Ruth and Abe Fejtlowitz

This is a studio portrait of my aunt, Ruth Biber, and her husband, Abe Fejtlowitz. It is actually their wedding picture, taken in 1923 in the USA. I think my mother brought it from the USA in the 1960s.

My mother’s family comes from Lodz. Mother’s name was Maria Biber. She was born on 25th March 1899 in Lodz. She had lots of siblings: three sisters and two brothers: Sala, Hela, Ruta, Leon and Motek.

There were six children altogether. I knew all my aunts, except Ruta, and uncles. My mother’s father died young and her mother died in 1919. The children were left on their own.

In the United States there lived an aunt of my mother’s, who had several children. She decided that since there were all these orphans left behind, she would take one of the children to live with her. And my mother was supposed to be the one to go.

But she wrote to her aunt saying that she couldn’t go to the States, because she had already given her word to a man, her future husband, and so she couldn’t do it. As a result, it was my mother’s younger sister Ruta who went to the USA in 1919.

Ruta survived the war, because in 1919 she had gone off to the United States. There she married Aba Fejtlowitz. They had two sons, Daniel and Harvey. My mother went to the States in 1959 – she saw her sister Ruta for the first time in 40 years then.

After that Aunt Ruta came to visit us a few times. She liked it in Poland very much. She especially enjoyed taking trams – she was very pleased that when she got on a tram, people would give up their seats for her.

She did not know this custom from the States. She used to bring toilet paper with her; she probably thought Poland was terribly backwards and there isn’t enough toilet paper. Aunt Ruta died in 1981, during martial law.