs, was a professor at the Lwow Polytechnic [Poland’s oldest technical university, founded 1844], at the aerodynamics faculty [head of the Aerodynamic Laboratory at the mechanics faculty] where not a single Jew was admitted [due to Anti-Semitism in Poland in the 1930s] 14. And he, though he was a Jew, was a professor there. The Fuchses lived in the school building and we often met the professor on the stairs. We called him Malzon, from ‘malzonek’ [Polish for ‘husband’], or Prince Husband. I know that in 1937 or 1938 they were in the United States for half a year, and he was offered tenure, but she wouldn’t agree because the school was her life’s work and she couldn’t imagine not going back. And so they returned, and both lost their lives.

On 3rd May 15 and 11th November [celebration of Poland’s independence, 1918] there were always street parades and the whole school had to attend. I don’t remember going on those parades in elementary school, but in high school we did. Obligatorily. I remember that when Pilsudski went to Madeira [Portuguese island in the Atlantic where Pilsudski took a vacation between December 1930 and March 1931], I was probably in elementary school. Each of the pupils had written a name-day greetings card that we then sent to Madeira [Pilsudski’s name day was 19th March]. There was a cult surrounding Pilsudski in elementary school and in high school, absolutely. Yes, [on the wall] there was the Polish eagle [national emblem], a portrait of Moscicki [Ignacy Moscicki, president of Poland 1926-1939], and a portrait of Pilsudski.

Books. All my life books have been my hobby. First fairytales. All kinds of them. Then my first book was ‘The Heart of a Boy’ by Amicis [Edmondo De, Italian writer, 1846-1908]. Many people were raised on it at that time. Those were short stories in which there was always some poor person, and in the end that person was always rewarded by fate – he or she would come out the winner. Then came a period of adventure books. I read almost all the novels by Karl May [1842-1912, German writer, author of popular adventure books about Native Americans and the Wild West]. And, in 1937, 1938, I suddenly started discovering great literature. I remember that it started with the French writers of literature and Alexandre Dumas. I also read Ehrenburg’s 16 ‘13 Pipes’ and ‘The Love of Jeanne Ney.’ In 1939 or in early 1940 my father gave me the ‘Silent Don’ [epic novel about the Don Cossacks; consecutive volumes in 1928, 1932, 1940, by Mikhail Sholokhov (1905-1984), Russian novelist and Nobel prize winner] to read. All that, of course, in Polish translation. Then came Romain Rolland [1866-1944, French writer and Nobel prize winner] and his ‘Colas Breugnon’ [1918], a book I’ve loved ever since and which I reach for every time I feel blue. Generally, however, no one recommended books to me. I took some off the shelf myself, I borrowed others.

I remember that one of the Tempel’s three rabbis, Dr. Dawid Kahane 17, was, in the latter part of my high school education, my religion teacher. He was very handsome, actually, and we all had a crush on him. I remember precisely the Tempel’s interior of that period. It was shaped like a semicircle. The balconies were white with gold ornaments, and the balustrades were red saffian. Next to those balustrades was a white-and-gold grating that separated the men from the women, as women were, of course, not allowed to sit with men. The men sat downstairs, and the women upstairs, on those balconies. There were three balconies, so there were three floors. On the right, on the top floor, stood the choir. What kind of windows did the Tempel have? In any case, kind of semicircular ones. There was the Ark of the Covenant [aron kodesh], placed in roughly the same place as the stage in a theater, rather than in the center. And on both sides of the Ark, on that platform, there were kind of stalls, each with three seats. On the one side sat the three rabbis, and on the other the cantors. And that was the elevated part. You went up the stairs. The Great Synagogue in Malmo, Sweden, actually shares this design, though it is not as beautiful. What else I remember… wooden benches, prayer book compartments in them, on the compartment lid was a nameplate. Everyone had their own place paid up.

But how do I remember all that? It’s not only that I went to the synagogue with Grandma – I used to go with her as a girl, but later, when I was 14 or 15, I no longer went with her. When I was in high school, roughly once a month we attended the so-called exhortation [a sermon, religious lecture, directed at a specific audience, usually students] at the Tempel. We went there with our religion teacher. Jewish male and female students would come, and a service was held, and then a lecture in Polish. The lecture was often delivered by the incumbent rabbi, Dr. Jecheskiel Lewin. Those were marvelous sermons – delivered in pure, beautiful Polish. Those sermons were very moving.

Dr. Jecheskiel Lewin lived with his wife and daughter at 3 Kollataja Street, on the first floor. I remember, because on the third floor of the same house lived Leopold, my mother’s brother. The oldest of the Tempel’s three rabbis was Rabbi Freund, short, with a little gray beard – the one that had wed my parents. All three sat together during the service. Not always, sometimes only two of them, but on the important holidays, when I went there with Grandmother, there were all three. In fact, of all the temples I went to, I liked the Tempel synagogue the most [Mrs. Wiener is comparing the Tempel with churches in Lwow]. The Tempel was located on Zolkiewska Street. Not where Grandmother lived, but much farther up the street [Dora Bodenstein lived at 83 Zolkiewska].

Somewhere towards the end of Zolkiewska, close to Sloneczna Street, was the Jewish quarter [see Lwow Jewish district] 18. I don’t know what it was called. There certainly were Orthodox Jews in Lwow, absolutely there were, but you just didn’t see them in the city. They kept within their quarter. Did I ever go there? As a teenager – not as a girl – perhaps. My grandmother lived on Zolkiewska so it’s not impossible that I may have wandered there on some occasion.

In my high school days, I never wore anything but a navy blue uniform or a navy blue skirt with a white blouse. Oh yes. I didn’t have any other clothes, I mean, I did, in the summer, have various summer dresses, for the vacations, but during the school year – the uniform. I don’t mean a single uniform. There was a woolen one, a georgette one, but it was always the same cut; moreover, the woolen ones had an inset, which in gymnasium was blue, and in high school it was maroon. The berets were the same, with a blue or maroon inset. I also wore a badge with the school’s number on my coat. And at some point, it must have been late 1938, or early 1939, I rebelled against that. And even my grandparents intervened that perhaps it would make sense to… and so on… And my parents somehow consented to that. I remember that Mother said then, ‘It’ll be better if you go with Father.’ And indeed, when I went with Father, I got material for a coat, I got material for a dress – because in those times clothes were made by tailors. I also got a handbag and a pair of shoes. I got much more than I would have if I had gone with Mother.

My mother had [her own] dressmaker. I don’t remember where the shop was located, but I remember where Mother had her hats made. I got my first two hats from Mother’s milliner. The first was a kind of cherry red… It was a felt hat with kind of laps [a turned up brim] and here [under the chin] it had strings like small girls wore – so that it didn’t fall off. The strings were made of the same felt. And I remember I cried for a long time there because I wanted the hat to be without it. The other hat was a small tricorn, a bit like the French kepi. It was navy blue, decorated with a tartan ribbon.

At high school, we went to the theater every month, and it was chiefly with school that I went to the theater. My parents never refused me money for school or the movies. I remember my first film, it was a nature documentary. I remember the movies from 1937, 1938, 1939, because I used to go to the movies a lot then. I remember French films, which I very much liked. My favorite actress was Michèle Morgan [b. 1920, French actress], who acted with Jean Gabin [1904-1976, French actor] in ‘People in the Fog’ [Editor’s note: actually called ‘Port of Shadows,’ 1938, directed by Marcel Carne, acknowledged as a masterpiece of poetic realism]. I also liked those musicals with Jeanette MacDonald [1903-1965; American actress], such as ‘Rose-Marie’ [1936]. I somehow wasn’t one of those girls who fall in love with movie actors, get crazy about them, collect their photos – nothing of the sort.

I used to go to the movies with a girl friend of mine, and always for the afternoon show. Never with my parents. I remember that every Sunday, I don’t know what time, probably 9pm, the city would become deserted, with everyone hurrying home to listen to the Wesola Lwowska Fala [Jolly Lwow Wave], a [radio] show [Radio Lwow’s hugely popular weekly show, broadcast nationally in 1933-1939. Created by Wiktor Budzynski, author of most of the scripts. The show presented a broad range of Lwow yokel types, including, most popular of all, a ‘batyar’ (Lwow street smart) double act: Szczepko (K. Wajda) and Toncio (Henryk Vogelfaenger) and comedians parodying the Jewish accent: Aprikosenkrantz and Untenbaum]. And I certainly listened to all those shows.

In my family, no one had a car. We lived so centrally we didn’t have to; if we needed to get somewhere, we could always take the tram. But, in fact, I always went everywhere on foot. I remember that the father of one of my friends had a car, a Buick. He did. One time, it was 1937, perhaps 1938, we went to Jaremcze [now Yaremche, Ukraine, known as the ‘pearl of the Carpathians,’ above all as a sanatorium for tuberculosis patients] on vacation. All the girls and boys were there with their mothers, and the fathers would usually come [every Saturday]. And one day the father of that friend of mine came by car, and took us for a ride. His chauffeur drove, because in those times few people drove themselves, even if they had a car and liked to drive.

I always spent my vacations in the mountains. And it was always the Prut Valley, or the Opor Valley [in the Eastern Carpathians, also known as the Ukrainian Carpathians]. So either it was Jaremcze-Worochta [now Vorokhta, Ukraine, famous for its Hutsul history and traditions, some 20 km from Yaremche; approx. 200 km south of Lwow], or Skole-Hrebenov [some 120 km south of Lwow]. I never saw the Polish sea. Once, one single time, I went with Father to Zakopane [Poland’s largest ski and mountaineering resort]. We stayed in a hotel called Stamara. I remember that one time I got really cold and we stopped at some inn at the entrance to the Strazyska valley to drink… not hot mead, I don’t know – something with dried fruit and nuts. I felt very proud, and later I told all my friends about it.

In Jaremcze and in Skole we usually stayed in guest houses. The one in Jaremcze was called Majestic, it was quite large. I don’t remember what the one in Worochta was called, because we went to Jaremcze more often than to Worochta, and always stayed in the same place. We always went with Mother; Father would only come for the weekends. We went for two months, July-August. Once, when my brother was ill, I spent some time in Brzuchowice [now Briukhovychi, Ukraine] near Lwow. It was a beautiful place set in a pine forest. I went there with Nanny to be with him, because Mother could not.

I remember that in September 1938 my father went for treatment to Truskawiec [now Truskavets, Ukraine, some 100 km south of Lwow, one of the newest and most popular health resorts of the interwar period; known above all for treatments for the digestive system], and he demanded I come to accompany him. As soon as I arrived, I had to leave, because everything in that place smelled of petroleum. I could neither eat nor drink anything, because of those deposits [deposits of ozokerite, ‘mountain wax,’ as well as springs of natural mineral water with a high content of organic oil-derived compounds].

My parents were friends with the Fisch couple. The Fisches had two daughters. One was older than me and was called Fela, the other was younger and her name was Tusia. Fela was a black-eyed blonde. I, as you can see, am chestnut-haired by nature. The younger one, Tusia, had red hair and green eyes. We frequently went on summer vacation together. To keep each other company and not get bored, our mothers would arrange where to go on vacation every year together. Our two families, I mean. Tusia and Fela’s father was a businessman, but what his business was, I don’t know. If I remember correctly, we stayed in Skole, in a villa called Arkadia.

We had these dirndl dresses, with short, leg-of-mutton sleeves, tight here [at the waist], wide there [at the bottom]. All the dirndls were black, with flowers embroidered on a black background – I don’t remember who had flowers of what color. There were blue ones, red ones, and green ones, and to go with that a matching mini-apron. Yes, those aprons were the same color as the flowers. And I remember that when we appeared for the first time on the promenade, some boys we knew nicknamed us ‘the three graces from Arkadia.’

The tallest of those boys was named Kubus Rosenbaum. His uncle was called Probst and worked as a doctor in Skole, and Kubus would come to stay with him for the vacation from some other place, not a large one, where, if I’m not wrong, his father was a public notary. I also remember Marian Urich – not a relative of ours – and Edek Bertrand, I remember those boys. That Edek Bertrand was from Lwow, he was younger than me, and Marian Urich was a friend of Tusia’s. I also remember Jozef Grosskopf and Danuta Wilk. If the weather was good we’d spend the mornings by the river. The Opor and the Prut are mountain rivers, but you could always find somewhere to bathe. I remember that we played volleyball, too. After dinner we would go for walks, and then supper and to sleep.

My girl friend went to the Strzalkowska high school, and her name was Rena Ruker. Our parents knew each other. Perhaps they weren’t friends, but they knew each other well, and we met somewhere, sometime, during the summer vacation. After that, we’d almost always go together. Her father was the director of the Baczewski plant [famous vodka and liqueur manufacturer]. Those were the best vodkas in pre-war Poland. The plant was founded in 1782, and I remember the following anecdote: in some exam, the examiner wanted to direct the student to the right date, so he asks him, ‘And what does the year 1782 tell you?’ And the student says, ‘The founding of Baczewski.’

Another person I remember from Lwow is Stanislaw Lem 19. I knew him as a young boy. He is older than me. I knew the crowd to which he belonged. After the war, however, I had no contact with Lem whatsoever. I simply learned very late that Stanislaw Lem was that boy Manius I had known before the war. Yes. He lived on Brajerowska Street [now Lepkoho], near my high school, I even remember which house. Yes.

I remember one street demonstration in Lwow [see Workers’ demonstrations in Lwow in 1936] 20. It all started when a worker died and an order came to bury him at the Lyczakowski cemetery. The medical school was nearby, the dissection rooms, so I guess it was there [his autopsy was done]. In any case, there’s no doubt he was supposed to be buried at the Lyczakowski. There were two cemeteries in Lwow: the Lyczakowski and the Janowski. The Janowski one was, so to say, more proletarian. And those who were leading the funeral protest march suddenly decided to bury that worker at the Janowski, and so the demonstration marched through the whole city, because the cemeteries were at opposite ends. I remember that because as they marched they broke all the windows. And among other things they broke a window in the bank where my father worked. And it happened as the protesters wanted – he was buried at the Janowski. I, naturally, wasn’t watching that protest march, in fact, if anything was going off, no one would let me out of the house.

Neither in elementary school nor in high school did I ever come up against anti-Semitism. Absolutely never. I actually never even thought about it… I simply accepted the fact that there were different kinds of people. There was no problem for me, until around 1938 when there were riots in the universities and three students got killed [see Murders of Jewish students in Lwow 1938-1939] 21. I remember their names: Karol Celermajer, Marian Probeller, I don’t remember what the third one’s first name was, but his last name was Wasserberg or Wasserman.

The procedure was that the Polytechnic came to beat up [Jewish students] at the University, and the university students went to play hell at the Polytechnic. For instance, I mean. It wasn’t that students from one school would beat up students from the same school. They used clubs, clubs with razors. And as well, at the turn of October and November, but above all in November, some streets were out of bounds, because you’d get beaten up there. I don’t know why then. One such street, for instance, was Lozinskiego [now Hertzena], where a dormitory was located, only I don’t remember which school’s. The Polytechnic’s? Anyway, everyone knew that in November Lozinskiego and the end of Akademicka were out of bounds to Jews. And that was when I came up against the problem [of anti-Semitism] for the first time.

I passed my high school finals in May 1939. I must have taken Polish and math, but I simply don’t remember that! [Mrs. Wiener says she has repressed many memories concerning the war and the period immediately preceding it.] I wanted to study microbiology. And then it all somehow… [Mrs. Wiener passed the entrance exams for the microbiology faculty at the Jan Kazimierz University in 1939.]

My father kept saying there’d be a war. Above all – that’s my hypothesis – he came to believe in that war, in its inevitability, I mean, after the Germans had taken Czechoslovakia [see German occupation of Czechoslovakia] 22. Absolutely, because Austria, you know, it was Hitler’s homeland, a German-speaking country – so that was understandable. When, following the Anschluss 23, Hitler entered Vienna, he threw all the Jews who had Polish rather than Austrian citizenship out to Poland. Among them was my father’s cousin, and I remember that when that cousin came to Lwow, the whole family took care of him. And he kept missing his wife, who wasn’t a Jew, and his two children. She was an Austrian and had stayed with the children in Vienna. And he missed them terribly. That I remember. I don’t remember his name.

I didn’t think of the war as a real threat at all. Absolutely not. On 1st September [see September Campaign 1939] 24, it was Friday, I think, I was with a boy friend of mine at the High Castle. We were sitting on a kind of promontory, near the Sobieski Rock, we looked – there were airplanes coming. As we were looking at those planes, we thought we heard explosions, and came to the conclusion it was some military exercise, because it was the last days, you know. The army had been mobilized [on 30th August a general mobilization order had been announced and subsequently repealed, and on 31st August a mobilization order was announced again]. And at some point some people came up to us and say: ‘What are you doing here? There’re ruins in the city, corpses, and you’re sitting here like doves!’ And we ran [home] right away.

A strange thing. Believe me now, please, that all those years have been erased, that the period right after the war has also been erased from my memory. Oh yes. The war period, well, I won’t be talking about it. Nothing. I don’t want to return to… that period at all… those few years… it doesn’t exist [Editor’s note: Mrs. Wiener has mentioned a few facts that make it possible to a small degree to reconstruct her and her family’s wartime experiences]. I know it was a very harsh winter. That I remember, but when I think of Lwow, I only see the pre-war Lwow. The Lwow of the first few months after the end of military action… it’s all blurry. I never remember it the way I saw it during the war.

I remember that from 9th September we were sitting in a basement, because Lwow was not only being bombed from the air, it was being bombed from the very beginning, but it was also taking artillery fire. That I remember. We sat in that basement all the time, slept there. You climbed up to the apartment to cook something or to fetch something, but you didn’t stay there. And on the 17th my father must have been listening to the radio, because we had a radio – ‘It’s the end!’ He believed that if they [the Russians] were entering Lwow, then it was the end of the Polish state. We had already returned home, the shelling had ended, because for a couple of days they [the Russians] stood at one turnpike and the Germans at the other and some kind of negotiations were taking place – the city wasn’t being shelled anymore. Then, on the 21st, they marched into Lwow. There was a barricade made of stones, of flagstones, on our street, and the first tank that had arrived couldn’t go through. So they ordered the local inhabitants to dismantle the barricade and my father was among them, and because he knew Russian, he made some small talk with the tank driver. Then he returned and said, ‘Nothing has changed there. The same ragged uniforms, the same old rifles and stinking tobacco, only now they have oblasts instead of guberniyas [Russian for ‘districts’ (the Soviet and tsarist terms, respectively)].’

I remember that Grandfather [Jakub] got sick. My father was fired from his bank job. I remember a meeting of the bank’s trade union was held and everyone had to present his or her CV, and someone asked my father: ‘Why didn’t you say that you served in the Polish army?’ Father said, ‘I did,’ and the next day he was fired. And then Mr. Fisch, who was a very enterprising man, found some job for Father in some company, some cooperative that had already been created somewhere.

Grandfather’s tenement houses were nationalized immediately. We were allowed to stay, only Grandfather – because his was a large apartment – was assigned tenants, Russian civilians. A married couple. Uncle Maurycy was already living there too – he and his family had come from Cracow – but there was still excess space in the apartment. They didn’t assign us any extra tenants, because we had already taken in some fugitives from Cracow [see Flight eastwards, 1939] 25.

I left Lwow in 1941, when the Russians were still there. That was the last time I saw my parents. I didn’t say goodbye to them. Things were so that I couldn’t. It was… there were some circumstances… I spent the rest of the war in Russia. I was in Turkestan, in Kazakhstan. Turkestan is a city in Kazakhstan. Everyone mixes it up [thinking Turkestan was one of the Soviet republics] because the whole stretch of land was once called Turkestan. There was no Kazakhstan, no Uzbekistan, there was only Turkestan, and only later did the Soviets divide it up.

I worked as a nurse in an orphanage. I had no previous experience. I was trained. The only thing you could do there besides working was to read. I read a lot. In fact, where I was, in Turkestan, the only thing that was there was a superb city library which had been evacuated from Kharkov or Kiev. So I read there the whole of 19th-century French literature in Russian, let alone the fact that I also read the whole of Russian 19th-century literature in the original. I also learned Russian there – just from listening to it, from various situations, for after all, in Lwow I had nothing to do with Russian. Sure, I spoke Ukrainian, which was then called Ruthenian. I did, because some of our maids sang songs so that I was familiar with it and spoke the language, but after I found myself there, Russian supplanted Ukrainian to the extent that I understand today when Ukrainians speak but I can no longer speak it myself. There I met my husband, Maurycy Wiener, and there I got married. The wedding was non-religious. My husband was born on 1st October 1906 in Cracow. He took a law degree and before the war worked as a lawyer in Cracow.

It was from the radio that I learned the war was over. It wasn’t radio in our sense of the word, but rather a kind of loudspeaker everyone had at home, through which a central message was broadcast. It was like a disk, a black cardboard bowl, and in the centre a metal something. And that was the kind of radio that people in Russia had. It was Radio Moscow broadcast, the Moscow news. The device worked so that I couldn’t change the frequency but only turn it down or off. I saw some light in the tunnel that I would get myself out of Asia.

It was somewhere towards the end of 1945. Repatriation had started [see Evacuation of Poles from the USSR] 26, you had to register and prove you had Polish citizenship. I had an ID card. School ID. It so happened that in Turkestan, where we lived, there were no Poles, but I know that in other places there were. The entire Polish population was repatriated, only reportedly somewhere in Siberia, or somewhere far in the deserts, where people didn’t know, they stayed there.

We repatriated ourselves in due course with all the other pre-war Polish citizens. I was able to choose where I wanted to go. I wouldn’t have gone to Palestine at that time. After the Kazakh steppes, the only thing I wanted was a big city. In fact, I’m a city kid. I simply don’t see myself in the countryside or some Asian city. My husband, because he was a Cracovian, chose Cracow. I didn’t want to go to Lwow because it’s very hard to go back to your home town knowing that no door will open for you. That I have no one to go to. The only door that will open for me will be a hotel door. I really couldn’t understand my husband. For him it was unimportant. For me, it was everything. That our families were dead, that there had been an extermination of the Jews we learned only in Turkestan [in 1939, some 110,000 Jews lived in Lwow, 33% of the population; several thousand returned after the war from the Soviet Union]. I had never imagined anything of the sort.

From Kazakhstan to Poland we went by train. A cargo train. The train stopped only where it was allowed to, i.e. at large stations, sometimes waiting for a free track at some junction. The conditions? The conditions were such that when I came to Cracow and saw a streetcar, I touched it. For me, that tram was a symbol of civilization. The journey lasted from 17th or 18th April to 5th May. We arrived in Cracow-Plaszow on 5th May [1946].

As far as my family is concerned, Anna [Niuka, daughter of Toncia and granddaughter of Adolf], my second-degree cousin, her aunt Irena and myself are the only survivors of the Holocaust. From such a huge family. These two girls. I in Russia and she here, under the occupation, on false papers. Irena survived in Poland, but soon, right after the war ended, immigrated to Switzerland. She had a seriously ill daughter who could be helped only in Switzerland. Apart from her, my whole family perished. Without exception. I learned about their fate from Marysia Jodlowska, my childhood playmate. I had written letters to my grandparents’ address, to our own address, and so on, and those letters somehow found their way to her. And she wrote me back.

Cracow was my husband’s home, but his home as such didn’t exist because his parents were dead. My husband had only one brother, Juliusz, and he was the only one that survived. Juliusz served in the Anders’ army 27, he left Russia with it and never returned to Poland, immigrating right away to Palestine. My husband couldn’t return to his parents’ apartment [because it had already been occupied by someone else] but he had a cousin in Cracow who had come earlier and was already set up. We stayed with him. As my husband was a lawyer, a member of the Cracow bar, he immediately started working at a law firm and earning money.

I will admit honestly that after leaving Russia, the Soviets I mean, when I came to Poland, Cracow was a strange city to me. I had no full sense of returning to my homeland, because one has two homelands: the one meaning of the word ‘homeland’ is language, culture, history, and the other is the house where you lived, the street where your house stood, the commons where you strolled in Lwow. I was returning to my homeland in the broad sense, but everything was strange for me. And one has to have a sense of being at home. But that sense of strangeness soon wore off.

After returning from Russia, I wanted to study, but first I had to prove I had my high school diploma, which I ultimately reconstructed in court on the basis of evidence given by two of my former teachers. Halina Poeckhowa lived in Bytom. I went to see her. She still worked as a teacher. She later died of cancer. Wanda Ladniewska-Blankenheim lived in Paris. She sent her testimony in writing. I tried, I wanted to start studying in 1948, but it turned out I was pregnant and I had to postpone those plans. I delivered a boy – my son [Jerzy], I brought him up a little bit, and in 1952 I went to the Jagiellonian University 28. Yes. I chose the easiest option. Being fluent in Russian, I knew I’d easily pass the entrance exams. The fact that I had read so much Russian literature in Turkestan made my studying easier. I completed my studies in 1956 and immediately got a job at the [Jagiellonian University’s] Russian Philology Institute.

During my studies and even later, I lived a similar life to my parents before the war in Lwow. First, when I was studying, we had a classroom at Golebia Street, and the faculty where I worked after graduating was at Pilsudskiego [these streets are close to each other and close to Cracow’s Main Square]. And I’d walk downtown the normal way through the Square. Later, when I worked at the Collegium Paderevianum [the Jagiellonian University’s main philology building since 1964], my classes ended at roughly 1pm and instead of returning home, down Trzech Wieszczy Avenue, I went along Krupnicza. Then I would take Szewska to the Square, then Slawkowska to the Literacka café, and I knew that when I’d arrive there, at quarter or twenty past one, there’d be a table until half past two where my friends would be sitting. And they were. Marysia Buczynska among them. That was my early afternoon. Then I’d return home, my husband would return from the office, we’d have dinner. At first, my husband worked in an office at 51 or 52 Dluga, and then at 60 Grodzka. He was involved in all kinds of cases, both criminal and civil. In the evening, at seven or eight, we’d meet friends at the Europejska café or at Wierzynek [a restaurant in the Main Square]. Wierzynek was very fashionable in those days. That kind of life I led for a very long time, in fact for as long as I worked.

Soon after the war I met some of my friends from Lwow. I met a close girl friend of mine from high school, from the same class. She’s very sick now, here, in Cracow. She’s my only high school friend in Cracow, a person very close to me. Very, very close. She has changed her last name, and her first name too because [during the war] she lived on Aryan papers. She wasn’t my friend then, only a classmate. Her name was Adela. I don’t want to say any more, because I don’t know whether she would want it.

As far as my friends from my pre-war vacations in Skole are concerned, one who survived the war was Kubus Rosenbaum, whom I met in Frankfurt am Main. My husband’s cousin, who, as it turned out, knew Rosenbaum, also lived in Frankfurt. One day, in some conversation, my name was mentioned. The cousin told me later that Rosenbaum was very pleased to hear it, and said: ‘She was my friend from vacation.’ I don’t remember where he came from, but not from Lwow. And one time, when I went to visit that cousin, I met him – that was a surprise. Rosenbaum was married to a German girl, a pretty blonde. He died some eight or ten years ago. Another girl who lives in Frankfurt is Danuta Wilk. She is alive, but she is a vegetable, not a person. I met Jozef Grosskopf in 1957, when I visited Israel for the first time. He was an officer in the Israeli army. If I remember correctly, he spent the war in Russia. He told me he was in the escort that took Herzl’s 29 ashes from Vienna to Israel.

Rabbi Kahane from the Tempel I met twice after the war. He and his wife had been saved by Archbishop Szeptycki 30 [who hid them] in the vaults of the church of St. Yur [the Uniate cathedral church, called Lwow’s supreme church]. In fact, I have Rabbi Kahane’s account of this story somewhere, only it is in English, if I’m not mistaken, or in Hebrew, because I brought it back from Israel. In fact, Szeptycki also hid the daughter of Rabbi Jecheskiel Lewin, and I know that she survived too.

The first time I met Rabbi Kahane [after the war] was at the opening of the Auschwitz Museum [June 1947, opening of a permanent exhibition on the site of the former Auschwitz I camp, and thus of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum]. I was there with my husband. In fact, it was the first and last time I visited Auschwitz. Altars had been placed in front of the individual barracks, and priests of a dozen denominations were praying. When Kahane turned around, because he was standing with his back to the congregation, I suddenly recognized him and later approached him. We talked. The second and last time, I met him in 1957 in Israel. Each compatriot society 31 in Israel holds a hazkara [Heb.: commemoration] on the day of the destruction of the given community. It is a different date for each community. And while in Jerusalem I read in a Polish-language newspaper published there, which is called… [Nowiny Kurier; since 1992 the weekly Weekendowe Nowiny Kurier] that the Lwow hazkara was to be held the next day in Tel Aviv. I went, and when I entered the room, I suddenly heard exclamations: ‘It’s Janka!’, ‘It’s Janka!’ And I met my friends. He [Kahane] was leading the hazkara, praying. In fact, shortly after the war he had been the chief rabbi of the [communist] Polish Army, here in Poland. Then he left for Israel, and at the time when I was there, he was the rabbi of the Israeli air force. In Israel, yes. My teacher.

I can’t say how many times I’ve been to Israel. It wasn’t that often, but I simply never counted. I remember the first time, because it was the first time. It was 1957. Israel is a very beautiful country. Unfortunately, I couldn’t see everything because Jerusalem, for instance, was divided [ed. note. Jerusalem was divided ten years later, after the 1967 war]. But for me, it was above all a family trip. I wanted to meet my husband’s relatives. My husband’s brother, Juliusz, was a lawyer and public notary there. My husband’s two paternal uncles were still alive. Those uncles were living on state pensions, and they were very well-off people who had fled Germany before Hitler, or already under Hitler, at the beginning, and settled in Palestine long, long before the war. I don’t remember what their names were. They left large families, those uncles. One of my husband’s cousins, for instance, Aaron Wiener, is one of the few water management experts in the world. He designed the whole water management system in Israel.

And look, a blessing in disguise [the Hebrew classes at the Tarbut]. When I’m in Israel these days, when I arrive in Israel, after a few days I can understand what people say to me. I mean, I understand bits and pieces, but I’m not completely dumbstruck. I can still write my name [in Hebrew] today.

Our son, Jerzy, knew he was a Jew, but he wasn’t raised in any particularly religious way. To the extent that one time he asked his father: ‘Daddy, why did you marry such an ignoramus?’ So my husband asked him: ‘Why ignoramus?’ ‘Well, because mommy believes in God, so she’s an ignoramus.’ And there he received his first lesson in tolerance from his father: ‘Mom believes in God, I don’t, but look – we love each other and it isn’t a problem for us. And you will do as you like. When you grow up, you’ll understand, you’ll make a choice.’ My husband was a left-winger and had joined the PZPR 32. I never joined the party.

In 1967, Jerzy passed the entrance exams and was admitted to Cracow Polytechnic [now Cracow University of Technology], and then, two years later, he emigrated. To Sweden. He emigrated because of March [1968] [see Gomulka Campaign] 33. He had encountered no problems, but I simply realized that he could expect nothing here. Oh yes. There were very many of those youths, but those who there were, left. In fact, almost all of them. But I must say that I experienced no harassment whatsoever from the Jagiellonian University.

My initial reaction to March was one of incredulity. I couldn’t believe it even when I was seeing it with my very eyes… How did it go? ‘Zionists to Zion’? [One of the most popular propaganda slogans of the 1967-1968 anti-Semitic campaign in Poland.] I saw such banners. Yes, there were TV reports from various workers’ meetings, where those poor workers knew neither what the Zionists were nor what Siam was [the ignorance of the banners’ authors was such that the banners often read ‘Zionists to Siam’ – the words ‘Zion’ and ‘Siam’ are pronounced similarly in Polish]. Yes. So first there was incredulity, then anger, and finally indifference to everything that was happening here [in Poland].

If I go to Israel, I go there chiefly for family reasons, because very many of my husband’s relatives live there. And, of course, curiosity also, but I already visited all the interesting places when it was possible to do so. When it was still safe to do so. Otherwise, as far as the East is concerned, I want to visit neither the Middle East, nor the Far East, nor Africa. The only place I can go to is the Canary Islands, where I have been going for many years. Barring Israel and the Canaries, I took my last big trip in 1989. A year before my husband’s death we took a cruise through the Mediterranean Sea.

The history of my visits to Lwow starts with the fact that I didn’t want to go there at all. Really. I could have, but didn’t want to because I was afraid of it, but I dreamed about it, and all my friends who went there had the duty of photographing [for me] all those [family] houses and those various places in Lwow. And one time, it was 1980 or 1981, one of my colleagues went to Almatur [a student travel bureau] and it turned out they had five seats free on a bus trip for university students. And she booked those five seats. It was Monday, I had a class [with students] at the Collegium Paderevianum, she knocked on the door and said, ‘Janka, on Wednesday at 5am you’re going to Lwow.’ I got so agitated I had to dismiss the class. I couldn’t continue.

And so we went to Lwow. With a group of Theater Studies students. The first time I was there, I saw Lwow as a boorish place. That’s probably the best word for it. Simply boorish. I saw a poor, provincial city. Poor, impoverished, neglected, terrible. Cobbles dating back to Franz Joseph’s times. Besides, I was plagued by that peculiar smell, the smell that all Soviet cities have. Please don’t misunderstand me, I’m not a Russophobe, absolutely not, but their cities have this characteristic smell, when you enter a doorway or pass an open one. I don’t know whether it’s some disinfectant or something. Besides, when I looked into the doorways of the various houses in which my uncles or aunts had lived, remembering those beautiful, wonderful houses, the walls in all those doorways were painted to halfway up with this disgusting oil paint. And everything was completely run down, the whole downtown. That was my impression.

All the time I felt like a stranger. I didn’t feel it was my city, but one day, with one of my friends, we went to the High Castle. It was winter, and there, at the High Castle, with that beautiful white snow, something started to awaken, something closer… And then we’re walking down that High Castle, walking on foot, down Kurkowa Street [now Lysenko], which is rather steep – in fact, all streets in Lwow run either up or down. We’re walking and down there I see the building of the pre-war Karol Szajnocha high school. This is the high school that Stanislaw Lem commemorated in his ‘High Castle’ [1966; biographical novel on the writer’s childhood in Lwow]. And at that moment, when, walking down that snow-covered Kurkowa Street, I saw that high school building, it was the only moment when I lost my sense of reality. I thought: God, I’m in Lwow! I’m in Lwow!

And suddenly I’m trying to recall the image of Cracow, that, you know, I’m from Cracow… I’m only visiting this place. The reality is: I’m only visiting this place. I’m not here, I’m only visiting. And I’m trying to get this image of Cracow… and I can’t. I can’t focus my concentration enough to recall anything from there. And finally I saw the green-painted door of the house where I live in Cracow. It was the only image my memory managed to recall. Cracow was an empty sound, a name that signified nothing. It was that one and only moment, which lasted… I don’t know. A minute, two? Other than that, I knew all the time it wasn’t my city. And after that visit I completely lost the sense of longing for Lwow, it drifted away somewhere. Today, when I’m in Sweden [since 1991, Mrs. Wiener has been spending a couple of months each year in Sweden] or am traveling the world, I long only for Cracow. What makes you love a city are its people. Not the buildings. Only the people, and I knew that there were no doors that would open before me there. This is something that has finally ended, but it ended when I actually went to Lwow.

I kept telling myself that I wouldn’t go there [to her parents’ apartment] at all. I was walking around Lwow with those friends of mine, showing them the various historical buildings, churches, museums. Only one of them knew Lwow, but not as well as I did. And on the last-but-one day of our stay we were at the Sobieski Museum on the Main Square and at some point, looking at the various exhibits, I suddenly realized that on the next day I’d be leaving and would not have been there. And I said to them: ‘Listen, we’ll meet at the hotel.’ I left them and dashed off alone.

And then I went there for the first time. I knew that the house which we had lived in before the war had had the front, stairs, and interior design altered because during the war it had taken a direct shell hit. I approached, the front door was closed. The completely changed facade, the little balconies where they hadn’t been before… But the other house, where Grandfather had lived, was precisely as I remembered it… I will only look at the yard [I thought]. And I entered. The sycamores weren’t there, someone must have found them a nuisance. Wooden stairs led inside, which before the war had been regularly polished, covered always with a red carpet, I saw the golden hooks that used to hold it, still in place. The banister, also wooden, ending, like everything in Lwow, with a lion’s head. The lion’s head wasn’t there anymore, only a round knob. So many years, everything had changed. I put my hand on the knob and I don’t know, don’t remember the moment when I found myself on the first floor pressing the doorbell to my grandparents’ apartment. Those few seconds were simply lost. I don’t remember going up those stairs. In any case, I was woken up by the shrill sound of the doorbell. And then the door opens and a petite lady is standing in front of me, completely grey-haired. It was winter, February. Those Bulgarian sheepskin coats were in fashion then. I stood in that coat, a very nice one, brown, with a hood and white finish. It was clear I wasn’t from there, that I was a foreigner. She looks at me inquiringly.

‘I lived here before the war,’ I said, in Russian. I was a senior lecturer in Russian philology then. She says: ‘Come on in,’ and lets me into the hall, which is tiny and divided, and I remember that it was very large, taking a turn at one point like the letter L. The door ahead, to Grandfather’s former living room, was in place. I always remembered those rooms as very large, very high. And when I now found myself in that apartment, I was surprised to see they weren’t that very large or high at all. They were large, but not as huge as I remembered. I enter, some tall man is standing there, and my ears are all clogged up, as if I had plugged them with cotton wool – I didn’t hear what he said, only her reply: ‘She says she used to live here.’ The man helps me with my coat: sit down, please, and tells his wife to bring something to drink. She brought cognac, he poured it into a glass and says: drink, please. When I drank it, I, so to say… came to. And I say excuse me, but it wasn’t me who lived here, but my grandfather. He asks me: what was his name? Jakub Singer, I say. And I’m sitting facing the windows, and there used to be two windows there, and between them the balcony door. And I see only one window and the balcony door, and yet I remember two windows, for God’s sake, and I either said something to that effect or he saw my gaze fixed on those windows, and he goes: yes, yes, you aren’t wrong, this apartment was very large, it has been divided into three separate apartments. We moved a wall to make the other room larger. Our son lives there. And he asks me whether I want to see that part? No, I say, I don’t.

I don’t remember their name, but he told me he had been a doctor, head of a Russian military hospital. Before the war, at 39 [Skarbkowska Street], there stood a business college, I don’t remember what it was called, but a business college. On seizing Lwow in 1944 [27th July], the Russians set up a hospital there, and he sequestered the apartment next door for himself. My grandparents weren’t there, of course, because they were dead. A Polish family lived there named Sliwinski, and it was from them they sequestered a part of the apartment. Where did they [the doctor’s family] come from? What happened to that hospital?… It was probably wound up, and he retired. I don’t know. I wasn’t interested in that. He didn’t go into specifics about it, but he told me that I must have been aware of what had happened to the Lwow Jews. And he asked me whether I remembered the janitor. I said I remembered him very well, his name was Jodlowski, and he was a janitor in both of those two houses. And he says, ‘You know, I’m intrigued by the fact that his daughter went to college, and there were fees to pay…’ Yes, you know, my grandfather, the greedy capitalist, paid for that talented girl’s, the janitor’s daughter’s Ukrainian college. He told me then that Marysia had been arrested by the NKVD 34 for membership of the UPA [Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists] 35, and the whole Jodlowski family had been deported. I didn’t learn anything more. Besides, none of the [former] non-Jewish tenants were there, they had all repatriated to Poland. Where, what, how? I don’t know. I didn’t happen upon any trace of them.

We had gone to Lwow by bus, a brand-new university coach. When we were on our way back and we crossed the border, when we rode into Przemysl [some 15 km from the Ukrainian-Polish border], I felt like I was in Paris, and when we rode into Rzeszow [some 100 km from the Ukrainian-Polish border], I thought I was in New York. After Lwow.

I retired two years past my retirement age 60, i.e. in 1984, but I could have kept on working. I have very good memories of my professional career. Very nice. And, more importantly, my students do, too. My students are everywhere, they’re here, they’re in the West.

Since mid-January 1991 I have been living part of the year here, part of the year in Sweden. In December 1990 my husband died suddenly. My son had been urging us to move to Sweden even before that. Both me and my husband had already secured permanent stay permits. I’ve been here [in Cracow] for four months now, and soon I’m going to Sweden for two months, to Lund.

My son got married in Sweden, works as a dental surgeon and lives in Lund [a university town of approx. 100,000 some 10 km from Malmö]. He has two sons. They’re called Jerry and Edward, but we all call him Tedi. Tedi has just been admitted to a teacher training college but I don’t know whether he won’t change his mind, because he first wanted to be a pilot, then a sailor, and his interests aren’t really specified. Tedi understands a lot of Polish, but doesn’t speak it so well.

Jerry speaks Polish and is 35 today. He is a businessman and runs his own company. He has just… What day do we have today? Wednesday? Jerry was here Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Here in Cracow. He came with his colleagues. Jerry has a child, but no wife. My great-granddaughter is called Natalie and is 15 years old. They live together near Lund, in Steffanstorp.

My German has gradually been effaced by Swedish. Just as Russian earlier superseded my Ukrainian. I used to be fluent in German, and now, when me and a friend of mine were in Frankfurt last time, and I was buying something in a shop, at one point she gives me a nudge. I look at her, and she says, ‘You said the first sentence in German, but now you’re speaking Swedish.’

In 1991, it turned out that the son of Joachim, my grandmother Charlota’s brother, survived, lives in London, and is a university professor emeritus. First I read in ‘Tygodnik Powszechny’ [Catholic socio-cultural weekly published since 1945] that the Jurzykowski award [the award of the New York-based Alfred Jurzykowski Foundation for Polish artists and scientists] had gone to Professor Henryk Urich. I wasn’t sure it was the same Urich, but I wrote him a letter. In the letter, I stated a few facts that no one from outside the family could have known. Such as that his father was nicknamed Bolo, and his brother, Franciszek – Franz. He immediately wrote me back. He had no family, a childless bachelor. We started exchanging letters. Not very often, but, unfortunately, it so happened that his letter announcing his visit to Cracow arrived when I was away in Sweden. And we didn’t meet. I later called him and that has been it so far.

My cousin Niuka died three years ago in Stockholm. She visited me twice, I think, in Cracow, but when she was visiting Poland, it was usually Warsaw, because that’s where she had lived before settling in Sweden. She got married and took her husband’s surname, Sznap. Her son lives in Stockholm, has three kids. Her daughter has one son.

I am religious. Unlike my husband, who was an agnostic, I am deeply religious. There is no tradition at my home, but there’s this one prayer, called Kol Nidre [prayer recited in the synagogue at the beginning of the evening service on the Day of Atonement] and my son then has to take me to Malmö, because that day, that evening, I want to spend praying in the synagogue. That is mine… I believe that… not so much talk, because you can’t talk with God, but pray to God, or ask him for something, or speak to him – that you can do on your own, without intermediaries.

Three years ago my son gave me a surprise present – a trip to Lwow as a gift for my 80th birthday. I was told only a few days before departure. Everyone in Lund knew but no one had said a word. And everything was arranged perfectly. I went with my son and his wife. We spent three full days there, not counting the flight day. We went by plane, and returned by plane. And those three days were completely like a dream. But it wasn’t like during the first visit because, with my son at my one side and my daughter-in-law at the other, all my sensations, my feelings were somehow different. It was no longer me alone in confrontation with my memories, this time I was with my family.

Of course, we went to those houses, because my son wanted to see his roots. We entered my grandfather’s house, we’re walking up the stairs, and some young man of about 30 passes us and asks – because it’s clear again that we’re foreigners – to whom? My son tells him that his grandparents lived there, that we just want to look around, and the man says, ‘Yes, yes. I know about this. One heiress from Cracow has already been here.’ And my son says, ‘This is the lady from Cracow. We’re from Cracow.’ I don’t remember how that young man reacted to the ‘heiress,’ but he told us that the doctor and his wife had died, and now he had a studio there, because he was a painter. He led us into the apartment, not through the main door but through the porch to the kitchen. And when we were standing in the kitchen, my son asks me, ‘Mama, do you remember?’ And I say, ‘Yes, I remember everything, only, you know, this kitchen looked different, there was a huge tiled stove here with a top plate, and it’s gone. A gas cooker stood in that place. And the door from the kitchen,’ I went on –it was closed – ‘led to the dining room, and on the right when you entered, that was a closet in the wall, wallpapered, with an iron door, and on the lower shelf there always stood tins of cookies.’ And the painter said that the door was gone, but the closet was still there, and so were the shelves. He opened the door, we entered, and indeed, and I looked and saw that the shelf was really low, and I remembered that I had had to stand on my toes to reach for those boxes – the memories of a little girl! A two, three-year-old one.

That visit three years ago with my son and daughter-in-law was a completely different story. It was like when you go as a tourist to visit Florence or some other beautiful city. My son was enthusiastic. He said he hadn’t imagined it was such a beautiful city. And now, when I picture [the old] Lwow in my mind, I see a smiling, beautiful, joyous city, beautifully illuminated in the night. When it rained, the wet sidewalks reflected the illuminated shop windows of the high streets, with elegant stores, well-dressed, smiling, pleasant people, because it was a unique city and the people were unique too. Pleasant to each other. Please show me another city where people on the streets smile at each other. Such a city it was, but it’s gone now.

Glossary