Rosa Kaiserman

Botosani, Romania
Interviewed in Botosani in 2007 by Major Emoke

“Calling names like that—it was awful.”

It was the late 1930s and I smelled that something was against us. I was too young to realize it, but I remember one thing: I usually got from my parents one or two lei [local currency] to buy myself a pretzel on my way to school. At the street corner there was always man with a basket covered with white cloth – he would sell pretzels to the children. One day the schoolmistress came into our class and I remember what she said: ‘Children, don’t buy any pretzels from that kike at the corner. I organized here for you a buffet, please buy only from the buffet.’

I didn’t know at that time what ‘kike’ meant, but I felt insulted. I asked myself: why? I was educated to be friends with everybody and to respect other religions, even if I had another religion. And still, what the schoolmistress Teodorescu said that day in school I remember even today.

Afterwards I still bought pretzels from the same man at the street corner. I mean, she could have said it differently, something along the lines of: ’Those pretzels from that man are dirty, please buy from us, because they are…’ But she used the word ‘kike,’ and that’s what I remember. This was in the third or fourth grade of elementary school. Calling names like that—it was awful.

Rosa Kaiserman remained in Iasi, a large Romanian city that had a prewar population of 55,000 Jews out of a total population of 90,000. She was in hiding during the infamous Iasi pogrom of June 1941, when approximately 12,000 Jews of the city were murdered by Romanian and German soldiers.

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