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Manin Rudich
Brasov
Romania
Interviewer: Andreea Laptes
Date of interview: May 2003

Mr. Rudich is a 71-year-old man, but he looks much younger than his age. He is in good shape, wears glasses and dresses rather well. He lives in a two- bedroom apartment in a house; the place is spacious, with nice furniture, and very sunny. He doesn't have problems communicating, he is a very talkative person, and very hospitable. He keeps repeating the phrase 'You understand me?', as though he wants to make himself absolutely understood. He talks with a lot of pathos about his life, and sometimes it is hard to interrupt him. He is especially passionate about the Holocaust period, but when he remembers it, he doesn't seem to be in pain. It is like the child he was back then has survived and retells the story, as if it had been some kind of childhood adventure.

I never knew my paternal grandparents, I only know that they died when my father was very young and still in school, about 15 years old, sometime in the 1910s. My father had a younger brother, Samuel Rudich, who was some sort of shopkeeper, I think. He was married and had a son, Izu Rudich. He died in Transnistria 1.

My maternal grandparents also died before I was born, in the 1920s. My maternal grandfather, Mose Weiselberg, had run the shop my parents inherited later. I remember I saw photos of him and my grandmother Weiselberg; I don't remember her first or maiden name. He had a long white beard and she wore a kerchief, but they weren't dressed traditionally. My mother had ten siblings, two sisters and eight brothers, but I didn't know them all. I know one brother was married and went to Peru. However, he was married and they had three sons here in Cuciurul Mare, all about my age. When their mother died, he came back for them and took them with him, in 1939. They became diamond polishers. Another brother left for the USA, married there, and had two children, a son and a daughter. They wrote a bit right after the war, but after a while we lost contact. Both his children studied medicine, and the boy became a military doctor. One of my mother's sisters, Cecilia - we called her Tili - was married and had two children, Leopold, whom we always called Poldi, and another boy we used to call Ficicu. Her husband left for the USA, and was on the Struma ship 2. Cecilia was shot in front of her house along with her son Ficicu, and one of her brothers, Bubi Weiselberg, in 1941. Bubi was the youngest of my mother's brothers and sisters. Her other sister, Roza, was married to Iosif Glaubach and had two children, Izu Glaubach and Clara Beraru, nee Glaubach.

My father, Iacob Rudich, was born in Cernauti in 1900. He spoke Yiddish, Romanian and German, and also some Ukrainian. When he was young he had worked as a clerk for a lumber station, and he had to come and work in Cuciurul Mare. He used to come to the shop my maternal grandparents kept, and that's how he met my mother, Gusta Rudich, nee Weiselberg. She was born in Cernauti in 1907 and spoke Yiddish, Romanian and German. They married in the synagogue, but I don't know exactly when. My father started to run the shop, along with my mother. He wasn't fanatical as far as religion was concerned, but every morning he put on his tefillin and tallit and prayed, and he went to the synagogue every Saturday. My mother was rather religious: she lit candles every Friday evening; on Sabbath the shop was closed and all the family went to the synagogue. All food was kosher and she kept separate pots for dairy and for meat products.

My father had been in the Romanian army during World War I. He told us he had traveled a lot, he had been in Czechoslovakia and in Italy, where people used to eat cats. But he didn't talk much about the war; they weren't things for a child to hear, I assume.

My elder sister, Rozalia Adler, nee Rudich, was born in 1927 and I was born in Cuciurul Mare in 1932. We had a good financial situation; I don't remember ever being in need of food or clothes. We lived in a house with two bedrooms, a large living room and a kitchen. I slept with my parents in one room, and my sister slept alone in the smaller room. The shop was in the house as well, in a separate large room: it had two big windows and a door for the customers to enter. It was a big, big room with a counter and all sorts of merchandise on shelves, and it had a cellar as well, for wine because there were no refrigerators back then. We entered the house through the courtyard, which was rather big. We had no running water or electricity, but we had oil lamps and a fountain in the courtyard. There were some nut trees and plum trees in the yard as well. A Christian woman came with her husband to take care of the garden: they delved, sowed and hoed. They didn't live in the same house with us, they just came and went. We also bred poultry, ducks and hens. I don't think my parents often went to the market, since we had what we needed in the garden, but they went to different warehouses to buy merchandise for the shop. They had a shopping list with them all the time.

They used to go to Cernauti with the cart, and I accompanied them two or three times. I remember one of those times, when my parents took me and my sister to Cernauti to eat out in a restaurant because it was kosher. The restaurant was somewhere in the basement of a building, and we ate there. But we never ate out unless the food was kosher. My parents were very generous to us, kids: whenever they went to Cernauti to buy merchandise they bought something sweet for us, the kids. They never came home empty- handed! As far as I know, my parents never went away on a holiday.

We didn't keep books in the house, except for religious ones, but I think my parents read newspapers because they knew what was going on in the world. They never advised my sister or me what to read, but they took us to cheder. Back then, both boys and girls went to cheder; it was normal. There was an old Jew, who was our neighbor and gave cheder classes in his house.

On Sabbath we didn't cook, and during the winter a woman came and lit the fire. My mother cooked challah on the day before, on Friday evening. The shop was closed, nobody in the family worked, but otherwise it was a regular day. We, kids, had to go to school on Saturday, we couldn't skip classes. I studied with my father very rarely.

On the high holidays we went to the synagogue with our parents, we listened to the prayer, came home, ate, rested, and in the evening we went back to the synagogue. As a kid, I loved all holidays because I didn't have to go to school. We could play in the synagogue's courtyard; we were too small and my parents didn't force us to listen to all the prayers, they let us out to play and came to check on us from time to time.

On Purim my mother used to send us to friends and family members with shelakhmones. We tried to disguise ourselves by dressing like a peasant, or in an even funnier way. I remember me and my sister went to an aunt in disguise, and the dog recognized us and jumped onto us; we were so annoyed that the dog gave us away. My aunt said that she hadn't recognized us, but of course she had, she just said so to cheer us up. On Chanukkah my parents always gave us Chanukkah gelt, and we lit the chanukkiyah at home. I did it when I got older, and my father said the blessing.

On Pesach we, the children, received gifts like new sandals or new boots. But my parents gave us small gifts all the time, like sweets, candy, or some chocolate. My father said the kiddush, the prayer, and we ate. On seder I asked the mah nishtanah and I also looked for the afikoman. But we kept it simple, compared to what I have seen others do nowadays: I saw Jews from Israel who were visiting Brasov with beards, payes and tallit coming to the prayer and then dancing and singing in the street... you don't see this here in the community of Brasov. And we never built a sukkah on Sukkot; we weren't religious to that extent.

My family got along well with the neighbors, most of whom were Christians. The Jews lived a bit further from where our house was. I don't think they were close friends with their neighbors, but they had good relations, and my father gave them merchandise on credit. Relatives often came to visit, and we also visited them. I remember my mother's sister, Roza, who moved to Radauti after the war and had two children, Izu, a boy of my age, and Clara, a daughter younger than me. They lived in a different neighborhood and went to a different school, but on Saturdays my parents told us to stay home because Izu and Clara would come, or they sent us over to their house. There was also the chief of the railway station, a Romanian, who visited us a lot. He used to call me a Bolshevik, I don't know why. My mother didn't know what that was either, only later, when the Russians came, she said, 'I haven't known till now what a Bolshevik is. Now I know!' On Christian holidays, my father always sent packages with gifts to the mayor, the prefect, the chief of the police. All Jews did that, not just my father. But they, the Christians, respected our holidays as well. We were closed on Saturdays, we had a special approval from the city hall, I think. We were open on Sundays though. They used to greet and wish us happy holidays. The world was more civilized then, and Cernauti had been under Austro-Hungarian rule for a long time. It was a different education.

I didn't go to kindergarten when I was little; my mother took care of me. I also had my sister to play with, and I was mostly in the garden, playing with the dog or with the chickens. I never actually studied with my father, although he explained a lot of things to us; but it was mainly my mother who told us stories about Esther and the exodus from Egypt. For us, as kids, it was a miracle how Moses managed to part the waters with just a stick.

I went to the regular state school when I was seven; it was compulsory to go. I got along well with my classmates. We would meet on the way to school - all the boys from my neighborhood - because someone had a gander and let it loose. We were afraid of it because it pinched. I had no problems in school, but I remember the teacher slapped me with the ruler over my palm one time - I don't remember why, but I probably deserved it. My sister was also in school, in a higher grade, and she studied Orthodox Christian religion with Gica Petrescu. [Gica Petrescu is a well-known Romanian singer.] We got along very well, me and my sister; she helped me with my homework until we were deported. I didn't like mathematics then, and I didn't like it later, in high school, either. I was more fond of literature. My cousin Izu had a problem in school. The teacher pulled him by the side whiskers and said, 'You Jew, I will thrash you so badly you won't know your own name anymore!' My uncle was very upset, and he went to speak with the principal, and the teacher was sent away. He was a rather influential person, my uncle; he had a restaurant and many good relations.

I made friends with everybody in school, Jew or not. We, the boys, would play football in a clearing with a stocking we filled with rags. I don't remember the names of my friends back then; it was a long time ago.

When I was in the first class in school the teacher took us to Cernauti, to the railway station: King Carol 3 and his son, King Michael 4, were coming. We were dressed as watchmen [see Strajer] 5; it was compulsory. I was right near the red carpet, and we were singing 'Long Live the King', which was the national anthem back then. I stopped singing at one point, and the teacher pulled me by the side whiskers: 'Sing!', she said. Michael was also in a watchman's uniform. He was older than us, and he stuck his tongue out at us. After that they got into a carriage and drove away.

Once, in the late 1930s, when I was already in school, I went to see a movie with my parents in Cernauti. I was so scared, I cried all the time! We were sitting in the front of the theater, and I had the impression that all the carts and horses on the screen were really coming into the room.

Cernauti was a beautiful town, and there were a lot of Jews. I don't know how many, but there were two beautiful synagogues. In Cuciurul Mare, where we lived, there were also two, but not as big as the ones in Cernauti, where one was for those who were well-off, and one for the poor Jews. There was a shochet and a chazzan in Cuciurul Mare, and we had a cheder, but we had no rabbi and no mikveh. An old Jew was teaching at cheder. I remember he had a stick he used on us sometimes. I went to the mikhveh in Cernauti once or twice, and I remember going there with my father, and sitting on benches. We had to pour water on ourselves, and use some small branches with leaves on them for our backs.

I remember my father went to see the rabbi in Cernauti. He needed advice because a Christian had opened a store across the street, and our business was going worse because most Christians would go shop there. And the rabbi told my father, 'Go home and be patient. He will mess up his business himself with his problems.' And so it was: he started drinking and in the end the shop was closed down.

All the Jews in Cuciurul Mare met in the synagogue on Saturdays and on the high holidays. They lived everywhere in the city, and many were watchmakers, jewelers, barbers or tailors; they had easy jobs. I remember the father of a friend of mine who was a tinsmith. His son, my friend Walter Beno, lives in Australia now and we still keep in touch.

Before World War II started, there were many Jews brought to our town from Transylvania; this was back in 1939 or 1940. One could feel the war approaching, and there were all these Jews who had to dig up trenches. They were forced laborers, brought by the Romanian authorities I think. They lived in some barracks, but they could say their morning prayers, and I remember some of them paid not to be forced to work on Saturdays. Some of them, not all, wanted to eat kosher food, and they ate in our house and paid us for it. My mother couldn't understand a word they said: they spoke mainly Hungarian, but some spoke Yiddish as well, so they understood each other.

I remember the flight of the Poles; there were many who came our way, to Cernauti or Cuciurul Mare. Some of them even settled here. There was a Polish family with two children who rented a house near ours. I don't remember their names, but I remember that he was a handicraftsman. It was easy to make contact with them: Polish people spoke German very well, and so did I; and children always relate very easily to other children, even if they don't know the language. I learnt a few Polish words from them, like 'pan polski' [mister Pole], and some others I can't remember right now. In our house, my parents were discussing the invasion of Poland 6, or the arson of the temple in Germany [Editor's note: the interviewee is probably referring to the Berlin Great Synagogue being in flames on Kristallnacht]. They said it was bad news, that they killed Jews. But I, a child, didn't fully understand the threat of those events.

My parents weren't politically involved, but they went to vote when there were elections. I remember that before election days, my father told my mother that they would have to get up very early the next day, so that they could vote before the brawlers appeared. They were back before we, kids, were up. They never had problems with voting, as far as I know, but I remember they used to say - they probably exaggerated for us, kids - that when you went into the booth to vote, someone was looking over the booth wall and marked your coat with chalk if you didn't vote for the National Peasants' Party 7. Their supporters were usually causing rows, and my parents said that if you had that mark they would hit you on your way out.

When I was in the third class of elementary school, the Russians came to Cuciurul Mare. I still remember the day I first saw them, in the summer of 1940. They came during the night, and took over our courtyard with their carts and horses. There was this silly hearsay, especially among kids, that Russians had a horn on their foreheads. And my mother came to wake me up and told me, 'You know, it's not true Russians have horns. Don't be frightened, they are in our courtyard!' But I was frightened. Then I went to the window and saw they were normal people. The story with the horn was because of the fur caps the Russian soldiers wore in winter.

They took over Bukovina, Bessarabia 8 and Cernauti. They immediately imposed Russian in schools, so half of that year I studied in Russian. I can't say it didn't help later: when we were deported, I could already read in Russian. A lot of people, like the mayor and other functionaries, ran away with carts, with what they could take along, and I remember the mayor came to our house and asked my parents to store a trunk for him, until he came back. The trunk was closed, and we didn't look what was inside. He came back in 1941, before we were deported, and took it back. He opened the lock, and I saw there were papers, files, and stamps. He said everything was alright and thanked my father.

Our family wasn't affected by the anti-Jewish laws in Romania 9, and neither was the shop. I think that, if it hadn't been for the Russian occupation in 1940, we would have never been deported. Some young men, like my cousin Leopold, welcomed the Russians, and wore red buttons on his coat; he thought Russians were a marvel. And when the Russians retreated, some of the older boys, like my cousin, who was ten years older than me, left with them. And everything was perceived as if we, the Jews, had brought the Russians, and that's why the Romanian authorities deported us.

In 1941, I remember it was afternoon, a neighbor came to us hastily and said that the German troops that entered the village, had shot my aunt Cecilia, her son Ficicu and my uncle Bubi, and told us to hide in his house. We did so. We ran out of our house with our clothes on and nothing else. After a while he came inside as well and told us that our Christian neighbors had started robbing our house. One took our counterpane, one other things... And this neighbor, who came to us - I don't remember his name - had a house with a garden, and we heard that they were shooting other Jews as well, so we, the whole family, hid there, in the garden, under some berry bushes, and we slept there, on some blankets, all night.

In the morning we heard that all Jews were asked to come to the city hall, to have their names taken down, and the Romanian authorities promised that nothing would happen to them on the way. So we went to the city hall, and in the courtyard there were already lots of people: you had to go to a clerk, who put your name down on a list. We all had to sleep in the courtyard, on the ground, till the next morning. Then another official came and said, 'Whoever wants to abandon their religion and become a Christian, let them come inside, and they will be released at once and will be free to go wherever they please!' There was one family - they had a son - who accepted immediately. My parents knew them, and I remember they were cursing them.

The rest of us had to fall into line and march all the way to Transnistria. We had no time to take anything with us. It was the end of June or the beginning of July, but it was already getting cold. At night we slept in the field, no matter where we were, and in the morning, when we woke up, they were counting the dead: one, two, three... We were escorted by Romanian gendarmes; some of them let us bury the Jewish deportees who had died during the night and say a prayer, others just buried them quickly and rushed us on. There were people and people, even among them. I remember once or twice, when there was cold rain, the gendarme said, 'Just so that you won't say we're accursed people...' and they let us sleep in the barn of some peasants, on straw. It was terrible and crowded, but it was better than outside. We got one slice of bread all day, and that was it; we only stopped for water at fountains. We walked for almost three months, it was already fall, September, when we reached Snitkov. [Snitkov was a small camp in Transnistria.] Many Jews were left behind in Mohilev-Podolsk 10, but we were taken to Snitkov. We had reached Snitkov only a few days before they brought that family as well; the one that had abandoned Judaism.

Snitkov was a ghetto. And it happened in the fall of 1941, that one morning I got out underneath the barbed wire and went to beg in town. I was on the outskirts of Snitkov, and I went to a house. It belonged to a Ukrainian woman, and I asked her for something to eat. She asked me to come in. I was afraid at first, but then I did. She warmed a mug of milk and gave me a slice of bread, and then I started crying and I couldn't stop. And she comforted me. She wrapped some bread and some cheese in a newspaper. I spoke Ukrainian because I was from Cernauti. And she told me to be careful not to be caught and asked me to come back. Her name was Irina Petrovna, and her husband was at the front - a huge Russian, she showed me photos of him. She had a small boy, three years old I think he was. I went back to my parents, who were scared because they didn't know where I had been, and gave them the food. It was a true joy for them; in the ghetto we only got to eat a piece of pea-flour mush, the size of half a brick, and that was all our food for one day. The food was very bad.

I told my parents I would go back to that woman because she asked me to, but they said, 'No'. They feared I would be caught. But I went anyway. The winter was drawing close, so she took a padded coat that belonged to her husband and cut its sleeves, and gave it to me, along with a pair of big rubber boots, and some food. And again she told me to return. I went back only one time after that because in the winter of 1941 I fell ill with typhoid fever. It was a very hard winter, I remember the sacrifices my parents made for me: they didn't eat so that I could have something to eat. My mother was crying because she couldn't help me more. I wasn't afraid of dying, I had seen death one too many times and I knew it didn't hurt, people mostly died silently. But I was lucky, my days weren't over yet.

In the meantime Irina had found out my name, came to the ghetto, bribed the sentry and showed him what she brought into the ghetto. She came weekly, and she brought milk, food; it was unbelievable. Other Ukrainians were very mean, especially to Jews. Thanks to her, I recovered and when spring came, I went back to her. She offered me some work - to graze her cow - and I accepted. Many people went out of the ghetto to work. There was a list at the entrance and on that list there was also my name, a nine-year-old child! I went to graze cows with some six or seven Ukrainian boys, and Irina asked them not to say anything about me if a patrol should come along. Indeed, we became friends. We met a patrol once, and they shouted, 'Deutsch? Deutsch?'[German, German?] But we all shrugged our shoulders. Then they said, 'Partisan?' - there was a forest nearby where they thought partisans were hiding. But we didn't say a word, and they left saying, 'Ach, Scheisse!' [Oh, shit].

The colonel of the military unit in Snitkov - Lange was his name - asked which one of us spoke German and Ukrainian. My father knew Ukrainian and he had also studied German in school, so he became a translator for the colonel, and my mother was a cleaning woman for the offices because she was considered trustworthy with her husband working as a translator. It was better than what the others had, at least we got some extra bread there. The others had to go to work; there were a lot of bombed houses and they had to clean and gather materials.

One night, when the colonel was away, the SS-officers gathered all the Jews and took them to a place, where a common grave had already been dug. They started selecting us - the old and the very young were to be shot, and the young and strong were to be sent to work. I was sent to the children's row, to the ones to be shot, and my sister was sent to the other. And I say, it was a miracle, you could find kind humans among the Germans as well, because the colonel [Lange] had meanwhile come back and talked to the SS- officer. He said that he needed a translator, that it was impossible to manage without my father, and that he needed his children as well because they were sent to gather information about the partisans, and so on. I didn't hear him word for word, I was too far away, but my father told me later. I just saw my father waving at me and calling me to join them; in the row of people who were going to live. So the colonel took us all back.

On the way back, we heard tractors, but only later we understood why, somebody told us: those tractors, usually used to plough, were let to run in order to cover the noise of the shots and to hide the mass grave. In the whole ghetto, the only Jews left were us. The colonel took us to live in a house, and after three days he came and talked to my mother and father. He said, 'I will not be able to protect you much longer. We will leave with the front and I cannot guarantee that you'll make it.' And he went on, 'Are you Romanian citizens?' My father said we were. 'Then I will take you over to the Romanian side.' The ghetto was split in two parts, and the colonel took us to Copaigorod, to the Romanian side. [Copaigrod was a ghetto in Transnistria.] He talked to the Romanian commander, who, as you can imagine, was scared of a German officer, who ordered, 'These people will get a house, and I will come to check on them. If something happens or if they aren't happy, I will send you to the front.' And my father was the one to translate all this to the Romanian officer, who was shaking! But he did what he was ordered to do. The colonel didn't do us much good, although he wanted to. The Romanians put us in the ghetto, where indeed, we had a nice house, but all the other Jews were afraid of us; they thought we were spies.

I remember we were also in a place called Shargorod 11, but only briefly; it might have been that place where they dug the common grave, I'm not sure.

We were on the Romanian side, in the spring of 1944 - it was April, I think - when a Russian armored car with the red star on it appeared, and a big fat Russian woman looked out through the cock-pit and shouted, 'Comrades, liberation!'. Some among us said we should open the gate of the ghetto and get rid of the barbed wire. Others were afraid; they said you never know what would happen. And the armored car left, and for three days nobody, neither the Germans nor the Russians, came. Everybody in the ghetto stayed behind the barbed wire and was afraid to go out. All the sentries were gone and the men who usually went out of the ghetto for work didn't go anymore: you never knew whom you would meet. They were afraid of getting shot.

I left the ghetto with a cousin of mine, to gather firewood, somewhere near some bombed houses, and some Romanian soldiers caught us and beat us both. I took the most of the beating. They threw us to the ground, my cousin over me, and they beat us with the belt, and it had an iron buckle. My cousin was twisting and turning, and the buckle hit me almost most of the time. It was some beating, I can tell you! After a while they let us go. I couldn't sit up for a few days.

The Ukrainian woman who had helped me, Irina, came to the gates of the ghetto and told us to stay still because the Soviet army was drawing near; it was just a few kilometers away. The first to arrive were the Cossacks 12 on horseback; lots of them. They dismounted, and their commander ordered to remove the barbed wire, and people braced up and came out. Then trucks started coming, and my father went up to them and talked to the people, and we rode with the front. It was the first time I was in a car. I remember it was very weird for me to see the bow of the car moving before we actually did. They fed us as well. I said goodbye to Irina. She gave me a loaf of bread for the road. I wrote to her when we got home, but I never received an answer.

When we came back to Cuciurul Mare in 1944, we just found wasteland: our house had been demolished. But we had a surprise: the school's principal, Cimbru, had saved from our house the only thing he could and brought it to my father. It was the book into which my father had written all his debtors; the people he had given merchandise on credit. And shortly afterwards a neighbor came and told my father he owed him money from before the deportation. He gave my father rubles - Cernauti and Cuciurul Mare were already Russian territories by then. My father told this neighbor who else owed him money, and word spread around. People came and brought the money they owed. They knew we were poor now; and we had been very well respected in Cuciurul Mare before the war.

I was twelve years old when I came back from Transnistria, and I studied two more years in Russian, because Cuciurul Mare was under Russian rule by then. In these two years we spent in Cuciurul Mare, my father was a supervisor in a food warehouse; he distributed food to different shops. My mother had suffered from frostbite, especially on her legs. She was a housewife.

We were still in Cuciurul Mare, I remember I was 14, and it was the first and only time when my father slapped me. He caught me smoking corn silk rolled up in paper with some other boys. I took a few puffs and got sick, when my father appeared out of nowhere. And I have smoked for more than 36 years of my life, but I have never smoked in front of my parents. Even though they knew I smoked because when I was in the army they sent me packages with cigarettes in them as well. I remember later, when we were in Brasov, I was smoking in the street with some friends of mine when we met my father. I hid my cigarette in my left hand, and it was burning me, but I didn't say a thing. I shook hands and talked for a while with him and his friends.

We stayed in Cuciurul Mare until March 1946, when the Russian authorities announced that everybody who had been deported and was a Romanian citizen could emigrate to Romania. Almost everybody left; at least us, who had been deported, knew what Ukraine was like, and we realized that Cuciurul Mare would become the same thing.

I was already here, in Brasov, when the state of Israel was born. We went to our synagogue, to the Neolog 13 one: everybody was in the courtyard; there were so many people singing and celebrating! We also went to the Orthodox synagogue because some of my friends' parents were Orthodox: there was also dancing, but there were two separate ring dances; one for women and one for men. And they served beer and nuts, I don't know why, probably somebody had a stock kept away somewhere and took it out to celebrate. Over at the Neolog synagogue, we had cookies and sweets. The women had prepared them beforehand, they probably knew of the birth of Israel before. And we celebrated far into the night. Later, I was upset to hear about the wars in Israel. Luckily, I didn't have any relatives in Israel back then; that would have been worse.

I never thought of emigrating, I considered it was too difficult, and so did the rest of the family. When we got to Brasov, some of our acquaintances from there left for Israel, but they had to stay in Cyprus first for a probation period and then pass the border to Israel illegally. We had a family council, and my father said, 'We already started from scratch after the camp [in Transnistria], I don't think I have the strength to start all over again.' So he worked as a shift supervisor in a food shop. He worked there from 1946 until he retired in 1960.

When we moved to Brasov, I was 14 years old and I hadn't had my bar mitzvah. There were three or four other boys, from all over the country, in the same situation, some older than me, and we got Rabbi Deutsch's approval to have our bar mitzvah in the synagogue, all at once, because we had been deported. We had our bar mitzvah in the Neolog synagogue.

There was a Jewish teacher, who had been deported to Transnistria as well, and he moved to Brasov, too; that's where we met. He tutored me, along with others, for the seven grades examination that you needed back then to pass to start high school. I studied with him in his house for two and a half years, and then I took my seven grade graduation diploma here, in Brasov. It was easier in high school, there wasn't so much to catch up with once I got there. I made friends easily and with everybody. One of our favorite hobbies was to collect the little keys in the Nivea boxes; when we found one, we fought for it. For I don't remember how many thousand keys you got a football - which we got - and for tens of thousands you got a bike, but I don't know if anybody got that one. If you only had a few keys, you would get a soap or a toothpaste. The prizes were handed over at the gate of the factory here, in Brasov.

I went camping with colleagues of mine when I was in the last year of high school, in the 10th grade, to Slanic Moldova, and to Costinesti. [Slanic Moldova is a spa in Moldova and Costinesti a Romanian resort at the Black Sea.] We were there with some of our teachers. Back then Costinesti was more of a village, and we slept in rented rooms; six boys in one room because we didn't want to be separated. We slept on the floor, only on straw and sheets, and cooked ourselves in the courtyard, but it was very nice.

We had sports classes in high school, but I also played football in the team of the Jewish community here, in Brasov. The team's name was Hacua, and I and other boys, like Gut, a friend of mine, were playing in the junior team; I was 17 then, I think. The team may have belonged to a Jewish organization, but I don't know for sure. There was also a senior team that was playing some championships, but it was too long ago for me to remember exactly.

After high school I started working at Carpatex textile factory. That was in 1951 and I worked there until I retired in 1990. I had no problems at work for being Jewish. There was another Jew working there, Weinberg, the technical director. When we had to attend meetings, he was the one to make the report on the nationalities present. He always used to say, '80% Romanians, 10% Hungarians, 8% Saxons and 2% others.' The two per cent others were actually the two of us, him and me, and he always giggled and gave me a nudge when he said that.

I joined the Communist Party because I didn't have a choice, although I had no political convictions. The director of the factory summoned me one day, and told me that Staicu, a colleague of mine, was retiring. I knew it already, I worked in the same department with him. And he told me I was to be made chief of the department. I said, 'Thank you', and he said, 'Now run over to Deliu - Deliu was the Communist Party secretary - to join the Party!' When I went to Deliu, he already had my file ready with two recommendations; all I had to do was sign. I didn't get upset back then, the salary was better and I was chief of department.

I was even decorated by Ceausescu 14 himself. I received a citation for the medal of work from him. In 1973 the factory celebrated its 150th anniversary and some top ranking workers were decorated. Ceausescu came to Brasov, to Casa Armatei [House of the Army, a building which belongs to the Ministry of the Armed Forces], somebody called out our names and we had to step forward and say, 'I serve the Socialist Republic of Romania! Good luck, comrade!', and afterwards we shook hands with comrade Ceausescu. I should have said, 'It is for this [decoration] that I serve the Republic.' - it would have been closer to the truth. It was December, I remember, and I was in mourning over my father, who had died that year, but they didn't let me wear a black tie, I had to wear another one. I buried my father in the Jewish cemetery here in Brasov, with Rabbi Deutsch present, and I recited the Kaddish at the cemetery. I also recited it in the synagogue the following year, whenever I had time to go.

Of course we had to march on 1st May and on 23rd August 15. We also did public work: we had to dig and build new roads, like Calea Bucurestilor [one of Brasov's main streets], where back then there was no street, just a small railway with a train that went to Sacele. We also worked on the road that now leads to Poiana Brasov, and at the Drama Theater in Brasov. [Poiana Brasov is Romania's premier ski resort located 12 km from Brasov.] Each factory from Brasov had its specific tasks to carry out: to gather leaves, dig, clean.

I remember, one time Ceausescu was about to come and visit the factory, and an activist, Rujan, said, 'Where is comrade Ceusescu's painting?' I was in charge of all the flags. We had a painting of him [Ceasusescu] but not one of Mrs. Ceausescu. He told me she was a weaver, too - although I had never heard she was one before. So in 24 hours we managed to get a painting of her as well. After the Romanian Revolution of 1989 16, I met this activist again. He had been a journalist for Drum Nou [New Road was a Romanian communist newspaper in Brasov], and I asked him about the story with the painting. And he said, 'The hell with it! Of course she was no weaver, but that was my job, I was paid for that!'

In the communist period I lived in a rented room in a house, so I didn't suffer so much from the heat restrictions. The room was warm, although the gas supply we used for heating didn't have enough pressure and sometimes the electricity went out, and we had to use a candle. The queues for food were terribly long; we had food stamps for milk and bread, but again I managed. Textiles were something you couldn't find back then, and there were a lot of people who needed a good fabric for a wedding, or something like that. I knew all the ladies at Universal [Brasov's largest universal store], so I gave them textiles and they gave me meat, salami, so it wasn't so bad for me personally. You could get extra gasoline, a lot of things; you just had to have the right merchandise; the black market was flourishing and you could make extra money.

I went to the synagogue during communism, but only on the high holidays, and if a high holiday was on Sunday. On Saturdays we had to work. I didn't observe the kashrut; after the deportation I ate anything.

I used to listen to Radio Free Europe 17 constantly when I was at home, in the evening; I was interested in all their broadcasts, all they said that was going on in Romania we didn't know.

My sister Rozalia worked in a knitwear factory, after she finished high school. She married in 1955, I think. I remember I was in the army and I had to go on furlough. Her husband was Alter Adler, a Jew as well. He had been deported to Auschwitz, and he was the only one of his family who survived. He was a tailor and worked at a cooperative. They were married in the synagogue here, by Rabbi Deutsch. They had a son, Iosif Adler.

Iosif studied English and French in Bucharest. He graduated first in his class and because of that he could choose the town he wanted to work in. He had a teacher, Farcas, who was also a Jew, and was from Beius. And Farcas told Iosif that if he went there to work, he could stay with his parents and didn't have to pay anything. Iosif and his future wife, Mihaela Csiszar, had been colleagues in Bucharest, but because she didn't graduate among the first, she was assigned to Dambovita. They were separated for two years. After two years, the professor's parents left for Israel, and Iosif didn't want to stay in Beius anymore. So I helped him with a job here, at Timpuri Noi [famous Romanian leather goods factory], as a painter: he had studied arts in high school. He had to write slogans, or make templates for street names. And Mihaela came here as well; she worked in a coop farm. They married soon after that, and in 1986, I think, they left for Israel.

My sister and her husband left for Israel as well, in 1990, because their first grandson was born, and they couldn't stay away. They live in Rishon le Zion, and Iosif is an English teacher there. Iosif and Mihaela have two children, Jonathan, who was born in 1989, and Karina, who was born in 1992. We keep in touch. My sister calls us often, it's not so expensive for her. We also write letters when we have news. She sends me photos as well. As far as I know, my sister didn't have problems with the letters she received from Iosif from Israel during the communist era, but they weren't about politics or anything like that.

I had a small problem during communism with a cousin of mine, Izu Glaubach, who lived in Israel. His mother, Roza, had been my mother's sister. He came to visit, and he was allowed to stay with my mother, but not with me because I wasn't a first degree relative. I went to the militia with him and registered him, and said that he would live with my mother. In fact, he intended to stay over at my place from the very first night. And so he did for one night, the first one. The next morning, the Securitate 18 officer in charge of the factory, a friend of mine, called and asked me why I caused him trouble. It was because my cousin had slept at my place and not at my mother's. 'How do you know?', I asked him. 'We know everything', he said. I told him he came over to visit and we talked and it got late, so he stayed. He told me my cousin wasn't allowed to stay with me, and asked me to give him in writing a deposition of everything we had talked about. We hadn't talked politics, just things you would discuss with a relative you haven't seen in years. But he didn't stay over at my place afterwards; it was safer that way.

Just before the revolution broke out, in September 1989, I went on a trip to Chisinau, to visit my cousin there. This cousin, Leopold Weiselberg, was the one who left with the Russian army when they retreated. After he left, we were interested to keep in touch with him; we wrote letters, but got no answer. His mother, Cecilia, had been shot in front of her house when the Germans came, and his father had died, too: he had been on the Struma ship. Anyway, after several unanswered letters, my father wrote to the Soviet Red Cross, and they replied that there was no person by the name of Weiselberg in the Soviet Union. So we had no news of him until 1987, when the workers from Steagu revolted [see 1987 Workers Revolt of Brasov] 19. In that year we had guests from Russia, from Cernauti. They were a young Jewish couple, husband and wife, and their parents had emigrated to Israel. They wanted to meet their parents, but they couldn't go to Israel, and the parents couldn't come to Russia. So they all came to Romania. The parents stayed at a hotel, and the couple over at my sister's. When I was taking their parents to the train station, we started talking about relatives, and I told the man about this cousin of mine. And he said, 'We were in the army together, I will give you his address!' I couldn't imagine this happening; after 40 years!

Leopold lived in Dubosar, near Nister, and then he moved to Chisinau. That's where I went to visit him. I took a vacation and I stayed in Chisinau for a month. I was there when the Berlin wall fell, on 7th November. I saw the parade in Moscow on TV, and Gorbachev 20 talking to the people. But there was no parade in Chisinau: there were men, children and women sitting on the highway, who didn't allow the Russian army to march. The people from Chisinau said to the Russian army that they were Romanians. I was afraid, especially because Leopold was proudly wearing his jacket with all the Soviet decorations from the war. He had a limp as a result of a wound.

Life was better in Chisinau: I remember we went into a coffee shop to have some coffee. We were standing at one of those tables without chairs, and we were talking. A waitress near us was eavesdropping, I noticed. And she went to whisper something to another waitress, packed something in a napkin and came to me. She asked me in a low voice, 'Are you from Romania?' I answered I was. 'Then take this!' It was a lump of sugar. Back in Romania it was a real problem: we had food stamps for sugar, for bread. I was very touched by the solidarity there. People heard us talking Romanian in the street and they just followed us. There were some gypsies in a parking lot, who heard us talking in Romanian, told us they had relatives in Bucharest and asked us if we knew them; of course we didn't. When I drove back to Romania and had to stop at the boarder, the car's trunk was full with bread, roast turkey etc; all from my cousin. The custom officer said, 'Don't let the doctor here see it, he will confiscate everything from you!' There was a doctor assigned at the customs office. The officer was a nice man, he let me pass. When I came back I gave my sister half of everything I had got.

Right before the revolution started, I was about to move. The house I lived in - a rented place - was to be demolished. All the houses on that street had long gardens, and they demolished everything to build a block of flats. A woman from ICRAL [local institution that administrated the state's housing facilities and made repartitions for the apartments] and a militiaman came to tell me that I had been assigned a one-bedroom apartment in a far away neighborhood of Brasov, Triaj. I went to see my future apartment, but the block wasn't even finished. And when I came back from Chisinau, I found out that a Jewish acquaintance of ours, Schemweter, had died. He lived in an apartment with two rooms, in a house that belonged to the Jewish community. I went to the community's president, Mr. Roth, and asked him to give me that place. He did, and ever since then I've paid the community rent for this place. I renovated it, which was quite costly, and moved in after the revolution. The room where I have the kitchen now wasn't mine at first, it was the community's health unit. Mr. Roth agreed to give it to me if I took care of the necessary renovations for the new one, in a different location. I did, I still knew a lot of people who were willing to help me with the work for the house.

The revolution started on 20th December, and I was at home, I think. I heard voices in the street, and I went out to see what was going on. It was the workers from ICA Ghimbav [Romanian aeronautics construction factory], with slogans like 'The army is with us!', or 'Away with Ceausescu!'. The revolution had already started in Timisoara on the 16th, and some party officials came to the factory and told us that there were only vandals, who broke windows and stole from shops, and they would be caught and punished. But we already knew what was going on, we had heard it on [Radio] Free Europe.

Then the phone rang. It was a colleague from work, who was on duty at the gate that day; she was crying, she was scared because all the workers from Steagu and Tractorul [Brasov's largest factories] were at the gates, and all the workers from the textiles department at the factory wanted to come out and join them. I advised her to call the managers, but she told me none of them was to be found. And I told her, 'Margareta, rather than get in trouble, open the gates!' She told me that the two militiamen guarding the factory had run away and were hiding somewhere in the plant. After I hung up, I called the technical manager, the one who was a Jew, and asked him where he had been. He told me he had been at home, but he was afraid to answer the phone.

Beginning with 21st December nobody worked in the factory. I went there and left the car in the factory's courtyard because it was dangerous to drive. There were army filters all over the town; they stopped you, ravaged your tapestry looking for guns, probably. One man got shot because he didn't want to stop. Across the street from my house, there was a military unit. If you were over 18, or 20, I don't remember exactly, and if you had your ID with you, they gave you a gun and 10 cartridges. People wonder today who was shooting in 1989? We were! There were drunk people with guns in the street, firing into the air or somewhere else. When I was coming home, I also heard gunfire from machineguns, I think they came from somewhere near Tampa. [Tampa is a hill in the very heart of Brasov.]

I never left the Communist Party, they left me! After 1989 things changed for me. I retired at the age of 56, according to the decree issued in 1990 - during communism I would have retired at 62. Immediately after that the Jewish community called me and asked me to be a cashier. I accepted; I didn't want to turn down Mr. Roth after he had been so nice to me with the apartment and all, and moreover, I had something to do. As a cashier I worked from 11am until 3 o'clock in the afternoon, when lunch was served at the community's canteen, and then I went home. But after that Mr. Roth asked me to be the canteen administrator, and I had some more work to do. The salary is small of course, but the money is useful for me, and I also eat for free. So now I supervise the activities of the cook, and the supplies. I work from 8am until 2 o'clock in the afternoon, but when we get meat delivered from Bucharest, I work longer hours. The meat is specially prepared by the hakham there, and it is sent in a sealed car. There are no more shochetim or hakhamim in Brasov. The hakham in Bucharest is also a rabbi, he is called Eliezer Glanz. There are two more hakhamim, one in Moldova, called Bruckmeier, and one in Cluj [Napoca]. But Brasov is closer to Bucharest, so we bring the meat from there.

I create the menus, along with the cook. We cannot be very diverse with veal only, but we try: we cook stews, schnitzels, steaks. There are about 30 persons eating at the community's canteen, mainly elderly people. Other kosher food, like eggs, we get by special orders from the farms near Brasov. On Pesach we don't have bread, we only eat matzah, and for dessert some sort of cake made up of matzah flour and stewed fruit. On Purim we bake hamantashen and shelakhmones. The canteen is closed on Saturdays and Sundays, so we give out food for two days on Fridays.

The community helps me with my medicine because I have worked for them for more than ten years. I can buy medicine worth 350,000 lei, but the ones I need cost more than one million. However, I'm lucky that I can get some of them for free, according to law 118, because I was deported. I also receive funds from Germany, a pension of 125 Euro every month, because I was deported.

I keep in touch with my sister's family, of course, but I also have some cousins and friends abroad. I have a friend in Australia, as I mentioned before, Beno Walter, who calls me rather often. I met him after the camp [in Transnistria] here, in Brasov. He left for Australia during communism, in the 1960s. He inherited something there from a relative. I don't know exactly how it happened, but the whole family left; they didn't have trouble getting out of the country. Probably somebody from Australia paid something for them.

You know there was this popular joke about Israel and communism, it goes like that: Ceausescu calls a meeting; he wants to know how he could get more foreign currency. And his economic adviser answers, 'The trucks bring in that much foreign currency, the tractors that much foreign currency, and Israel that many dollars because they pay for every Jew we let go!' And Ceausescu said, 'We will breed Jews!'

I also keep in touch with Armand Beraru - we call him Puiu. He was married to Clara Glaubach, my cousin. He is a photographer. Clara died of cancer, her brother, Izu Glaubach, was electrocuted while working, and Izu's wife also died of cancer. It was like a curse, they all died within a year and a half. Izu's daughter is married and has three children. Clara also had a boy and a girl; both are married now and have children. I also have a Jewish friend, Alexandru Horia, who had been a conductor with the musical theater here in Brasov, and lives in Israel now.

I have been to Israel on two occasions: once in 1972, when I was invited by my cousin Izu. He was a truck driver, he worked in the construction business, and I traveled with him in the truck. We got up at 4 in the morning, and came back at 11, before noon. The heat was unbearable. But I saw Jerusalem, the Red Sea; I slept on the beach. I was only there for a month because I couldn't take a longer vacation. The things that most impressed me were the life style, the shops, the freedom. Back then in Romania everything was low-standard. The second time I was in Israel was in 1998 or 99, when I went with my wife, but we weren't married back then. So she needed an invitation from my sister's family; I didn't need one anymore, like I did before the revolution, because I was a relative.

I married my wife, Dorina Draghici, in 2000, after we had been together for 25 years. We don't have children. We met in the plant in 1978. She was working in the textiles section, and I was her boss. There were over 200 women, but she was my favorite! We married in February. We were standing by the stove one day, and she said to me, 'Don't you think we should get married?' And I said, 'Who do you think will want to marry us?!' We married in the city hall. She isn't Jewish, but we still celebrate both Jewish and Christian holidays; we have never had problems with that. She comes to me for seder, we have a Christmas tree in the house and celebrate Christmas with her family; we share everything.

I have no problems with accepting my Jewish identity, I never had, and I never hid it. Except the deportation, I never experienced any kind of anti- Semitism, I have always had good friends and colleagues who weren't Jewish.

Glossary

She has quiet gentle manners, a clear mind and a bright memory.
She speaks slowly due to her stuttering since childhood. She is taciturn and not emotional.
She says she devoted her life to work.

Her husband Isaac Verkhovski died in 2002. She lives alone in a three-bedroom apartment near the State University in Moscow.
Her apartment is very clean and cozy. Her husband Isaac Verkhovski was a stage designer.
He had a collection of folk craft items: brightly painted Zhostovo trays.
 

[1]They are placed on the walls and there are also pictures and drawings by famous artists that have been given to him.
Rachil Meitina has no problems with her day-to-day issues. She has a housemaid from ‘The Hand of Help’, a Jewish Public Charity Fund’.
This woman cleans her apartment. Her son Gleb Verkhovski often visits her, too.
She willingly gave this interview. She enjoyed talking about her life and hopes the story of her life will be remembered by her son and grandson.

My family background

Growing up

During the war

After the war

Recent years

Glossary 

My family background

My paternal parents lived on Zadonovska Street in the suburb town of Vitebsk 2. My father’s parents died before I was born. All I know about my paternal grandfather is that his name was Moisey Meitin. My parents didn’t tell me anything about him. He probably died when my father was just a child. 

In my childhood my parents often took me to Vitebsk in summer. Vitebsk is a lovely town on the Dvina River, about 450 kilometers from Moscow. It is a very green town. There is a nice historical museum housed in the former town hall building. There was a Polish and a Belarus population in Vitebsk, but the majority of the population was Jewish. There was no Jewish neighborhood or district in the town: Jewish houses neighbored upon Belarus houses and this caused no problems whatsoever. People respected the traditions of other nations. My husband, who was born in Vitebsk, told me that his family lived in a communal apartment 3 and their neighbors were a religious Russian family. Their neighbors prayed for them and brought them Easter bread on holiday. They were friends. 

My father’s parents were middle class, as they would say nowadays. I guess, they were involved in crafts and one of them had something to do with medicine. My father’s parents must have been religious people. They attended the nearby synagogue in Vitebsk. 

I know very little about my paternal grandmother Gelia Meitina. I have her photograph. She had a beautiful and intelligent face. She was born in 1852 and died in New York in 1919. She emigrated to New York with her four children before 1915. My father didn’t want to go there since he was actively involved in the revolutionary movement here in Russia. My father Tsala Meitin was a member of the Bolshevik Party, propagated revolutionary ideas and was even exiled for this to the town of Beryozov, about 2,000 kilometers from Moscow. [Beryozov: a town in Tobolsk region, exile destination at the beginning of the 20thcentury]. Inmates in Beryozov called him Alexandr and when he obtained his documents later he had this first name written in there. He was exiled in 1905 during the tsarist regime and served his term until 1917, the October Revolution [see Russian Revolution of 1917] 4. My father finished cheder, but didn’t continue his studies in any institution afterward. He was self-educated but an intelligent man.

My grandfather and grandmother had five children: three boys and two girls. Regretfully I can’t tell you their names or dates of birth or death. I remember one of them well: Aunt Rosa. She had a son, but I don’t remember his name or any details about him.My parents corresponded with him, but at some point they stopped corresponding. My father had two brothers, Ruvim and Mosha, and another sister, whose name I don’t remember. My father was born in 1878. He was the second oldest brother in the family. Ruvim was older and Mosha or Moila – that’s how his family addressed him ‑ was younger than my father. 5I remember that they sent dollars when Torgsin stores 5 were opened6. These stores sold food products and other goods for dollars while other stores only accepted Soviet money. I remember that our parents bought my sister a coat with a white collar. My father corresponded with his brother until theearly 1930s when it was allowed. After 1937, when the political situation in the Soviet Union was strenuous [during the so-called Great Terror] 6, correspondence with relatives living abroad was dangerous and my father stopped writing to them[see keep in touch with relatives abroad] 7. He must have been afraid of being arrested and destroyed their photographs. The only photograph I have is of my grandmother and her grave. My father didn’t tell me anything about his mother, brothers or sisters. We lost track of them.

My mother’s parents lived in the village of Kazarnovichi near Vitebsk. My mother was born there in 1883. Later her family moved to Vitebsk where they lived on Smolenskaya Street in the center of town. I know very little about my maternal grandfather. He died before I was born. I think he died during World War I. They told me he was very greedy. He literally starved to death on bags of food stocks. His name was Morduch Kazarnovski. He was born in Kazarnovichi, but I don’t know the dates of his birth or death. 

My maternal grandmother’s name was Feiga Rokha Kazarnovskaya. I was named after her. She died shortly before I was born. It probably happened in 1917.She was also born in Kazarnovichi.near Vitebsk. I believe she was born in the late 1850s. My grandmother had a younger sister, Esfir. She married Ruvim Okunev, a Jewish man. She died shortly before World War II. They had four daughters. Her older daughter Sophia was my husband’s mother. She was born in 1891 and died in 1968. The second daughter’s name was Mary, born in 1892. The third daughter was Anna, born in 1894. And there was another Sophia. Probably, one of the girl’s name was Seina in Yiddish, but when they changed their names to Russian ones [see common name] 8 they both happened to have the name of Sophia. She was born at the beginning of the 20thcentury and died in 2001. 

All of them finished grammar school. Mary moved to Kaunas before World War II [see Great Patriotic War] 9. When Germans occupied Lithuania she ended up in a ghetto. Mary had two sons. One of them was a talented violinist. Both sons must have escaped from the ghetto, but they perished somewhere since they never showed up again after the war. Mary survived. After the war her sisters took her to Moscow where they moved to after evacuation. The sisters were accommodated well there. Anna was the secretary for the Chief Prosecutor of the Soviet Union for many years, Sophia junior was the secretary for the Chairman of the Moscow Council and Sophia senior was a teacher of mathematics. 

My maternal grandparents were religious. I don’t know any details since it was only my parents who told me about them. They had two daughters and a son: Frada, my mother,,born in 1883, Dvoira, born in 1890, and Isaac, who died in infancy. 

My mother’s sister Dvoira Kazarnovskaya lived in Vitebsk. She married David Levitan, a Jewish man. He was a well-known attorney in Vitebsk. During the period of collectivization 10 he saved many people from dispossession [see Kulak] 11. I saw them bringing him food products to thank him for his services. I remember once we spent our vacation in the house of a man that my uncle had saved from dispossession. 

When she got married Dvoira Kazarnovskaya became Vera Levitan. They had a son named Alexandr, born in 1908, and a daughter Sophia, born in 1910. Dvoira was a pharmacist. She worked in a pharmacy in Vitebsk. Before the Germans occupied the town during World War II Dvoira and her family evacuated.After the Great Patriotic War they didn’t return to Vitebsk, but stayed in Sverdlovsk [present-day Ekaterinburg] where they had been in evacuation. We corresponded with them occasionally: we sent greeting cards for holidays and birthdays. Dvoira died in 1990 at the age of 100. 

Her son Alexandr was a promising surgeon. During World War II he was a surgeon in the army, but since he was a weak person and had access to drugs he became a drug addict. He died in Leningrad in 1950. Her daughter Sophia was a lawyer. She married Felix Kaminski, a Jewish man, who was arrested and executed in 1937. Their son Edward Kaminski is a correspondent member of the Academy of Natural Sciences. Sophia died in Moscow in 1985. 

My mother finished lower secondary school and the medical/obstetrical school in Vitebsk. She entered a medical college in Petrograd, but quit after finishing her 2ndyear when I was born. My mother was also interested in politics when she was young. She was a member of the party of Mensheviks 12. She told me little about it, but I know that she even went to Geneva to a meeting with the Menshevik Party leaders: Plekhanov 13 and Martynov 14. She also went to meet Lenin in Paris, but I don’t know any details, of course.

My mother and father met in Vitebsk, probably during some [revolutionary] activities,that they were both involved in. They got married in Vitebsk in 1912. I don’t know whether they had a wedding at the synagogue or just a civil ceremony at the registry office. I know that they were both atheists. My parents’ mother tongue was Yiddish, but they always spoke Russian. They switched to Yiddish when they didn’t want their children to understand the subject of their discussion. 

My parents moved to Petrograd in 1916. The name of this city changed to Leningrad in 1924 and now it’s called St. Petersburg. I don’t know why my parents moved – probably because this city was the center of revolutionary activities. My parents rented an apartment and my father went to work as a typesetter in a printing house called Printing Yard. My mother was a medical nurse in a town hospital.Around this time my parents changed their Jewish names to Russian ones: my father became Alexandr and my mother became Fania Meitina. 

In 1917 my father was mobilized to the army. I know very little about this period of his life. I have a photograph from the time when he was in the army before the Revolution of 1917. He served in the tsarist army that didn’t exist any longer after the Revolution. My father returned home because of the Revolution. 

Growing up

My sister Vera Meitina was born in Vitebsk in 1912. I was born in Petrograd in 1918. 

My parents received a very nice apartment in a very beautiful pre-revolutionary building in the center of Petrograd. There were six rooms in the apartment. We used only three of them and our housemaid lived in another room. Two rooms were locked. There was a toilet near the kitchen and another one next to the bedroom. There was a wood stoked stove and also a Primus stove used for cooking. There were beautiful stoves for heating the rooms. Our janitor Alyosha brought wood for stoking the stoves. There was running water in the apartment. 

I had many toys. My father loved me a lot and always bought me toys. I remember my father saying that I had 24 dolls. The other three rooms in our apartment were called ‘cold rooms’,since they were not heated in order to save wood. My parents dressed me in warm clothes and we went for a stroll there. Later some students rented those rooms. In 1927 this apartment was divided into two. They made a kitchen in the hallway, a bathroom and a toilet and separated three rooms from us. Another family lived in this apartment – they had their separate entrance. Our apartment belonged to a scientist in the past. Before I was born his family left Russia for Prague. My older sister told me that their son came to pick up some of their belongings. This ex-tenant left a huge collection of books. I maintained a book log where I registered each book that members of our family took from there. I was like a librarian. My parents, my sister and I read books from this collection. There were Russian classics: Turgenev 15, Pushkin 16 and Dostoevskiy 17.

My parents had housemaids. When I was small I had a nanny. 

Her name was Kamilla and she was a Chukhon woman 18.
Another Chukhon woman brought us milk. She lived in the suburbs of Leningrad.
She perished during the blockade of Leningrad 19 during World War II.

My father was very cheerful and witty. He was the heart and soul of all gatherings. He was very sociable and easy-going. He was very intelligent and well read. It was amazing considering that he actually only had elementary education. He wasn’t strict with the children. When we lived in Petrograd he and I were called ‘Papa, buy’as a joke, since I was always asking him to buy a toy. He never turned me down. I think he had an influence on us. My sister and I made our way in life. He helped me a lot when I was working on my candidate’s dissertation. He typed the first draft. 

My mother obviously liked my sister more. She was never satisfied with me and constantly reproached me with her ‘she can sew’, or ‘she is so handy while you aren’t’. The only time I heard my mother praise me was when I defended my thesis. My mother called her friend and said ‘Rachel has defended her thesis today’. This was the only time in my life that she complimented my achievements. She was strict and greedy. Her father was greedy and she probably took after him, as well as my sister and her son. My mother was prudent. She was a cold person. I was never as close with my mother as I was with my father.

Our parents had many friends that often came for a cup of tea. They had a discussion and the children played in another room. I remember Christmas trees that we decorated in Petrograd. We celebrated Christmas and Easter. I remember a wooden bowl with the letters ‘CR’ [Christ is Risen] engraved on it. We didn’t celebrate Jewish holidays, but I remember that gefilte fish was made whenever our friends and relatives visited us on Soviet holidays, birthdays of family members and even at Christmas. Most of my parents’ friends were Jewish. My friend from that time had a Jewish father and a Russian mother. When another family moved into our apartment, after it had been divided into two, we became friends with them. There was a boy of my age in this family and I remember his mother taking the two of us to the Botanical Gardens. We were friends with our neighbors, although the door separating our apartments was always locked. 

My mother and father spent their vacation with the children at the dacha[cottage]. When we lived in Petrograd we rented a dacha on the bank of a lake somewhere in the suburb of Petrograd. We had a boat and went rowing on the lake. We often went to visit our parents’ relatives in Vitebsk. In summer 1934 we stayed in Shpili near Vitebsk. I think now it’s a suburb of Vitebsk. There were many apple orchards there. It was a lovely spot. I remember the sound of apples hitting the terrace of the house where we lived: sweet small Belarus apples. That summer the family of my future husband Isaac Verkhoski lived there, too. He is my second cousin. His mother Sophia Verkhovskaya and grandmother Esfir Okuneva were there, too. That was when I met him and we made friends, but many years passed before we got married. There are no relatives of ours left in Vitebsk. 

Our family was rather well off. Although my parents took an active part in the revolutionary life of the country when they were young they became rather neutral later. They didn’t discuss any political subjects with me and didn’t share with me their attitudes about what was going on. However, they were interested in the events. My father used to say, ‘When I die please come there and tell me what is happening in the world’. Fortunately, Stalin’s terror didn’t impact my parents. 

I spent my early childhood in Petrograd. I recall this town as a fairy tale. I found it very beautiful. There was a nice yard with a garden in it. We lived on a quiet street. There were stores and schools on the nearby lanes. My sister studied in one of them. Matveyevskaya church was on our street. It was demolished in 1930. We had already left for Moscow by then. There were synagogues in the city that I never went to since it wasn’t a custom in the family. They were destroyed in the 1930s when the authorities struggled against religion 20. It was a clean town with numerous private shops. I remember the period of the NEP 21 when stores were full. I remember delicious chocolate. My mother gave me some change and I bought a chocolate teddy bear. 

At the age of five I went to a state budget kindergarten near our house. The director of this house was a scientist in the field of pedagogy whose name I don’t remember. We learned music and dancing and had other classes. It was a very good kindergarten. I went to a Russian school in Petrograd and also attended a nearby music school where I learned to play the piano. I studied for three or four years in the music school. 

Lenin died when I was six years old. I remember that my father and I went to Troitskiy [Trinity] Bridge where we could hear gun shots from the fortress. There were crowds of people and the traffic stopped. I was too small to grasp the importance of the event, but I understood that something terrible had happened. 

In 1924 the printing house was closed and my father lost his job. He went to Moscow looking for work and we stayed in Leningrad. My father met an acquaintance of his in Moscow. He offered him a job as a corrector in the committee for standardization and development of state standards that had just been established. Later my father became a technical editor. My father rented a room in a house in the very center of Moscow. We moved to Moscow in 1930 and got accommodated on Kropotkinskaya Street. We exchanged our huge apartment in Leningrad for a small two-bedroom apartment, about 27 square meters, in Moscow. There was central heating and gas in this building, which was very rare in Moscow in the 1930s. There was also a bathroom, a toilet and a small kitchen in the apartment. In my class I was the only one living in an apartment with gas and heating. My mother went to work as a medical nurse at the medical facility of the University of Working People of the East and my sister entered Chemical Technological College. I was getting acquainted with Moscow. I used to take a tram to tour the city. I got used to Moscow, but I always liked Petrograd better. I still have warmer feelings for Leningrad than for Moscow. 

My mother couldn’t afford to pay for my musical education any longer. We were pressed for money. My mother and father’s relationships also changed for the worse. My father must have met somebody when he was alone in Moscow and didn’t terminate these relations. My sister told me later that she asked our mother why they stayed together and my mother said that my father didn’t want to leave his children. 

I studied in school 22, a former grammar school, in Moscow. A few years ago it celebrated its 75thanniversary. Many of our teachers used to teach in this former grammar school. I remember Sergey Fyodorovich, our teacher of mathematics. He addressed all his students with the formal ‘You’. Our teacher of physics was the author of a textbook in physics and our German teacher Albina Ivanovna was a teacher of the former grammar school. I had good marks at school. I was good at biology, but didn’t have any favorite subject at school. I had many friends. There were more boys than girls in our school. We kept in touch after we finished school and we are still in touch. There were Russian and Jewish children, but we didn’t care about each other’s nationality then. It was of no importance. We didn’t face any anti-Semitism, but I think there was some when looking back. I had a friend, Dima Zotov, a Russian boy. Our friendship stopped all of a sudden when we were in the 9thor 10thgrade. Now I understand that it must have been his strict mother that forbade him to have a Jewish friend. 

I became a pioneer at school. It was a routinely matter for me. I wasn’t an active pioneer. I remember we went to parades on Soviet holidays. The Iskra newspaper printing house was a patron organization supporting our school. Employees of the printing house went to parades with us. We got together near the printing house and marched to the Red Square. It was fun. There was a brass orchestra playing and we danced and sang.

After finishing school I decided to continue studying sciences related to chemistry and biology. I could take a tram that turned left to university or another one that turned right to the College of Fine Chemical Technology. Both institutions weren’t far from where I lived. The first tram that came to the stop was the one turning left, so I entered the Faculty of Biology of Moscow State University in 1936. I enjoyed studying there. There was no anti-Semitism. The dean and deputy dean at the university were Jews. Jewish scientists were lectures at the university, but later the situation changed. 

My specialty was the physiology of animals – biochemistry. My group was the best of the faculty and university. We were awarded two red banners for our academic success at university. It was a big honor. I studied well. I didn’t look my age when I was a 1st-year student. I remember my exam on morphology of plants. I wore a plain polka-dot dress with a white collar. I noticed that our teacher gave me a ‘5’ and a smile spread across my face. The teacher asked, ‘How old are you?’ I said, ‘19’, although I hadn’t turned 19 yet. He looked at me and said, ‘Well, at your age it is all right to be pleased with a mark. You won’t when you get older’. I wrote an interesting diploma thesis. My tutor was a professor, a scientist of the institute of biochemistry. This thesis actually became a part of the scientific work for which this institute received a ‘Lenin Award’ 23.

My friends were Mila Ginzburg, Ruth Berkman, Nina Gelmanand Shura Tseitlin, all Jewish girls. The only Russian girl was Natasha Melitsyna, the daughter of a well-known professor of medicine. We were always the first to take any initiative and we were called ‘presidium’. I joined the Komsomol 24 in university. I spent all my time studying and being involved in students’ scientific activities. I didn’t take part in any public activities. 

1937 had its impact on the university. Some outstanding professors and students disappeared. I remember a meeting where a student was expelled from university because his father had been arrested. I felt awkward at this meeting. I knew that he wasn’t to blame for his father’s ‘sins’ and that he was suffering already – so why add to his suffering? My father told me about the legal persecution of leaders of the Party. He understood that not all of them could possibly be ‘enemies of the people’ 25, but he never discussed this with me. 

My sister graduated in 1936  and got a [mandatory] job assignment 26 at the Scientific Research Institute of Glass where she was involved in scientific development. She defended her candidate’s dissertation in 1950. She met her future husband Pavel Prushak, a Russian man, when she was a student. Upon graduation from college he was a teacher at school. They got married in 1940. They had a civil ceremony, but no wedding party. It was the custom at the time. They lived in his room in a communal apartment in the center of Moscow. In January 1941 their son Leonid Prushak was born. My mother left her job to look after her grandson. She never went back to work. 

During the war

In 1939 when I was a student at university a pact with Germany was executed [see Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact] 27. I didn’t think that there was to be a war. On 22ndJune 1941 I passed my last exams. The beginning of the war was quite a surprise for me. It was a warm day. My sister took her baby son for a walk when she heard about the war on the radio. Shortly afterwards her husband was mobilized to the front. He perished at the front in 1942. 

Upon graduation from university I was going to work at the biochemical laboratory in a children’s hospital in Moscow where I had some training during exams. I went to this hospital, but it had already been turned into a military hospital. Well, I had to think about my mother and sister and her baby. We evacuated to Kineshma, about 350 kilometers from Moscow. My father stayed in Moscow since the institute where he was working stayed there, too. He stayed there until September 1942 when the Germans came close to Moscow and panic began in the town. He joined us in Kineshma and stayed there until he was called back to Moscow. 

We decided for Kineshma since our friend from Leningrad was there. My friend’s father had been arrested in 1937. Her father’s investigation officer had notified the family that they would be ordered to leave Leningrad within 24 hours in a few days. He advised them to think about a town where they wanted to go. They decided for Kineshma in Ivanovo region. My friend Galia Lifshytz was a student then. There was a technical college in Ivanovo and a chemical and ceramic plant and she thought that she would study and then go to work. This was in 1938. I visited them several times there. It was a nice town. 

When we came to Kineshma I went to the military registry office and they issued an assignment to me. I was to work in a hospital. There were many Jews in evacuation in Kineshma. The local population didn’t demonstrate any ill-mannered attitude. I worked as a lab assistant in hospital for two years. We worked from 8am till 8pm. We received a meal in the hospital and I even managed to take a bowl of shchi [cabbage soup] to my relatives. The family was having a hard time. We settled down in an empty house. Its owners had left. 

My mother and sister didn’t go to work. My sister had a baby son to take care of. She sold our belongings at the market to get some money to buy food. Later my father, who worked in a printing house, began to send us paper that my sister exchanged for food products in a kolkhoz 28 on the opposite bank of the Volga. My sister crossed the river by boat in summer and in winter she walked on the ice. We survived and two years later my father sent us a document enabling us to return to Moscow. We returned to Moscow in 1943. Moscow hadn’t been bombed, but there was hardly any food available. My father was very thin and looked awful. I hadesome potatoes and a three-liter jar of melted butter with me. I sat on the upper bench in the train the whole night holding it in my hands. When I returned my father and I went to the canteen at his workplace where we had nettle soup.  

We returned to our apartment in Kropotkinskaya Street. My sister went back to work at the Institute of Glass and my mother looked after my little nephew. 

I went to work at the biochemical laboratory of the central skin and veneorology hospital in Moscow. I worked there from 1943 till 1949. I defended my candidate’s thesis ‘Vitamin B and its influence on carbohydrate metabolism’ in 1949. We injected this vitamin into the brain of animals by the method of Lina Shtern 29 and watched how the skin was changing. This work also had practical significance: we offered treatment to patients by my method. 

After I had defended my thesis I got an invitation from the Academy of Sciences.
They said my thesis was very interesting,
but that there were too many references to Shtern and they wanted me to cross out this name. 

A professor, who used to be Shtern’s student and I sat down to do the corrections.
What else could we do? If we hadn’t done what we
were told the Higher Certification Commission wouldn’t have approved my dissertation.
A few days later it was approved. Shtern was a world-known scientist.
Employees of her institute were her followers and supporters. Later I attended a meeting
where an academician grabbed Shtern’s books yelling, 

‘On our Soviet money! On our money they’ve published these books!’ throwing them off the stand.
In 1949 Lina Shtern and members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee 30 were arrested.
Her institute was closed, employees fired and another institute was created on the basis of the previous one.

The management of the institute where I worked was replaced.
The attitude towards Jews changed dramatically.
We were suppressed and abused.
There was such a hostile environment that we realized it was time to leave. 

I submitted my documents to the biochemical laboratory of Vishnevski Institute of Surgery where I became a junior scientific employee. I was employed on 1stDecember 1949 and on 3rdJanuary 1950 I was fired due to reduction of staff; they explained to me that since I was a new employee it was all right to fire me rather than somebody that had worked here for a long time. However, it was crystal-clear that they fired me because I was a Jew. Other employees felt sorry for me. One of them was acquainted with Bakulev, who was opening a laboratory at that time. He began to study lungs and needed to learn about gaseous metabolism, blood gases. He needed employees. 

Alexandr Bakulev was a famous surgeon. He was chief surgeon in the Kremlin hospital for many years and a full member of the Medical Academy of Sciences. He was the director of the surgical clinic at the town hospital; a very decent and intelligent man. He was a multifaceted surgeon. When I began to work with him he was organizing a lung department. In 1948 he performed the first heart surgery. He employed me. There were several broken units in the room where I was to work. They opened the door saying, ‘This is where you will be working’. I started work on 28thJanuary 1950. 

I actually set up the laboratory that lay the foundations for the Bakulev Institute of Cardiovascular Surgery. I was one of its founders. I was head of the laboratory. I worked there from 1950 till 1989. 

I met Isaac Verkhovski, my future husband, in 1934. In 1943 his mother, two aunts, Anna and Sophia junior, and he moved to Moscow. They lived in a room in a communal apartment. We met again on his mother’s birthday in 1948. We dated until we decided to get married in October 1950. We had a civil ceremony. Isaac was a designer and he was surprised at the dull interior design of this registry office. There were only dusty palm plants decorating the room. At home we had a small dinner. We settled down in my apartment on Kropotkinskaya Street. My mother, my father, my sister Vera and her son also lived there. There wasn’t much space. 

Isaac Verkhovski was born in Vitebsk in 1919. His father Samuel Verkhovski was an assistant accountant before 1917 and after 1917 he worked in trade companies in Vitebsk. He died in 1935 and was buried in the Jewish section of the town cemetery in Vitebsk. His mother Sophia Verkhovskaya, nee Okuneva, was a teacher. She finished a grammar school and was very good at teaching. She lived in Vitebsk before World War II and during the war she evacuated to the Urals with her relatives. 

After finishing lower secondary school in 1935 Isaac entered the art school in Vitebsk. He finished it in 1939. Afterwards he got a job assignment with the Lepesh regional theater near Vitebsk where he worked until the beginning of the war in June 1941. This was a traveling theater that was on tour in Western Belarus in 1941. He was chief stage and costume designer. When the war began the theater closed. They loaded all items on carts and walked beside the carts. My husband had a winter coat made in Belarus. It was a hot summer and he got tired of dragging this coat along. He threw it away. Since then he never had a winter coat made and did without. They got to Vitebsk and in some time my husband managed to evacuate with his relatives. 

In December 1941 he was mobilized to the army. He was wounded in his right hand at the front and was demobilized from the army in 1942. In November 1943 he began to work as art director in the Moscow Jewish State Theater of Solomon Mikhoels31. My husband participated in making arrangements for the Freilakh performance and many other performances produced by Mikhoels. He did the stage sets and costumes for almost all performances staged by Mikhoelsin the theater. My husband worked with a well-known artist called Alexandr Tyshler 32. They were friends. In 1948 Mikhoels was murdered in Minsk. My husband went to his funeral and helped his relatives to make all necessary arrangements. Isaac was very sad about the death of Mikhoelsand the subsequent closure of the Jewish theater. He stayed in the theater until the last day and helped to save the stage sets. The Jewish theater operated until early 1950. In the same year Isaac began to work in Maly Theater 33. He obtained an assignment by the Ministry of Culture. He worked there for over 30 years until he retired in 1989.

Our family didn’t have much to live on. I received a salary of 80 rubles when I was a lab assistant, which wasn’t a lot of money. My husband received 60 rubles. We lived with my parents until my son was born. We gave my mother 100 rubles of housekeeping money every month and had little left. My mother wasn’t really fond of my husband and that was mutual. My mother believed that I deserved better while my father was easy about it. In 1954 my husband mother’s sisters insisted that my mother-in-law lived with us. She was living with her sisters in a room in a communal apartment up until then. Living with my mother and mother-in-law under one roof wasn’t easy. 

After the war

Well, in 1950 I joined academician Bakulev’s group. I was senior lab assistant.
Senior lab assistant was a low position, the lowest one for a person with higher education and I was already a candidate of medical sciences. Later,
when we had our laboratory equipped my boss introduced me as our senior lab assistant and head of laboratory. I had a low position and a small salary because I was Jewish.
Once in early 1953, when the Doctors’ Plot’ 34 was at its height, I got a telephone call from the academy.
They notified me that I was fired due to reduction of staff in Bakulev’s group. I and another woman were fired. She was Russian, but her husband, a well-known physicist, was a Jew. The next day my manager went to see Bakulev. Bakulev had the habit of leaving town when something like this happened. My boss returned and said that Bakulev told him there was nothing he could do at the moment. My husband became the sole breadwinner in our family. 

In 1952 my father lost his job. He worked at the editorial office of a scientific research institute for over 30 years. He was one of their best employees. He began to work for free at the library near our house. My sister, who worked at the Institute of Glass and defended her thesis, was also fired. Our family of six lived on my husband’s small salary. It was very difficult. We could hardly manage to make ends meet. 

On 5thMarch 1953 Stalin died. We had idolized Stalin during and after the war, but at that moment we already understood that he was to blame for the suppression of Jews. His death was a liberation. On 6thMarch my boss called me and told me to come back to work immediately. My colleagues told me that Bakulev adamantly demanded that I returned. I held the same position, but soon I became a junior and then a senior scientific employee. Then I became head of the laboratory. Some time later my sister also resumed her job. 

However, Stalin’s death didn’t put an end to the persecution of Jews. I had almost an analogous story with my doctor’s dissertation that I defended at the Academy of Medical Sciences. I got all votes ‘for’ it. I was approved by the first council of VAK certification commission: the highest body of federal executive authority awarding titles, the Russian equivalentsof PhDs, MAs, etc]. Then another council was conducted. Somebody told me that a professor didn’t like my surname and demanded an additional reference for my work. Once an acquaintance of mine called me to say that her neighbor, who was a well-known scientist, had got my dissertation to write a reference letter. He said that he was unfamiliar with the subject and asked me to write a reference letter that he would sign. My boss and I wrote the letter and he signed it. On the next day my dissertation was approved. 

My father died a sudden death of infarction in 1958. The day he died his colleagues from the library called to find out why he wasn’t at work.
After Stalin’s death he didn’t go back to work. They would have probably hired him, but he was over 75 years of age then.
He had never been late or missed a day at work. He was buried in the town cemetery. 

My son Gleb was born in Moscow in 1958. Two months after he was born I went back to work. My mother and mother-in-law looked after him. 

I worked a lot before and after my son was born. I specialized in pathological physiology. In the laboratory I worked on the issues of breathing, gaseous metabolism and gaseous content of blood. We examined hearts and often surveyed blood from various parts of the heart. I worked with patients with heart and lung problems that were later operated. My dissertation was entitled ‘Gaseous exchange and gaseous content of blood in patients with congenital heart diseases’. ‘This was the first dissertation on this subject in the Soviet Union. I’m satisfied with my scientific accomplishments since we were the first to do it and I provided assistance in establishing similar laboratories in a number of leading clinics of the country. 

When I was promoted life became easier. A senior scientific employee received 400 rubles per month. This was enough at that time. I couldn’t afford to buy expensive things, but we were doing all right. We went to theaters, art exhibitions and concerts at the Conservatory. My husband was fond of ballet and we attended all ballet contests. We often had guests over at birthdays and on Soviet holidays. Isaac was a sociable man. His colleagues liked him. His friends were producers and artists of the Maly Theater. We liked to spend our summer vacation at the seashore in Riga, Latvia. 

My sister married Valentin Estrovich, a Jewish man, in 1959. She bought a cooperative apartment for my mother and her son and lived with her husband. My mother died of a stroke in 1967. We buried her in the town cemetery where my father was also buried.

Recent years

In 1976 we moved to another apartment, which my husband received at work, and where I live to this day. 

My son Gleb studied at secondary school. He studied well. He became a pioneer and a Komsomol member at school. He didn’t take part in public activities. He had many friends and was the heart and soul of any company. He probably took after his grandfather. We aren’t religious and never observed Jewish traditions and our son wasn’t raised in the environment of Jewish traditions. 

Gleb failed to enter the College of Chemical Machine Building in Moscowthe first time. Perhaps, his nationality played a role. The following year Gleb had private classes with a teacher ofmathematics from that college. This teacher was also there during an exam. Gleb passed his exams, entered Moscow College of Engineers of Railroad Transport in 1975 and graduated in 1980. He never mentioned any problems regarding nationality in college. Upon graduation he got a job with the Moscow metro. He has worked in the laboratory of corrosion for many years. At night, when there is no traffic, they inspect the track for corrosion. He joined the Party at work for the sake of his career. He wasn’t an active party member. All he did was attend meetings and pay his monthly fees. His membership was over at the beginning of perestroika 35. By the way, my son was the only member of our family, who became a party member. Neither my father, a former Bolshevik, nor my mother, a former Menshevik, ever joined the Communist Party. 

My son got married in 1980. His wife Irina Charskaya is a Jew. He met her at school. Their son Vitali Verkhovski was born in 1981. My son divorced his wife twelve years ago. She fell in love with another man, who emigrated to Canada. She followed him there alone. So, my grandson stayed here with his father. He finished 13 years of school and works in a bank. We never thought he would go to live there [in Canada]. My daughter-in-law’s cousin went on a visit there and took my grandson with her. When they arrived Vitali’s mother insisted that he stayed in Canada. It wasn’t his wish. He studied here in a good school where they learned English. I believe he would have got a higher education if he had stayed, but there in Canada it is very costly and besides, he isn’t eager to get it. My grandson has lived in Canada with his mother for eleven years now.

Well, I think emigration is a positive thing, but not always. My relative,my husband’s niece Inga Levit, followed her children and moved to Israel. She is better off there, but she regrets she had agreed to move there. I think it’s a good thing there is Israel, but if you take European countries Israel is like a backyard. A number of our acquaintances moved to other countries from there. I’ve never traveled abroad. In 1980 I got an invitation to hold a speech at a conference in France. I obtained a passport and got tickets. But at the last minute I wasn’t allowed to travel there. Again, the reason was my nationality.

I retired in 1989 at the age of 71. My boss had retired before I did and his replacement didn’t respect my accomplishments and honors. My former boss even said once, ‘You need to understand that Rachil and I were organizing things here, you just barged in’. I didn’t like working with him. It happened so that my boss died on the day I left my job. Actually, nobody pushed me to quit, but I couldn’t work with a person like my new boss.

I retired during perestroika. Perestroika didn’t bring anything good into our life. We lost all our savings that we had made for old age. Our society divided into the classes of rich and poor. My pension is too small to lead a decent life. It’s too bad that my husband and I have to rely on our son’s support when we had worked hard all our life. When my husband fell ill he needed expensive medications and medical care. If it hadn’t been for my son I wouldn’t have managed. 

My husband fell severely ill in 2000.
I had to take care of him. It was exhausting.
He died in 2001. We buried him in the town cemetery near the graves of our relatives. 

I think Isaac and I had a good life. We were different and had different professions.
However, we didn’t have major disagreements.
Although I earned more than my husband it didn’t disturb me.
My husband was an interesting individual. 

Now I don’t work any more. I receive a pension of 3129 rubles, approximately $100 USD. It’s not a lot of money.
My son Gleb supports me. The Jewish Charity organization ‘Helping Hand’ provides medications for a certain amount of money. 
They also send a cleaning woman once a week. I’m not a member of any Jewish organizations. 

I don’t know Jewish traditions, but I identify myself as a Jew: I’m a Russian Jew. My father and mother are Jews and that is my nationality as well. I wouldn’t want things to be otherwise. I had problems in this regard, but it was the political situation in the country that allowed it to happen. I suffered a lot from having a Jewish surname, but I’m not ashamed of having it. I became a Doctor of Sciences and a respected person in my sphere regardless of any obstacles.

Glossary:

Zhenia Kriss
Kiev,
Ukraine
Interviewer: Zhanna Litinskaya
Date of interview: November 2002

Charna Kriss is an intelligent and sociable woman. She lives with her husband, Isaac Gragerov, in a nice spacious apartment. She is very ill and can only walk with two sticks, but she is very sociable kind and hospitable. She likes to talk about her occupation, science and the medications that she developed. It's a pleasure to talk with Charna. One can feel that she has had an interesting life full of events and accomplishments.

Family background
Growing up
During the War
After the War
Glossary

Family background

My mother, Sima Kodrianskaya, came from Makarov, a small town in Kiev province [50 km from Kiev]. It's a district town now. Before 1917 its population consisted of Jews, Russians and Ukrainians. There were synagogues and churches. During the Great Patriotic War 1 many Jews were exterminated by the fascists, and the rest of them moved out of town after the war. The only information I have about my mother's parents is that her father's name was Yankel Kodrianskiy. I don't know my grandmother's name, or my grandparents' occupation, or what kind of life they had. None of their children had any education - (they were all craftsmen -) so my mother's parents must have been very poor people. They died in 1905, one after the other, when my mother was 10 years old. My mother never answered any questions about my grandparents. It was probably too hard for her to recall them, or she probably couldn't remember much considering her age when they died. After they died, my mother was raised by her older sisters and brothers.

My mother's older brother, Zeidel Kodrianskiy was born in 1885 and he was a laborer. After the Revolution of 1917 2, when the family moved to Kiev, he took on a job as a loader in a store. His wife died in the early 1930s. During the war Zeidel's sons, Monia and Zinoviy, went to the army, and his daughter, Malka, and her family lived in the vicinity of Moscow. Zeidel couldn't go into evacuation, and he didn't want to either. He had severe eczema. His body was covered with abscesses and wounds. He was confined to bed. On 29th September 1941, when the 'zhyds [kikes] of Kiev' were ordered by German command to go to Babi Yar 3 and were shot there, Zeidel stayed at home. He didn't know anything about the order, and besides he couldn't walk. After a few days Zeidel's Ukrainian neighbors - they  had become policemen during the fascist regime and were drunk -) dragged the poor man down into the yard, beating and whipping him until he became quiet. They left him dying in the dust of the yard. Our neighbors told us this story. They watched the incident but were afraid to come to my uncle's defense and stop the murderers.

My mother's second oldest brother, Shloime, born in 1888, was a tailor. He was a quiet man and spent day and night working on his sewing machine. His wife, Hava, helped him with his work. They had two small children. During the Civil War 4, when the Whites 5, Reds 6 and Greens 7 raged in Ukraine, my Uncle Shlome was killed by bandits. Hava and the children moved to Kiev almost immediately after his murder. I don't know what happened to them after that.

My mother's third brother, Gershl, born in 1890, had three children: two daughters, Rachel and Charna, and a son, Munia. Munia was at the front during the Great Patriotic War. After the war he moved to Leningrad and married a Russian woman. Gershl, his wife and his daughters were in evacuation during the war. After the war they returned to Kiev. Gershl died in the early 1960s. Rachel and her children live in America, and Charna lives in Kiev.

I didn't know my Aunt Beshyva very well. She was my mother's older sister and died before the Great Patriotic War. My mother's other sister, Nehama, died during a pogrom in Makarov in 1918.

As far as I know my mother's brothers or sisters didn't go to the synagogue. They weren't religious, and they didn't observe any traditions or celebrate holidays. They were very poor, so poor that they couldn't even give my mother a home and food when their parents died. Getting education was out of the question. My mother had to become a servant: she washed floors, did laundry and looked after the children of richer Jewish families. Her masters treated her well, though. They were mostly distant relatives or acquaintances of the family. After a few years Shloime took my mother into his family. She became his apprentice and helped Hava and him with their work. During that horrific pogrom, when Shlome was murdered, Hava, her children and my mother were hiding in a haystack near town. After the pogrom my mother moved to Kiev with Hava and the rest of the family. In Kiev they rented a very small apartment in Podol 8. My mother lived with them for several months. She met a clerk from a wood store - Haim Kriss - whom she married in 1919.

My grandparents on my father's side, Pinhus and Rukhl Kriss, came from the small town of Sidelkovo in the north of Ukraine, near its border with Belarus. I don't know what my grandfather did for a living in Sidelkovo, but in Kiev, where he moved to at the beginning of the 20th century, he owned a wood storage. This was solid business because wood was always in demand, and he could provide well for his family. After the NEP 9 was over the authorities expropriated his facility. My grandfather was declared a nepman and deprived of his electoral right. He didn't get another job. My grandfather Pinhus was a very religious man. He spent his days studying the Torah and Talmud at home. He went to the synagogue in Podol every day where he had his own seat. They followed the kashrut in the family and celebrated Shabbat and all the Jewish holidays.

My grandmother Rukhl was a housewife. They had seven children: six daughters and a son, my father. They were all born in Sidelkovo, but lived in Kiev from their early childhood years. They got education at home. My father's sisters and my father were moderately religious. They tried to observe the main rules and traditions. They only went to the synagogue on holidays, but they prayed regularly and celebrated all holidays at home. They didn't follow the kashrut, though. They spoke Yiddish at home, but they all knew Russian.

My father's older sister, Rosa, born in 1888, was a housewife. Her husband, Yufa, was a clerk. During the war Rosa, her husband and their daughter, Asia, were in evacuation. Their son, Anatoliy, perished during the war. Rosa died in the middle of the 1960s. Asia lives in Saint-Petersburg.

The next child in the family was Clara Waisberg (her family name). Her son, Munia, perished at the front during the war in the 1940s, and her daughter, Beba, who was very ill in evacuation, died shortly after the war. Clara died in Kiev in the early 1950s.

The next sister, Hana, was born in 1892. She was well educated and read a lot, the only problem was that she was deaf. She therefore didn't work and lived with one of her sisters. She lived with us for a while, too. She was single and died in the early 1970s.

Pesia was born around 1897. Pesia was written in her passport, but everybody called her Lena. She was the next child after my father. She graduated from a medical institute. During the war she worked in the hospital in Fergana, Uzbekistan. She died in the middle of the 1950s. The next child was Enta, (whom everyone called Lyolia). She worked as a conductor in streetcars in Kiev. She died in the middle of the 1960s. Lena and Lyolia were single. They both lost their loved ones to the war.

The youngest child, Olga ((Golda in Yiddish),) was born in 1905. She wasn't very young any more when she got married. Her husband perished during the Great Patriotic War, and her baby died on the train when they were on their way into evacuation. She didn't marry again. Olga died in Kiev in the middle of the 1970s.

My father, Haim Kriss, was born in Sidelkovo in 1893. I don't know what kind of education he got. (I believe, he only had classes with his tutors at home), but he was a pretty educated and intelligent man. He worked as a clerk at his father's wood storage. He had to know the basics of this business to do his work well. My parents met in the store when my mother came to buy some wood.

They got married in 1919. It was at the height of the Civil War, and they only had a small wedding with their closest relatives. But it was a traditional Jewish wedding with a chuppah at the synagogue in Schekavitskaya Street. This was one of the biggest synagogues in Kiev, a beautiful two-storied brick building. Although my parents weren't religious they had no alternative. They had to obey their families' wish and accept all religious rituals to be performed at their wedding, according to the rules that have been observed over centuries.

My parents rented a tiny apartment, (with one small room and a kitchen,) in Podol. I was born in this apartment on 23rd February 1920. I was named Charna at birth, but I didn't know my real name until the middle of the 1980s when I obtained a copy of my birth certificate. My parents called me Zhenia, and I was sure that my real name was Evgenia [Zhenia is affectionate for Evgenia]. In 1922 my brother, Froim, was born.

Growing up

My earliest memories go back to the time when I was five. My father was also declared a nepman and deprived of his electoral right - just like my grandfather. It was terrible that nobody wanted to employ him. He had to work as a loader or cart man for the rest of his life, even though he was an educated and intelligent man. It was hard physical work and he needed to be strong.

My father grew up in a religious family and observed Jewish traditions. I remember him sitting by the stove in our apartment, putting small pieces of pork fat on sticks and frying them over the fire. He kept saying, 'If there is a God, he is smart and understands that I have to eat pork fat to be strong, and that I need to be strong to keep my job, because if I loose it my kids will die'. This was his only breach of Jewish rules. He had a tallit and tefillin that he put on to recite a prayer. He prayed in a corner of the room every morning. We celebrated Pesach, Chanukkah, Purim and Rosh Hashanah in our family. My father didn't fast before on Yom Kippur, though. It would have been too hard for him.

My grandfather Pinhus or my mother's sisters usually invited our family on big holidays, because we were very poor, and my mother didn't have money to cook a festive meal. My grandparents lived not far from where we lived. I remember our parents asking us to be quiet when my grandfather conducted the seder rituals at Pesach. He was a serious man and couldn't bear any disturbances during religious rituals. I never saw my grandmother sitting down quietly. She was constantly doing something: cooking or treating somebody to a meal, washing or cleaning. She was thin and always wore a shawl. She obeyed her husband. I cannot remember any delicacies in their house, but there was always sufficient food, even if there wasn't any meat or fish. My grandfather died in 1935. I know that he was buried according to Jewish tradition. I remember a number of men with beards and payes, wearing black hats and black outfits, who prayed several days after my grandfather's funeral. My grandmother Rukhl died in 1937.

We lived a very poor life. My father worked until late carrying heavy loads. When he came home he was very tired and went to sleep. My mother sewed at home. I assisted her doing minor tasks. My mother had a hard life, but she was a very nice and kind person, she sympathized with other people and always tried to help them. She also supported Hava, Shloime's wife. She made clothes for her children and often sent me to take little treats to them. My mother had no education, but people liked her for her kindness. My mother was a good singer. We lived in the basement of the house and there were often people near our windows listening to my mother singing while she was doing her work. She sang Jewish and Ukrainian songs and Russian ballads. Once a stranger came in, charmed with her singing. He told her that she had a wonderful voice and could enter a conservatory and that he would help her to do it. My mother declined telling him that she had to support her husband and raise their children.

My parents spoke Yiddish at home. My father intended to raise us religiously, although he violated Jewish rules every now and then. Only boys were given education in Jewish families and when my brother turned five our father hired a teacher for him to teach him Jewish laws, traditions and rituals, and the Talmud and the Torah, at home. But the teacher's efforts were fruitless. Froim wasn't successful in his studies. I was in the same room and tried to explain tasks to him, but he told me that studying always made him feel sleepy. Our playmates in the yard were Young Octobrists 10 and pioneers, they sang merry patriotic songs and played ball. All this seemed so much more interesting and important than boring religious studies. We were growing up in an atheist surrounding, and my father realized that he wouldn't be able to turn my brother into a faithful Jew.

In 1930 my mother had another baby, Inna. Inna was born with Down syndrome and couldn't speak or walk until she was four years old. My parents gave her a lot of care. They loved her dearly and took every effort to get any possible treatment for her. And, she survived!

I started school when I was seven. It was a Russian lower secondary school - (seven years of studies) - that soon became a higher secondary school (with ten years of studies). There were Jewish schools in Kiev, but my parents believed that I would avoid language problems in my further education if I went to a Russian school. Our school was housed in several buildings. At first it was in a mansion that housed cultural associations of foreign countries, and then in the building of the cultural center until they built a new building near the hospital for workers [eit was a Jewish hospital before the Revolution of 1917 and now it is a regional hospital]. In 1928 my brother began to study at the same school.

I had a few Jewish classmates. The other children in my class were of various nationalities. We were all friends and our teachers were nice to us. I enjoyed studying and finished school with honors. I was an active pioneer and, later, a Komsomol 11 member. I was secretary of our school Komsomol unit. I conducted Komsomol meetings, arranged competitions between different classes, worked on improvement in studies and arranged the collection of waste paper and scrap. I took part in district and town Olympiads in chemistry, physics and mathematics. In 1937 my portrait was on the Board of Honor for the most advanced people in our neighborhood. I was very proud of it. This board was located in the park planted by pupils of our school, in front of the Rus cinema. We celebrated 1st of May and the Day of October Revolution Day 12 at school and attended parades. We enjoyed singing Soviet songs. We didn't celebrate Soviet holidays at home. However, my friends liked to get together at my home after parades where my mother treated them to delicious pies that she was the best at making.

Only my mother's cooking skills helped us to survive the famine of 1932-33 [famine in Ukraine] 13. By that time we were living in a one-bedroom apartment in a two-storied building. We had moved there in 1930, after our house was pulled down to create a construction site for the Arsenal Plant [the biggest military plant in Ukraine]. There was a kitchen and one room in our new apartment. The toilet was in the yard. There was a stove in the kitchen for heating the room, which my mother also used for cooking. During the famine my mother made pancakes from potato peels, and we also had sunflower seed wastes. Once my mother bought some cutlets at the Lukianovskiy market near our house. She bought them for our father, who needed some meat to be strong enough to work. My father had them and afterwards heard rumors that those cutlets were made of human flesh. He was sick for a whole week after he heard this. We sometimes got buns and small pies at school. They were brought to school from the Arsenal Plant and the cable plant that were supporting our school. Several times a military unit, located near our school, invited us to their canteen where we had delicious soup. It was so great to have a bowl of soup at that time.

This period was very hard for my father. He was haunted by two feelings for his whole life - the feeling of guilt towards his wife and children and the feeling of fear. My father felt guilty that he couldn't provide better for us, as he was actually deprived of the right to have a good job he deserved and received a miserable salary instead. This feeling of guilt became stronger during the famine. He believed that it was his fault that Inna was born an ill baby. He thought it had happened because his wife didn't get enough food when she was pregnant. As to his feeling of fear - he couldn't sleep because he feared that authorities would recall that he had been declared a nepman and would put him into an even worse situation.

In the late 1930s, during the period of arrests of innocent people [the so- called Great Terror] 14, my father didn't sleep at all. Every night he said 'goodbye' to us in his thoughts fearing that he would be arrested. Fortunately, nobody in our family was arrested - we were too insignificant for the authorities. But the nightmare of people being arrested and the suffering of their relatives was all around us. There was Lukianovskaya prison across the street from our house, and a shipment railway station from where trains full of prisoners were sent to prisons and camps was just nearby. Prisoners' relatives came to our garden and our house begging us to let them stay. They were hoping to see their loved ones for the last time on their way to the station, escorted by security guards and watch-dogs. We often saw prisoners boarding trains. Militia often came to our house to tear people away from our place. I felt sorry for these people, but I believed that they must be true 'enemies of the people' if they were arrested. Some lecturers and students vanished from the university where I studied. Our favorite teacher in physical culture, Benesh, was arrested. He was a Hungarian and a very educated and intelligent man. He vanished just like so many others.

After finishing school with honors in 1937, I entered the Faculty of Chemistry at Kiev State University without taking exams. When I was a first- year student I became a member of the Komsomol committee of the university. I was responsible for cultural and social activities. I arranged lectures, issued a wall newspaper and had lots of errands to do. I had a nice group of friends. We got together at my friend Ida's place. Most of us were Jewish. I especially liked one of them - Isaac Gragerov, a third-year student. We were fond of theater. Our favorites were the Red Army Theater and the Ivan Franko Ukrainian Drama Theater. There were Soviet performances glorifying the Soviet way of life and communism. Sometimes there were classical performances, but they also had a touch of Soviet propaganda against capitalist society. We also went to the cinema. Of course, those films and performances were of patriotic subjects, but the actors were very good. I liked reading most of all. We had a neighbor that worked at the Lukianovskaya prison. His name was Nikolay Bereg. He arranged a permit to the library of Lukianovskaya prison for me. It turned out to be a very good library. I borrowed great books from there: books by Russian and foreign writers and many historical books. I found it strange that the prison had such a wonderful library, because the inmates weren't even allowed to read.

We [Komsomol members] were educated people and had information about fascism and about the war, which was a real threat to European countries. We were aware of Hitler's views and saw the film Professor Mamlock 15. But I got really frightened when the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact 16 was signed. Although the official propaganda stated that it was an assurance against Hitler's aggression, I thought it was very dangerous to come to any agreement with fascists and that the signing of this pact was a precursor of war in itself.

In 1939 a one-year course for reserve nurses was established at the university. I was secretary of the Komsomol organization and was responsible for enrollment to this course. The best way was to be the first to enroll and I did so, although I was scared of everything related to medicine: injections, blood or dissection rooms. All girls in our group followed into my footsteps. I was very good at theory, and at training classes my friends were giving injections and applying bandages for me. After finishing this course we received certificates that said we were reserve nurses. We also had civil defense training at which we were taught to use gas masks and put out firebombs. In general, the country was preparing for a war.

During the War

But the war caught our people unawares. I was in the town of Rubezhnoye, Donetsk region, where we [fourth-year students] had training at the chemical factory, when the war began. We headed home immediately. Trains were overcrowded, and it took us a while to get home. People were going back from business trips and vacations to reunite with their families. I stayed at home for two days. We were sent to harvesting in Poltava region. At that time many people thought that the war was going to be over soon and that it was just a terrible confusion and our army would win. We, students, understood that harvesting was our important contribution.

We worked at Lemeshovka village [120 km from Kiev]. Our group of girls sorted tobacco leaves. We were to hang tobacco leaves on poles in the sheds and cut smaller leaves. Once I heard a man's voice calling my name. It was Isaac Gragerov. He was an army recruit already and had stepped out of his march while on the way to a training camp to find me and say 'goodbye'. My friend Ida Mahagon was in love with him, and I decided to take him to her. Isaac was a reserved man. He had never told me about his love, but this time he looked at me and said, 'Zhenia, it's war and I'm going to the front. I've come to say goodbye to you.' And he stressed this 'to you'. I understood his feelings then, but I didn't feel the fear that we might never see each other again. I said 'goodbye' to Isaac, and he ran to catch up with his unit. This happened in August 1941.

After a few days it became clear that the front was moving closer. We could hear explosions and the roar of war. I went to the central facility of the collective farm, where we were working, looking for our fellow students. It turned out that our rector, Gusko, lecturers and some students had left for Kharkov a few days before, forgetting about us. That was when I got scared! We didn't have any documents or bread cards. The other girls sent me to the university in Kiev, as I was the leader of our Komsomol unit. It never occurred to me that it was dangerous to go alone, and none of them offered to keep me company. I felt it was my duty to take care of my friends. I reached Kiev by taking trains whenever possible and going on foot.

I came home. The ceiling in the kitchen had fallen down after a bomb explosion near our house. There was a note from my parents on the table. It said that Froim had gone to the front and that they and my sister had gone into evacuation. My father wrote that they would try to reach Fergana where my father's sister Lena 0was working at the hospital. I walked to the university. There was military training in the yard. Some students that were not recruited to the army were preparing to join the Territorial Army. I saw Aunt Rosa's son and my cousin, Anatoliy Yufa. He was blinded in one eye by a slingshot when he was a child and was unfit for the army. Anatoliy took part in the defense of Kiev with a group of volunteers from university. Almost all of them perished. Anatoliy returned to the city, which was already occupied, and was hiding in an attic where his schoolmate had taken him. Shortly afterwards this same schoolmate reported him to the Germans, and Anatoliy was shot at Babi Yar.

In August 1941, when I came to the university, I obtained evacuation documents for the rest of the girls, bread cards and cards for 400 grams of candy. Before leaving Kiev I went to see my Uncle Zeidel to take him with me. He refused to leave. He couldn't even move, because his whole body was covered with abscesses.

I went to Lemeshovka by changing from one train to another. My friends were waiting for me there. We went to Kharkov on foot. On the way I walked until my feet were covered in blisters and couldn't go on. I decided to wait for a train at the railway station of Lemeshovka. My friends left me again. My best friend Ida Mahagon said, 'I understand that we cannot leave you here, but I'm too scared to stay. If we get captured by the Germans we won't be able to escape'. I stayed alone on the platform at nighttime. I was lucky. A train full of soldiers arrived. They pulled me inside, and soon I caught up with the girls again. Changing vehicles we reached Kharkov on the third day. It became clear there that the university was preparing for evacuation in Kzyl-Orda.

Kiev was occupied, and it was clear that the Germans were coming to Kharkov. Other girls and I went to the mobilization office to volunteer to the front. We were told that students had to continue their studies and weren't allowed to recruit. I found Isaac's relatives in Kharkov and told them that I was going to join my parents in Fergana. I left the address of the hospital with them for Isaac. We still didn't believe that the fascists would go too far in our country and we, 12-13 girls, headed to Konstantinovka in Donbass where a brother of one of the girls worked as chief engineer at the chemical factory. We were hoping to get a job there. In Konstantinovka we only met this man's wife with her baby. She told us that he had been recruited to the army, and the factory was getting ready for evacuation. We helped her to get packed to go to her relatives in the country. Then we went to the railway station.

Changing trains we headed to Kzyl-Orda where we knew the university was going to evacuate to. We slept in railway cattle-cars. We were dirty, freezing and starving. We got off near the town of Engels in Saratov region [1,250 km east of Kiev]. It was the capital of the German Volga region. The town was empty. Nice and clean houses were empty. We were struck by this emptiness. We didn't know that the Germans had been deported to Kazakhstan, just like some other nationalities that the authorities had found suspicious, 13 as soon as the war began. They didn't have time to pack their luggage and left all their belongings behind. We washed ourselves in one of the houses and found some clothes. There was nobody to ask permission to take the clothes, so we changed and moved on.

After about three weeks we had covered another 300 km on passing vehicles or on foot and reached Kzyl-Orda at night. Kzyl-Orda was a small town in a desert in Kazakhstan, Middle Asia. Its population was Kazakh. Kazakh people had no education and led a patriarchal way of life. We fell asleep on the railway platform. I woke up at night and saw a moving whitish tape. I took a closer look and saw that these were lice. I woke up my friends. We left the station and fell asleep in a park nearby. It got very cold at night, and some of us fell ill. The girl whose brother we looked for in Konstantinovka had a high fever, and we took her to hospital. I left the most precious thing that I had with me - my mother's woolen shawl - with her.

We went to the town which was located about 20 km from the railway station. We found out that the university wasn't going to open for a while, because it was difficult to find sufficient facilities for both the Kharkov and Kiev universities in such a small town. I decided to go to the place where my parents were. I asked my fellow students to notify me as soon as the university would begin to operate. I covered over 800 km to Fergana on foot and any transport, train or a vehicle, driving this direction.

I found my parents and sister in Fergana. They lived in a small plywood hut that had served as a shed for silk worms. My father's sisters also lived nearby. Aunt Lena worked at the hospital. There was a hospital deployed at the Kuwasai station near Fergana, and Aunt Lena found me a job as a nurse there. Soon the hospital was converted into a mobile military hospital and sent to the front. Near Kharkov the train was bombed, and I was scared of the horrors of the war. Survivors and personnel moved to Markelan, which was not far from Fergana. I had a small wound on my right leg, but I recovered soon and returned to my duties.

The hospital became a typhoid hospital. Our patients were soldiers and officers. I had to learn how to give injections, dress wounds and assist doctors - I had to do everything that I had been so afraid of doing before. The thing was that only Valia Shulman and I had some medical training. The others working there were girls that had just finished school. I became a member of the Communist Party in this hospital. It was easy to become a party member during the war. They admitted all people that had been at the front. I wished to belong to the advanced part of society, to be a communist, to fight the enemy. There were a few girls, overwhelmed with the feeling of patriotism. The leader of the party unit conducted a meeting where he handed our party membership cards over to us without any special ceremonies. We took an oath to be patriots and defend our motherland.

One evening I bent over a Polish patient and felt a bite on my forehead. It turned out to be a typhoid louse. Shortly afterwards I fainted. I had typhoid with complications: pulmonary edema, encephalitis and phlegm on the leg that had been wounded. The doctors were going to amputate my leg, but fortunately there was a talented surgeon from Leningrad in this hospital, whose wife and child had perished in the blockade of Leningrad 17 some time before. He performed a surgery on my legd and saved it.

I received quite a few letters from friends while I was ill. There was one from Isaac. There was so much love and care between the lines of this letter that I didn't even care to answer letters from other young men. I understood that Isaac Gragerov was the gift of my life. After about two months I resumed my work duties, although I was so weak that I fainted every now and then. Then I received a letter from the university, inviting me to come back to resume my studies. I wanted to continue my studies, but I felt sorry to leave the hospital. I had a discussion with the director of the hospital, and he promised to notify me as soon as the hospital would be ordered to the front again.

I arrived at Kzyl-Orda a month before New Year's Eve of 1942. I settled down in a hostel, passed my exams and took to my diploma thesis. I also worked at a shop established by professors of the university. I defended my thesis. Its subject was the generation of spirits from wastes of Kzyl-Orda rice. At that time I received a letter from the director of the hospital telling me that they were to be sent to the front. He also specified the time when their train would be passing Kzyl-Orda. Letters took a long time to reach their destination in wartime, and it turned out that their train was to arrive at Kzyl-Orda half an hour after I received the letter. I ran to the station to catch the train. I didn't have any documents with me, and they didn't have the right to take me along without documents. I asked the conductor to keep the train for two hours for me to get my documents. When I came back the train was gone. I was awfully upset and still have the feeling of hurt and loss. I worked in Kzyl-Orda for a few months when I got assigned to the position of head of laboratory at the iodine and bromine factory on Chiliken Island in Turkmenistan. My friend wrote a poem about our life in Kzyl-Orda that I still keep. It is an accurate description of our life there.

Some time we shall have a cup of tea and will recall like an old anecdote the brew we had at the hostel in the year of 1943 that we shall remember. The weather so freezing that even dogs tried to hide away. Macaroni soup once a day that was hard to get. And bread that was so little that we could feel no taste of it. Two spoons for the four of us and one bed for two. An oil lamp on a dark evening in the fall. Porridge with melon on Sunday, spiced with smoke for misfortune, And Zhenia's ballads in the evening, oh, yes, she does sing well. And her concert gets straight to the sole especially when the stomach is empty. We read Green before going to bed and Kuprin books aloud, And had a life with no makeup, no holiday drunkenness or wine. We were sober after parties and discussions, We drank tea from shaving sets and ate bread that we had saved. Some time at tea, under a lampshade where it is as bright as on the brightest day, We shall recall the brew in the hostel and make a mention of our friendship with a kind word. .

I arrived on Chiliken Island in a fisherman's boat. We came across the Caspian Sea from Krasnovodsk to this island - now it's a peninsula. There were iodine deposits and deposits of other chemical elements on Chiliken. In the 1930s a big factory was constructed there. It wasn't a big island. There were just a few villages, two or three stores, one school and an iodine-bromine factory. The majority of the population of this island worked in this factory. They were Turkmen. They were very poor people that had no education, but there were also employees from other areas. There were also few of us that had been sent to this factory on assignment upon graduation from higher educational institutions.

There was sand on this island, clear seawater and bright sunlight. There was one saxaul tree, and local schoolchildren came to look at it to see what a tree looks like. I stayed in the hostel. Although there wasn't enough drinking water and bread, no books, theaters and cinemas, I recall this period of my life with pleasure. There weren't enough qualified engineers at the factory, and I had to conduct training classes in mathematics, chemistry and physics. I was also elected secretary of the Komsomol unit of the factory. I was responsible for amateur clubs - dancing and theatrical groups and choirs - to make our dull life more colorful. We cooked at the hostel in the evenings and had meals together.

There were eleven other tenants in my room in the hostel. These girls were of various nationalities and came from different areas of the country, but we got along well. We supported each other and shared all food that we had. My job assignment lasted three years. I was a good employee and after three years had passed my management was very reluctant to let me go. My manager promised me promotion and further transfer to Moscow, but I dreamt of seeing my beloved Kiev again. I hadn't heard from Isaac for a long time. I had no information about him and was hoping to see him in Kiev. I had to make a plot. I had a friend, former partisan, David Shakhnovskiy. He had been in love with me a while ago. He went to my management in Moscow and said that he was my husband and wanted his wife back home. They let me go, and I returned to Kiev in 1946. It was in ruins after the war, but how I longed to see my city!

After the War

My parents and my sister had returned to Kiev from Fergana a month before I did. Our house had been destroyed by a bomb and they were living in the kitchen with our distant relatives. I moved in with them. Later a room in a shed in the same yard got vacant, and my parents moved in there. It was a small hut but all of us - my parents, my sister, my brother and I - lived in it. My brother was a war invalid and after some time he received an apartment from the plant where he worked.

In 1946 food was rationed. I began to look for work after I returned. I had received a small allowance when I quit my job on Chiliken Island, but I was spending it rapidly. My nationality - (it was called Item 5 18 -) was in my way wherever I went. When I went to inquire about a vacancy I was told there was one, but after I left my documents it turned out that there was no vacancy any more . It went on like this for a while. Once I visited the chemical laboratory at the Arsenal Plant asking if there was a vacancy. I was refused. When I left the egress checkpoint I saw Isaac. 'What are you doing here?' I asked him. 'Waiting for you,' he replied. He was a post-graduate student in Moscow and was working on his thesis. When he came from Moscow he found my parents, and they told him where I was. We hugged each other and went for a walk to the banks of the Dnepr River.

We got married a few months later. We had a civil ceremony and started moving my belongings to Isaac's parents, who had an apartment in a house within the area of the leather factory. We were detained by a drunk militiaman that thought we were thieves carrying somebody else's belongings. We had to spend some time at the militia office. They let us go after they clarified the situation, and when we returned home there were guests waiting for us to celebrate oure wedding. That's how our family life began.

Isaac got a job at the Institute of Physical Chemistry at the Academy of Sciences. It was so difficult for me. I finally got a job as senior lab assistant at the Department of Organic Chemistry at the Silicate Institute. I didn't like it. I managed to get the position of junior scientific employee at the Institute of Non-Organic Chemistry. After a few weeks the director of the institute called me and said that it was a mistake to employ me as junior scientific employee and that if I wanted to stay with them I had to accept the position of senior lab assistant. This was at the onset of anti-Semitic campaigns that became a state policy in 1948-49. [This was the so-called campaign against cosmopolitans.] 19

While working as senior lab assistant I prepared my thesis. But this took place at the height of anti-Semitism in 1952. My tutor Efim Grinein, a Jew, was fired. Nobody wished to even accept my thesis for review. I prepared another thesis under the leadership of Professor Fialko and defended it in 1956. I became candidate of sciences, but I had to work as senior lab assistant for ten years. I had many publications and students who were working on their thesis. But whenever I addressed the director of the institute, asking him when I would be promoted to the position of junior scientific employee he got embarrassed telling me that the time would come.

In 1966 I finally became a junior scientific employee then a senior scientific employee and, finally, a leading scientific employee. I prepared five candidates of sciences and worked on the development of new medications, based on compounds of metals with nucleic acids. I retired in 1997 when I turned 77. I broke my hip and became an invalid. My former students call and visit me. They come to see me or ask my advice.

I have been happy in my personal life. Isaac and I have two children: our daughter Irina, born in 1948, and our son Alexandr, born in 1953. My parents were helping me raise the children. My father wanted to go to work after the war, but we didn't allow him to. My parents lived with my brother and his family. My mother died in 1967, my father in 1970.

My brother Froim was married, but he didn't have children. After the war he graduated from the Kiev Polytechnic Institute. He was a talented engineer. He worked at the Kiev Relay and Automation Plant for many years. He died in 1999. My sister Inna lived in my brother's family after our parents died. I supported her buying her clothes and necessary medications. Inna was a very kind person like all people with Down syndrome. She died in 1991.

Our children, Irina and Alexandr, followed into our footsteps. They wanted to become chemists. It was next to impossible for Jews to enter higher educational institutions at that time in Kiev and they went to study in Moscow. Irina graduated from the Faculty of Chemistry at Moscow University. She married her fellow student Yuri Malitin. Irina and Yuri live and work in Kiev. They have two children: Andrei, who graduated from the Faculty of Biology at Kiev University, and Alexandra, who studies in the 10th grade of the lyceum at the Kiev Polytechnic Institute.

Alexandr entered the Technical-Physical Institute in Moscow. He became a specialist in molecular genetics and defended his thesis. During perestroika in Ukraine in the 1990s, when financing of scientific research in Ukraine was reduced dramatically, Alexandr went to work in America. Now he works on the development of new medications and manages a big scientific department. I am proud that he is my successor: I also dedicated my work to the development of medications that people need so much. Alexandr worked in New York, Chicago and Washington, and lives in Seattle now. Alexandr's wife is an architect, and his daughter, Masha, studies in art school. She has had personal exhibitions and dreams of becoming a designer.

My husband and I have visited our son in America. Of course, we miss him, but we don't want to leave the country in which we have lived all our life. I have never been religious and never identified myself as a Jew. My husband, I and our children have always been Soviet people, patriots of our country. We always liked to celebrate Soviet holidays. We've had friends of various nationalities. We liked to get together and sing beautiful Soviet songs. We've read a lot and attended theatres, art exhibitions and concerts.

Unfortunately, I've never been to Israel, but I've read a lot and watched TV programs about this wonderful country that suffered a lot in the past. I follow up all news and events in Israel. The situation is terrible considering all the deaths of innocent people and children. I do hope that the situation will improve and people will live in peace in Israel. I wish them happiness.

There is a number of Jewish organizations in Ukraine. There are Jewish newspapers and all this has become interesting to me. Unfortunately, we cannot attend lectures or concerts due to our health condition. We read Jewish newspapers and watch the Yahad program 20 on TV. Hesed provides assistance to us. We find it wonderful that Jewish life has revived in Ukraine.

Glossary

Anna Lorencova
Prague
Czech Republic
Interviewer: Pavla Neuner
Date of interview: July 2003

Anna Lorencova is retired but still very active, also in various Jewish associations. She has a lively memory and is a good story teller.

She lives close to the city center in a nicely furnished apartment near the famous Prague Vinohradske Theater.

In the room we are having the interview I see her computer which she learnt to use as well as the Internet.

Anna Lorencova is good-looking and she is also a very nice person.

• Family background
• Growing up
• During the war
• Post-War
• Glossaries

• Family background

My granddad on my father's side was called Filip Weinstein. He lived in Ceske Budejovice, where there was a large predominantly German speaking Jewish community. He was a commercial traveler, and I think that his mother tongue was German.

We didn't go there very often and I don't know whether they were religious. His first wife, my dad's biological mother, died quite early on, so I only got to know his second wife. She was called Sofie Weinsteinova and was born in 1874. In 1942 she was deported to Terezin 1, where she stayed until the end of the war.

After the war she lived in a Jewish old people's home at the Hagibor 2 grounds in Prague, and we used to visit her there. That is where she died. My granddad died before the war, back in the 1930s. He is buried in the Jewish cemetery in Ceske Budejovice.

My grandmother on my mother's side was called Berta Schulzova; her maiden name was Kohnova. She was born in 1875, probably in Konstantinovy Lazne, where her family lived. I can't remember my granddad. His name was Arnold Schulz; he was born in 1865 and died in 1928 in Palupin.

They lived on an estate in Palupin, which is a village at the end of the Czech-Moravian highlands, about 20 kilometers from Jindrichuv Hradec. The estate was bought in 1884 by my granddad's father, Vilem Schulz.

My grandmother was religious and she often prayed. On Fridays there was always Sabbath dinner with barkhes and they observed the other important holidays, too. Palupin probably didn't offer the best conditions for religious observance, because the Schulzes were the only Jews there.

It was a small village with about forty houses, including a small two-class school and a little church. In the land registry books, all the property owners in the estate were referred to as 'church wardens'. This was the case even when there was a Jewish family living on the estate. My great-granddad, granddad and uncle always supported the church and the adjacent cemetery.

Although my grandmother lived in Palupin after she got married where no-one probably spoke anything else but Czech, she never really learnt the language. When we were children she spoke to us in bad Czech, which we found very funny. Despite this, she enjoyed a great deal of respect from the other villagers.

I don't know how educated she was, but she was certainly a wise woman. She kept a large household and had servants; a large amount of bread was baked and butter was churned every week and there were always lots of chickens in the yard. It was a potato-growing region and, besides the estate, which included land under crop, woods and ponds, there was also a distillery where potatoes were processed.

And there was also a small place for making spirits, wine and fruit juices. There was a small ornamental garden by the house and a large garden a bit further on, where they grew mainly black and red berries for wine-making and so forth.

My dad was called Richard Weinstein. He was born in 1896 in Ceske Budejovice and came from a German-speaking family. At home he spoke German and Czech with my mother, but because my brother and I went to Czech schools, we spoke only Czech at home.

My father studied medicine and worked all his life as a doctor. He was a person with a great sense of humor. A lot of his patients were children; when necessary he would remove their tonsils or polyps and so forth. He was great with them, for he joked around, did magic tricks and knew how to amuse them.

His humor came out mainly when he was with the family and among friends, but otherwise he was quite a withdrawn person. He was not very tall; he had a lot of hair. He was a Jew and felt like he was a Jew. They went to the synagogue on traditional Jewish holidays, but I think that this was mainly in keeping with tradition rather than being religious. My parents got married in 1921 and then moved to the town of Most.

I wouldn't want to say how my dad was as a doctor, but children loved him and he would always have a chat with his adult patients. I can remember two incidents that he used to mention. One of his patients was an elderly gentleman who had lost most of his hearing.

There weren't the facilities in those days and there was little else my dad could do for him. So all he did was to blow through his ears and give them a clean. He then asked him to make an appointment for a checkup so he could see how things were shaping up.

As the gentleman couldn't hear very well, my dad pointed to the calendar to show him when he was supposed to come back. The patient said to him: 'Doctor, my eyes are ok; it's my ears that aren't so good!' Then there was another patient who couldn't hear well and found it so unpleasant that he couldn't hear what was being said around him that it drove him to despair.

My dad turned to him and said: 'How old are you?', and he replied: 'Seventy-five,' and to that my dad said: 'Well, you must have heard enough things by now, it's always the same stuff anyway.' In his old age, my dad, too, couldn't hear very well. He had a hearing aid but he didn't wear it, for he followed his own advice.

My dad worked in the mornings and went home at midday for lunch. He would then lie down for twenty minutes and after that he would go back to the medical office, which was in the house where we lived. After work, it was almost a ritual for him to go to the cafe 'Zum Weissen Ross' [German for 'The White Horse'] where he would meet his Jewish companions.

Whenever I needed something from him, this is where I would go to find him. They met there regularly every workday. My dad was not a member of any political party; I think he was completely apolitical. He read the Prager Tagblatt [Prague German newspaper], as did the majority of the local German-speaking Jews. I can remember very well how he listened to Hitler's speeches on the radio in the 1930s and shouted very rude German insults at him.

My mom was called Gertruda Weinsteinova, nee Schulzova. She was born into a German-speaking family in Palupin in 1904. She graduated from the German lyceum in Jihlava, which was a kind of secondary school for girls. She met my dad in quite an interesting way. Mom was one of five children, four daughters and one son, who was the future owner of the estate.

The daughters had to get married and the most important thing of all was for the future husband to be a Jew. But they lived in a village where there was no chance of meeting any. It was, therefore, the duty of an uncle who had studied agriculture in Ceske Budejovice to bring along Jewish boys to see the sisters in Palupin.

But because they were girls from the estate and no riffraff, the boys had to be graduates or at least young students. That was the way it was. The youngest sister, Marta died single and the eldest and most beautiful aunt, Aninka, found her own husband. The two middle sisters really wanted to marry boys whom their uncle Arnost had brought from Ceske Budejovice to Palupin. Aunt Elsa married a lawyer, Pavel Klein, and my mom married my dad.

Before we were born, my mom helped dad out in the medical office, but later on she was a housewife. Mom came probably from a more religious family than my dad, but she wasn't religious herself. She was different from my dad - more practical, and more sociable, too. Ladies would come round to our place quite regularly to play bridge; they spoke German and they were all Jewish.

We used to have various different guests round, though. But as far as I can remember, the closest friends of my parents were all Jews. My mom occasionally played the piano. I learnt to play the piano with my brother, too, but I didn't stick to it.

My grandparents' only son, Uncle Arnost [Schulz], was born in 1898; he was the second oldest of the siblings. He graduated from an agricultural school in Ceske Budejovice and took charge of the estate after my granddad's death. My grandmother transferred half of the estate over to him and kept the other half.

He married Aunt Vera Hellerova, a Jewess from an estate in Zalesany. They had two daughters, Sonja and Gita. Sonja was born in 1929, survived Terezin and, after the war became an actress. She died at the age of 29.

Gita was born in 1933, also survived Terezin, and immediately after the Soviet occupation and 1968 [see Prague Spring] 3 finally emigrated with her husband and daughter to Germany. She died in Munich in 1992. Aunt Vera also left for Germany to stay with Gita and her family. She died in Munich, just short of her 90th birthday.

Uncle Arnost didn't survive the Holocaust. The Germans seized the estate in 1939 and arrested him. Via the Brno Kounic 4 track he was sent to Auschwitz where he perished in 1941. At that time, his mother, wife and children were still at home in Palupin.

They were deported to Terezin in May 1942. Beforehand, Uncle Arnost had tried to emigrate to Argentina, but that was conditional on him being a Catholic. The whole family had to get baptized in the little church in Palupin. But his attempt of emigration failed. It was too late already.

Many Jewish people got baptized at this time but according to the Protectorate law they were taken still as Jews [also see Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia] 5. My grandmother was transported to Terezin where we met. She didn't work there and was transported later to Auschwitz where she died in 1944 in the gas chamber.

The eldest of the Schulz children was my mom's sister, aunt Anny Pernerova, who was born in 1897. Her husband was an engineer and also, of course, a Jew. Aunt Anny was an extremely beautiful woman. They had two children, Pavel, who was born in 1923, and Kamila, born in 1926.

Kamila, who they also called Mimi and Mimuska, was the cousin I got on best with. Uncle Walter Perner was a manager at some production plant. They used to move house a lot. In the end, they were living in Jihlava, which was probably the first Czech town that was supposed to become 'judenrein' 6, which meant that all the Jews had to move away.

The Perners then came to Prague. I assume that my uncle worked for the Jewish community, because they stayed in Prague for a relatively long period of time. In 1943 they were arrested after being informed on. Uncle Walter and Aunt Anny were sent to the Small Fortress 7 and then to Auschwitz, where they perished in the same year.

In July 1943 Pavel and Kamila were put on a transport to Terezin and in October 1944 were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where they both perished. I can't imagine that either of these beautiful young people would not have got through the selection or have been rescued. I think they must have been branded 'RU' - 'Rückkehr unerwünscht' [German for 'return undesirable'].

[Editor's note: The Gestapo used this label, usually for political prisoners. They were sent to the concentration camps and were not supposed to return; it was an indirect death sentence.]

Another daughter of the Schulzes was Aunt Elsa Kleinova, who was born in 1901. Her husband was Pavel Klein, a lawyer. He was always in the center stage whenever people got together, for he was a terrific person and had a great personality. He may have been a good lawyer, but he was what they called a lawyer for the poor, so he didn't get on too well financially.

They lived in Prague. We would sometimes come over from Most and pay them a visit. They had two children, Tomas, who was born in 1928, and Marta, born in 1929. They weren't sent to Terezin until the summer of 1943, seeing that my uncle worked for the Jewish community.

After the war, Marta told me that she envied us for being in Terezin, as it was so terrible in Prague at that time - there was no-one to talk with and they weren't allowed to walk on the sidewalk, in fact they couldn't go anywhere [see Anti-Jewish laws in the Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia] 8.

Things were so unpleasant that she was looking forward to being among her own. Once in Terezin Marta spent the whole time lying in the tuberculosis ward, as she had fallen ill. They were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau in December 1943 on the second transport of that month and then stayed in the so-called Czech Family Camp.

After its liquidation in July 1944, they were all subjected to the selection process. Uncle Pavel and Tomas didn't return and we never found out the circumstances of their deaths.

Marta and Elsa were rescued, but it was all very dramatic. They got to the Stutthof 9 camp where they were sent off to work. Together with other women, they dug trenches in the vicinity of Gdansk. It wasn't a proper camp, for they lived in tents and when they finished work in one spot, they just moved on to another.

They survived under wretched conditions. The Red Army liberated them in January 1945, by which time they were in a desperate state, sick and frost-bitten. They received treatment at a military hospital and were then sent on a hospital train to the center of the Soviet Union, where they stayed for a long time in various camps, along with captured Germans [POWs].

Later on, a few of the young girls there were sent home with them, while the others remained incarcerated. Marta returned in November 1945 on her own. Aunt Elsa didn't return until 1946.

After my mom, my grandmother had another daughter, Marta, who was the youngest. She died single; I think it was in 1928. Apart from her, I knew all of mom's siblings and their families quite well, because we used to spend all our vacations together in Palupin.

My brother is called Hanus Hron, and he was born in Teplice in 1925. As a boy he was always inventing and making things, connected with perpetual motion and so forth. He actually made a radio set, known as a crystal receiver - a tiny thing with earphones.

There was a lot of sound interference, but it worked and it gave him a lot of pleasure. After the war he finished his schooling and became an external student at the School of Mining and Smelting in Ostrava. He worked for a long time in the Ostrava area, mainly at the Trinec Iron Works. He now lives in Nejdek; he's retired and has three adult children. He's still as inventive as he has always been. I'm glad to have him as a brother.

• Growing up

At home we were brought up in the conviction that we were Jews. That was paramount. The company my parents kept was completely Jewish. We kept certain traditions, but we were probably not as religious as most other Jews in Most or in the rest of Bohemia. We were assimilated and didn't stand out from other people in terms of our appearance or way of life.

The main holidays were observed and we went to the synagogue, but we didn't have kosher food at home. We also celebrated Christmas, but not as a Christian festival with carols - we just had a Christmas tree, had carp for dinner and gave each other presents. There were always a lot of children from the family who would meet up at my grandmother's house in Palupin.

Often, the children of distant relatives would also turn up there. There were usually at least 10-12 children and at Christmas we always put on some kind of program, performed little dances, sang and recited poems.

My parents fasted on the main holidays [the interviewee is referring to Yom Kippur], but I can't remember if we tried to fast as children, too. On Sabbath my grandmother would light the candles. We didn't celebrate Chanukkah, but I can remember celebrating Pesach. It sometimes overlapped with the school spring holidays, which was when we went to Palupin, where we had a proper seder meal and my brother would ask the mah nishtanah.

As children we took part in Jewish parties during Purim. The Jewish community in Most was led by Rabbi Halberstamm and 'Oberkantor' [German for 'chief cantor'] Mueller. There wasn't a yeshivah or a mikveh there, at least I don't know of any. My parents were, of course, members of the Jewish community.

There was quite a large synagogue in Most; it was burnt down during Kristallnacht 10, but we weren't there when that happened. We didn't go to the synagogue only on the main holidays, but also on the less important ones. It was actually a social occasion.

Although my father was a doctor, we weren't very rich in any way. The house in which we lived in Most was probably acquired from my mom's dowry. It was an old house, but it was in the town. On the first floor was the medical office, waiting room and sitting area, because my dad had outpatients and did minor operations, such as removing tonsils.

Also on the first floor was an apartment for the janitor, who was employed by us. Opposite our house was a theater, behind which was a beautiful park that we used to stroll through. The town of Most had a population of about 30,000. It wasn't exactly a pretty town, as it was full of opencast mines and the air was always full of dust.

When we were coming home from our vacation in Palupin, we could feel the dust in the air by the time we reached Bilina. And whenever it got foggy in Most, you couldn't see through it at all because of all the fly ash. My dad moved there probably because there wasn't an ear- nose-and-throat specialist, and he was looking for a place where he could come in useful. We lived on the second floor in a four-bedroom apartment.

We had a dog, an Airedale Terrier, called Bobik. We paid for him dearly, because he was always running out of the house and straight on to the road and he took delight in jumping up at cyclists. From time to time, my parents would have to pay for the cost of trousers that had been torn and other such damage. Our dog slept in the entrance hall. My dad took him for walks every day and I went with them very often.

The apartment had a dining room, a lounge for guests, a master bedroom, a children's room and a kitchen. In the dining room there was a large table with a tapestry that my mom had sewn herself. In the corner was a large tile stove. The dining room was efficiently furnished and was connected with the kitchen.

Cooking was done on a traditional coal-fired range. We didn't have two sets of dishes. In the bathroom was a bath stove, which had to be fired up for there to be hot water. In the lounge was a so-called American slow-burning stove, which was very modern in those days. It was a low cast-iron stove with small windows covered with mica plate in the doors, so you could see the flame. It was heated with anthracite, which apparently was the most expensive fuel as it was processed from coal.

It really was slow-burning, because if it was turned on at the beginning of the winter, it would stay on until the spring. In addition, there was a round conference table with armchairs and a bookcase, which consisted mostly of German books. There was also a grand piano. The floor was carpeted.

In the lounge were three doors which led to the dining room, bedroom and entrance hall. In the children's room I can remember there was a cabinet under the window where we kept our toys. In the doorway that led from the bedroom was a wooden swing that was suspended on hooks.

There was parquet flooring throughout the apartment, except in our room which had linoleum. It was real drudgery cleaning the parquet; mom spent a lot of time on her hands and knees there, even though we had a maid, Mrs. Mana. They scrubbed the floor with special wire and soapy water, which had to be rinsed loads of times and took ages to dry. After all that, they polished the floors with a hard brush.

In Most we always had lunch and dinner together at home. On Sundays I would go with dad to a special candy store for delicious meringue, which we usually had after Sunday lunch. In our house we had to eat everything there was, for the general rule was that what didn't get eaten for lunch was served up for dinner.

I didn't like cumin soup, but I always ate a little bit of it, just to show willingness. The food we had was rather stereotypical. Very often it was beef, vegetables and potatoes - and beef soup. We also had cumin soup quite often, usually with meatless lunches. We ate very little pork at home; we had a lot more of it in Palupin, where pigs were actually bred. There were days when we had pancakes or potato goulash. I can also remember my favorite, stuffed peppers, beans in a creamy sauce, and lungs.

For our vacations we went to Palupin, which has a superb landscape - gently rolling hills, beautiful woods and lots of ponds. Uncle Arnost was involved with rearing pigs, which he brought in from England. They were special pigs that had little fat on them and lots of meat. On the estate there was a large amount of cows and several pairs of horses.

Uncle Arnost rode horses and had one or two riding horses. We usually got together in Palupin during the vacations; when all eight of grandmother's grandchildren got together, we were quite a large group. The estate was pretty spacious, so when we all met up there, there was room enough for us all. There was also a bathroom with bath stoves.

In Most I attended a splendid new elementary school, the Masaryk School for Girls, which was about a fifteen-minute walk from where we lived. I enjoyed school and I found it easy on the whole, except for handiwork and composition and exercises.

Apart from poems, we didn't have anything at all to learn at home. I think that it was easy for the other children, too. I had a lot of non-Jewish friends. In our class there were only two Jews, me and Alice Kohnova, who lived on the outskirts of town and wasn't one of my friends.

My main friends were Vera Ottova, whose parents had a candy store, and Jarmila Borovcova, whose dad was the manager of an insurance company, I think, and Vera Gregrova, who lived near me and who I sometimes walked to school with.

I wasn't aware of any signs of anti-Semitism at school, but there was certainly tension in Most between Czechs and Germans. Lessons were held only in the morning; in the afternoon there was only religious education. I took piano lessons and enjoyed singing.

I read various novels for girls, as well as my brother's books. We subscribed to the children's magazines Mlady hlasatel [Young Announcer] and Srdicko [Little Heart]. I went to the Scouts [see Czech Scout Movement] 11 and exercised at the Maccabi 12 and at Sokol 13 sports grounds, although I don't know if it was at the same time.

I never joined a Zionist organization. When we came to Prague and we didn't know anybody, I somehow turned up at a Zionist group meeting; perhaps my parents sent me there. I was only there once or twice; they were singing Hebrew songs that I didn't know, and it all seemed strange to me. In Prague, of course, we went to Hagibor, because we couldn't actually go anywhere else. From September 1941 we had to have the Star of David on our clothes.

In Most my brother attended the Comenius Elementary School for Boys, which was quite near where we lived. The high school was coeducational. I went there for about a week, in September 1938. That was just before the occupation of the Sudetenland 14. We were sent to stay with our grandmother in Palupin.

No-one knew how long it would be for, so at first we both went to the two-class school in Palupin, but we didn't belong there at all. That was just for a few days, before it was decided where to go next. We then went to the nearest community, Strmilov, where there was a council school.

We went to school by bike, but we only had one, so my brother would ride while I was sitting on the crossbar. On the way back I had to walk. For one thing, we didn't have lessons together, for the other, it was uphill almost all the way home, so the bike had to be pushed.

In the meantime, my parents had moved from Most to Prague, where we came to stay with them at the beginning of 1939. In Prague we didn't move up to the high school, but we both went to the council school. My brother later started an apprenticeship at the CKD factory [Czech-Moravian Kolben Danek, engineering company], but he wasn't allowed to complete it.

In the school year 1940-41, we were not allowed to attend school [see Exclusion of Jews from schools in the Protectorate] 15, so I completed the third grade at the Jewish school on Jachymova Street. There were excellent teachers there and the standard was high; I liked the Czech teacher Jirina Pickova the best. I didn't get to the fourth grade though.

The two third grades moved up to a single fourth grade, which was terribly overcrowded. In the fall of 1941 I joined a Jewish group, but I didn't stay long because we were deported in December 1941.

I can't recall any concrete manifestation of anti-Semitism in Most. I think that the people around my parents were apolitical. Although they came from German orientated families, my parents respected President Masaryk 16 because he had established the republic and Jews were grateful to him for fighting against anti-Semitism.

My dad employed a German nurse in his medical office, which shows that before Henlein 17 came on the scene, there was by no means any major animosity around. The nurse liked us, but all of a sudden she became a Nazi. I can't actually remember when, all I know is that it was talked about. But I think that she was at my dad's office until the time we left.

• During the war

As I mentioned earlier, my dad was an apolitical person, but he had some kind of 'Jewish radar' and when Petschek, in 1938, began to sell his mines in northern Bohemia, my dad decided that we should move away. [Petschek, Ignatz (1857-1934): German industrialist with considerable influence on the Czechoslovak economy.]

After the Munich Pact 18, when Germans occupied the border regions, we moved to Prague, where we lived in a small apartment on Hermanova Street. Dad was trying to arrange for us to emigrate to America. On the same street, a bit further down, on the second floor in a normal residential apartment, was a Jewish prayer hall where we would go sometimes.

As children, we didn't find all the anti-Jewish measures and restrictions as difficult as adults did, for we just adapted to things. When we were no longer allowed to travel by tram, we went to the Hagibor sports grounds by foot, although it was pretty far from where we were living.

My dad was no longer looking for employment in Prague. He was doing what he could to be able to emigrate to America, but it didn't work out for him. It was extremely difficult, for it required a lot of money, we weren't from the area and he didn't know anyone here.

Dad wasn't familiar with the local conditions and probably didn't have the right nature for this kind of thing, as he was actually a shy person. In short, our family didn't manage to emigrate. In the end, there were some people, perhaps acquaintances, who left for America. America required an affidavit, which meant some kind of surety.

Either you had to deposit a certain amount of money somewhere, or somebody had to accept liability for you. We didn't have anyone in America to help us, so our parents gave the relevant people nearly all their savings so that they would put down an affidavit for us.

And those people then sent word that they had lost the money. After that, there was no money and no possibilities left. Only Shanghai was still an option for Jewish immigrants. Dad managed to get there, traveling by train across the Soviet Union.

It took several months before he could arrange the necessary permits for us. He sent each of us the appropriate document, but by the time we got it, we weren't able to leave. In Shanghai my dad worked as a doctor.

When we came from Most to Prague, we moved into a new house that had been built in 1938 for employees of the National Bank. It was an entire housing block on Letna Plain [large plain in Prague, popular place for summer walks]; building work was still going on around it, but three houses were already standing.

Our house had a wide marble staircase, the apartments had modern facilities with electric cookers, the cellar had a modern laundry room with a washing machine, spin-drier and a drying area, and we had district heating. The house was situated in an area where a lot of Germans were living. Because it was a very nice house, Germans often came round to look at our apartment. That could have been the reason why we were summoned for deportation as early as 1941.

This is corroborated by the fact that when we returned, the apartment was empty, as German tenants had just moved out of it. In the summons to transport it was stated what we must, and what we must not, bring with us. Other families that went later were usually prepared, but we weren't.

My dad was no longer there and mom had decided not to leave our beautiful furniture for the Germans, so she swapped it for some old junk that belonged to another family in the house. She hid her jewelry and other items where various acquaintances were living and gave the janitor's family several suitcases, mostly full of clothes. When we returned, the janitor was no longer alive; he had been murdered by a German two days before the end of the war. He now has a small memorial plaque in the street.

The assembly point was in wooden buildings on the Trade Fair grounds near what is now the Park Hotel. It was just a short distance from our apartment, so we went there on foot. Various administrative operations and thefts were still under way at the assembly point. Identity cards, money and jewels, if people had any left, were handed over.

Out of fear, and out of defiance, people threw money down into the latrines. I think that house keys were also handed over and people had to sign various declarations legalizing all the robbery that was going on. For quite some time our accounts had been blocked, which meant that we could withdraw only a very limited amount of money.

We spent almost three days and, I think, two nights at the assembly point. Early in the morning, probably about 4am, we were taken to Bubenec Station, from where we left on passenger trains to Bohusovice. When we were seated in our compartment, an SS man appeared and called out our names.

We had to stand up, but the benches were so crammed that we could hardly squeeze our way out. The uniformed German then handed over a letter that my dad had sent mom. In Bohusovice the 'Transportdienst' [transport service] was already in waiting; young Jewish guys loaded the heavy luggage onto carts and we went on with only one bag each.

We were taken away to a 'Schleuse' [German, literally 'sluice'], which was a kind of sorting center. We were registered again here and then assigned to billets, the latter falling within the scope of the Terezin Jewish self- government.

At first we lived with mom in the Podmokly barracks, but after a short while we were moved to the Hamburg Barracks. At that time, in December 1941, Terezin was still inhabited by Czechs; not everything had been cleared out yet and people lived only in the barracks.

My mom volunteered as a nurse, so I lived with her in the nurses' room. It was pleasant there because we were living with mostly young, clean and refined women - all of them nurses. They had various shifts, so there was always someone to talk with. I was the only one who had no work to do, but I still enjoyed myself enough, being among the nurses.

They spoke about all kinds of things that I was very interested in, and they secretly smoked. Some of them were really strong smokers and they would swap cigarettes for food rations. I can well remember one of them in particular. She was called Hanka and was about 18 years old. She smoked so much that she exchanged a large proportion of her food for cigarettes and, as a result, was always hungry.

The nurses occasionally had an obligation - although it was perhaps to their benefit - to work in the fields; they would pick flowers, grass or ears of corn and use them later to decorate their corner of the room. I can remember one day when Hanka was sitting on a table, dangling her legs and she asked the other nurses: 'Do you think you can eat flowers?' 'Why not, after all, cows eat them and they live.'

But basically I didn't have anything to do and I was bored. A girl I had been friendly with came on the same transport as me. She was also called Hanka and she lived with her mom in the same barracks. We would often stroll together through the long corridors of the barracks or through the courtyard, thinking up ways of amusing ourselves.

Fortunately, sometime in the spring of 1942, the Jewish self-government set up a separate room in the barracks for girls, which was where we moved in to. We had a great supervisor, Kamila Rosenbaumova, who was a dancer. She rehearsed a program of recitation and dance with us, which was based on Nezval's poem 'Znam zemi blizko polu, znam divukrasnou zem...' [I know a country near the pole, I know an exquisite country]. [Nezval Vitezslav (1900-1958): Czech poet, dramatist and translator.]

The poem was in praise of the Soviet Union, and we recited it as a chorus or in combination with solo acts, and it had a kind of simple melody, a bit like a 'voiceband'. And as she was a dancer, she had shown us various movements to perform.

At that time, we also started to do work in the garden, the so-called 'Jugendgarten' [German for 'garden for youth']. It was a great achievement and the Jewish self-government did a lot for children by employing them. They no longer felt bored; instead they felt useful, they could be outside and, from time to time, they could nibble at vegetables when they were ready for picking.

By 1942 all the original inhabitants of Terezin had been moved out and the entire town had opened up. Jews moved in and occupied all the houses, and the transports kept coming. At that time, young peoples' homes were also being set up. The girls' home 'L 410' was situated next to the church. It was a three-story building, and the girls were put in separate rooms according to their age. We older children went to work during the day and when we got back we were attended to by a tutor. At first I was in room 29, where the tutor was Rozi Schulhofova. Plenty of interesting people, including professors, writers and musicians came to see us to give talks or to discuss different topics.

My brother lived in the Sudeten Barracks with the men. At first we weren't at all allowed to go there since we couldn't leave our barracks without a pass. After a certain period of time, it was arranged that girls under 14 could go to the men's barracks once a fortnight, provided they were accompanied, so as to see their dads.

I was 14 and actually didn't belong to that group, but my mom somehow always managed to push me through, so I was able to see my brother. Now and again, I would bring him the odd button and such like or I would stroll around the courtyard with my friend Jirka.

My brother was very skilled with his hands, so from the outset he was employed in the locksmiths' workshop. In 1944 he volunteered to join a group of artisans who were sent to do work in Wulkow, which was about 30 kilometers from Berlin.

They were to build timber buildings for the 'Reichsicherheitshauptamt' or RSHA - the Reich Security Head Office - which were intended for the RSHA archives and also for the Germans who were supposed to work there. The deportation list to the extermination camps was drawn up by the Jewish self-government. Because it was routine policy at Terezin not to split up families, my brother actually saved us from deportation throughout the time he was away.

The group returned to Terezin in the spring of 1945. We had been put on the deportation list at the beginning of 1942, which was when I was still living with mom in the Hamburg Barracks. Anyway, my mom put me to bed - actually we still slept on the floor back then - and somehow she arranged for a doctor she knew to say that I had scarlet fever, so we were crossed off the list.

None of the people on those transports ever returned. Later on, I was put on another deportation list, but I think that was when my brother was in Wulkow, so I was crossed off the list again.

In 1943 there was a typhoid epidemic in Terezin, which struck me too. It spread very quickly and an infection ward for those infected with typhoid was set up in the Vrchlabi barracks. They were long barracks rooms and because there were four or five girls between the ages of 15 and 16, we were put next to each other.

We were there for quite a long time, with severe diarrhea and, at the outset, in a state of semi-unconsciousness. When we finally got up, we were unable to walk. On my left was Ruzenka Voglova, with whom I established a friendship that has lasted to this day, even though Ruzenka lives in Israel.

When they let us out, we returned to house 'L410' and were put in a convalescence room, instead of being with the other girls. I then moved out with Ruzenka, and we stayed together until the fall of 1944, when she was sent to Auschwitz.

Apart from her and her grandmother, who stayed in Terezin, none of her family survived. After the war she lived with her grandmother in Zatec; at that time, we were hardly ever in touch with each other. In 1948 she left for Israel. But she has an apartment in Prague and she comes here regularly.

• Post-War

My husband was called Bohumil Lorenc, and he was born in Moscow in 1925. We met at the [Czechoslovak] Youth Association 19. He wasn't an educated person, but was extraordinarily intelligent and handsome. We got divorced.

I have two daughters, Lenka, who was born in 1951, and Eva, born in 1954. Lenka is a nurse, and she is married and has a son and daughter. Eva is an editor for a publishing house and has three sons, the youngest being 16. They both live in Prague.

We often see each other and we celebrate birthdays, Christmas and other occasions together. They weren't brought up in a religious way, but most of my friends are Jews and my children grew up together with their children and are still friends with some of them.

They were both known as 'Maisel Children' [named after Maisel Street where the Prague Jewish community is situated] in the 1960s, when the regime gave way a bit and allowed them to meet at the Jewish community center. Various talks and parties were held there. It was a strong bond and although many of them emigrated, they occasionally come from all over the world to meet up.

I myself didn't think about emigrating after the war. Instead, I joined the Communist Party [of Czechoslovakia] 20, as I believed in its attractive theories. In communism I saw a solution to the Jewish question. Even before the war I was inclined towards communism, for there was a kind of omnipresent salon communism about, especially in literature and the humor of Voskovec and Werich 21.

After all, even the son of one of the proprietors of the Brouk and Babka retail chain [commercial firm in Prague, later with branches in Ceske Budejovice, Ostrava, Brno, Pilsen and Bratislava] was a communist supporter. It was all in the air. I would have rather joined the party in Terezin, but communists had to conceal their identity back then. So I joined after the war - not straight away, surprisingly, but in 1946.

It was certainly disillusioning to see all the different kinds of collaborators as they brought out the flags and started to chant out the slogans. At that time, the Communist Party hadn't yet made its presence so visible. In the first postwar years there was still a relative degree of democracy; the Soviet army was here, but there was still a democratic government. However, the Communist Party already had quite a lot of power and support.

When the political show trials of Jews began in the 1950s [see Slansky trial] 22, however, we found out what it was all about. But I still couldn't drag myself out of it. They already knew that I didn't belong to the Party and we already knew that we didn't belong there, but we didn't find the courage to get out of it, so we thought that things should be resolved from within.

That is my own life sentence. It is a fact, though, that a young person who knew nothing and had no experience of life and had experienced World War II as a Jew, would have found it hard to resist the lovely idea of freedom for all people. And it took quite a long time before I understood that there was a fundamental difference between what was said and the way things were.

So I stayed in the Party until they threw me out, which happened in 1968/69, as part of the vetting proceedings at the Czechoslovak Radio [see Political changes in 1969] 23. But by then I had been going the completely opposite way for a long time. I once heard a story about a professor at the Faculty of Philosopy in 1948 who went out through the door and jumped in the air three times.

When asked what was going on, he said: 'They've just thrown me out of the Communist Party.' I did exactly the same thing, when I was thrown out - I jumped in the air three times.

I didn't experience any explicit anti-Semitism from any specific people after the war. Anti-Semitism over here was mainly linked to the state; I was dismissed from several jobs, for instance. The first time I got the sack I was still a 'faithful' communist, that was just after the coup of 1948 [see February 1948] 24.

I was working at the Secretariat of the Youth Association, but it was because of my bourgeois origin that they got rid of me. At that time they dismissed my brother and many of my Jewish friends from their jobs. A lot of Jews lost their jobs after 1948.

I had various jobs. After the war I made a big mistake in not going to a normal secondary school, but instead attending the photography department of a school of graphic art. I was employed as a photographer with the Skoda Company 25 for a while, and then for the afore-mentioned Youth Association, from where I was fortunately dismissed. At the beginning of the 1950s I worked at the City Library and then at an educational institution and at the Prague Information Service.

In the meantime I was an external student and, in May 1968, I entered and won a competition for a position at the study department at the Czechoslovak Radio. As I was in the process of finishing school and was about to take my final exams, however, I wasn't able to take up the post until July.

Then came the Soviet Occupation in August [see Warsaw Pact Occupation of Czechoslovakia] 26 and after that I got the sack. I was then taken on by the then Jewish State Museum, at a time when Dr. Vilem Benda was director. He was very kind, for he took on four people who had been fired from other jobs.

The exceptional and strange thing was that he took us on at a time when all cultural institutions had already been 'purged', normalized and given new directors. At the museum, the original director was allowed to stay on for a long time, which was why we got in there. In the end they got rid of him anyway and along came a new director by the name of Klima who thoroughly 'purged' the place.

At the beginning of 1974 I was taken on as a bookkeeper at the Housing Cooperative. I had never done bookkeeping before and had never learnt it properly, so they then gave the job to someone else and I became a secretary at the cooperative, which meant that I was a girl Friday, but I enjoyed it and I stayed there for almost twenty years.

We followed what was going on in Israel all the time. Some of my relatives went there after 1948, some just before the war, and many of my friends have emigrated there. I corresponded with my cousin Marta and friend Ruzenka for all those years. I didn't consider emigrating.

I thought about it a bit in 1968 but my daughters didn't want to go and we probably wouldn't have had enough money for it anyway. I've been to Israel many times, the first time being in 1969. The rest of the visits were after 1989.

I wrote various things and distributed Samizdat literature 27, helped out in the [Czech] Helsinki Committee 28, and so forth. As a family we were definitely persecuted by the regime. I was given the sack, my daughter Eva didn't get a university place in Prague; in the end she was taken on as an external student [not attending courses every day, only a few times a month.] in Brno.

A strange thing happened to me when I was working at the cooperative. The then chairman took me on when I had to leave the Jewish Museum, and he knew that I was a Jew. A Jewish woman had already been employed there before me.

When men from the StB 29 came to take away the typewriters I had been using for Samizdat, for a so-called mechanical examination, they paid him a visit and told him that I should be fired. But he stood his ground and said that he wouldn't do it. He then came over to tell me everything that had been said. It was a remarkably brave and rare thing to do.

In 1984 my dad died in Ceska Lipa, where he had been working as a doctor. My mom and dad got a divorce after the war. He didn't get remarried, but he lived in a very beautiful relationship with his companion, Maruska. My mom married again and worked all her life as a nurse; she even worked at the hospital after retiring. She died in Prague in 1988. I'm sorry that she didn't live to see the revolution.

We welcomed the revolution of 1989 [see Velvet Revolution] 30 with enthusiasm. My children went on all the demonstrations and even with toddlers on their shoulders. My entire life was changed by the revolution. The only thing I regret about the past is that our very many social contacts have disappeared.

In the past, we all did menial work but we had plenty of time for each other. Since the revolution everyone has got involved in different projects or tried to catch up on things, but all those wonderful social contacts have been broken off.

The Palupin estate was put under state control by the communists in 1948 and about seven to eight different owners alternated there with varied focuses of interest, from breeding ducks to breeding bulls. In the last 17 years prior to the restitution, it was known as JZD Strmilov Collective Farm. I went there with my children on vacation for all those years; we rented a cottage and one time the local authority even rented us three rooms in our own house.

My brother's family also used to go there. When my children grew up, my younger daughter wanted nothing better than to buy a cottage in Palupin, and when that didn't work out, they got one in the next village, which is about a kilometer away.

Very soon after the revolution we got our estate back as part of the restitution. It was in a very poor state of repair. We are trying to look after it, but it is very difficult. But at least our family can once again spend their vacations and weekends over there.

• Glossaries

Faina Shlemovich
Chernovtsy
Ukraine
Interviewer: Ella Levitskaya
Date of interview: August 2002

The family of my father, Moisey Shlemovich, lived in Zhvantsy, Kamenets- Podolskiy district, Vinnitsa region. My grandfather, Boruch Shlemovich, was born in Zhvantsy in the 1870s. I know very little about his family. His father was a tailor and my grandfather was helping him from his childhood years on. When my grandfather mastered this profession and could provide for the family, he married my grandmother, Beila Shlemovich. She came from Zhvantsy and was two or three years younger than my grandfather. She came from a poor family with many children. She didn't have a dowry, but my grandfather didn't care. They had a Jewish wedding with a rabbi.

The majority of the population in Zhvantsy was Jewish. They lived in the center of town. Ukrainians lived in the outskirts. They were farmers and kept livestock there, and they supplied food products to the town. Jews were craftsmen and traders. They owned all the stores in Zhvantsy. There was a small market in town, but every family had their own suppliers, who brought their products directly to the houses. There was no anti-Semitism. People were friendly with each other. There was a synagogue and cheder in town. My grandfather's neighbor was a melamed in cheder.

I remember my grandparents' house. It wasn't very big, but it was a solid stone building. There was a shed and a small kitchen garden behind the house. In front of the house there was a flower garden with two or three fruit trees. There was an annex behind the house, which served as my grandfather's shop. There was an entrance door in the center of the house. The house was divided into two parts. There were three rooms and a kitchen on the left, and a small store on the right. They sold clothes made by my grandfather. He had two or three seamstresses working for him. He was rather wealthy. My grandfather worked, and my grandmother was a housewife.

My father's family was religious. There was a synagogue not far from the house, and my grandparents went there on Saturdays and on holidays. My grandfather also prayed at home. He had his tallit and tfilntefillin. They celebrated Sabbath and Jewish holidays. The boys had their bar mitzvah at 13, and the girls had their bat mitzvah at 12. They followed the kashrust in the family, and so they had separate dishes for dairy and meat products.

My grandparents wore casual clothes. My grandfather had a small beard. My grandmother didn't wear a wig or a shawl. She usually wore her hair in a knot and had a beautiful hairdo on holidays. She only wore a shawl when she went to the synagogue. She liked jewelry and often wore some.

There were no Jewish pogroms 1 in Zhvantsy. Perhaps, because it was a very small town and thus didn't arouse the interest of bandits. Besides, local Ukrainians got along well with Jews. The Revolution of 1917 2 didn't change life in town dramatically. There were no rich people there, and the authorities took no interest in its inhabitants. My grandfather lost his savings. He was saving for the time when he wouldn't be able to work anymore. I remember going to the attic of my grandparents' home when I was a child. I saw boxes full of fabric shreds, old letters, old toys and many other interesting things. Once I found a box full of bank notes. I believed that I had found a treasure and called everybody up there. My grandfather explained to me that it was old tsarist money, and that he kept it to remember his stupid naivety.

I remember heavy furniture in the rooms and dark curtains covering the windows. I also remember a big family photograph on the wall showing my grandmother, my grandfather and their children.

My father was born in Zhvantsy in 1899 and his brother, Iosif, followed in 1903. In 1906 my grandparents had a daughter, Shprintsia, and their last child, Sarah, was born in 1910.

Iosif married a local girl from a rich family in Zhvantsy. When collectivization 3 began, Iosif's wife and her parents were deported to Siberia. Iosif loved his wife and, although he didn't have to, he followed her. They settled down in Novosibirsk.

Sarah had a love marriage. Sarah and her husband, Gersh Shnaiderman, a Jew, had known each other from childhood. They fell in love and got married. Gersh was a shop assistant. Unfortunately their marriage wasn't happy later. Gersh took to drinking and caused Sarah much suffering. Their first daughter died in infancy; later they had twin daughters. Sarah and her husband moved to Kharkov before the war.

Shprintsia, her husband, Aron Baron, and their children were living in Dunayevtsy back then. Shprintsia's husband came to Sarah and her husband, and they helped him to get a job in Kharkov. When the war began Sarah asked Shprintsia and her children to come to Kharkov, but Shprintsia refused. Aron went to Dunayevtsy to pick them up. Shprintsia, Aron and their two sons perished in the ghetto in Dunayevtsy.

My father's family spoke Yiddish to each other. They spoke Ukrainian to Ukrainians, but there was a noticeable Jewish accent. Only my father and Iosif spoke fluent Russian. Shprintsia and Sarah's Russian was very poor.

My father and Iosif studied at cheder, and their sisters were educated at home. There was a Ukrainian elementary school in Zhvantsy. All the children finished it. My father read a lot and studied Russian. He successfully passed his exams for the Russian grammar school in Kamenets-Podolsk in 1908. He lived in the hostel and came home on vacations. My father was the only one of the family to finish grammar school. Iosif entered the same grammar school in 1912, but he didn't finish it due to the Revolution of 1917. My father's sisters only finished elementary school. In the early 1920s the authorities established a collective farm 4 in Zhvantsy. My father was well educated and was offered the position of the chairman of the village council, the head of the collective farm. He got this responsible post, although he was only in his early twenties then.

My mother's family lived in Mohilev-Podolsk. It was a fairly big town at that time. There were brick and stone buildings, stores, a theater and a restaurant. More than 50,000 people lived in the town. There was a big market. Vendors from all the surrounding villages were selling their food products and crops there. There were many Jews in Mohilev-Podolsk. Jews constituted approximately half of the population. Basically, the inhabitants of Mohilev-Podolsk were craftsmen and farmers. All tailors and shoemakers in Mohilev-Podolsk were Jews. Jews also kept small stores selling food products, clothing, shoes, and so on. They lived in peace with the Moldavians and Ukrainians. There were no nationality conflicts. There was also a Christian Orthodox church. People in Mohilev-Podolsk respected the traditions of each other.

My grandparents came from this town. My grandfather, Haim Gilberg, was born in the 1860s. I don't know my grandmother's maiden name. Her first name was Inda, and she was the same age as my grandfather. They died before I was born, and the little I know about them is from what my mother told me.

My grandparents were religious people. They wore traditional Jewish clothes. My grandfather wore a long black jacket and a black hat. My grandmother always wore long black gowns and a wig. I don't know what my grandfather did for a living. My grandmother was a housewife. They had six children: Sima was born in 1890, Israel in 1892, Velvl in 1894, Reizl in 1896, my mother, Hana, in 1898, and Ilia in 1900.

My grandparents celebrated Sabbath and Jewish holidays and went to the synagogue every week. The boys studied at cheder and the girls were educated at home. They spoke Yiddish in the family, but all children also spoke fluent Russian. Mohilev-Podolsk was a pretty big town, and my mother and her sisters and brothers socialized with many young people. Of all my mother's sisters and brothers only her older sister, Sima, grew up to be religious.

My mother came from a poorer family than my father, but her family paid attention to giving education to their children. All the children finished secondary school. Sima and Israel studied at the Jewish school for eight years, and the other children studied at the Russian school. After school Israel finished medical college and became a nurse. Nurses didn't have the right to operate at that time, but they were qualified to prescribe treatment., etc. Velvl finished financial college and became an accountant. Ilia, the youngest, finished the same college. The daughters didn't continue their studies after school. My grandfather believed that women had to learn to do housekeeping and get married.

My mother told me how she met my father. In the early 1920s he came to Mohilev-Podolsk on business. He met my mother's sister Reizl, who was a very beautiful girl. My father fell in love with her, but she was engaged to a Romanian Jew from Bucharest, who owned several stores. I don't remember his name. My grandfather didn't want his daughter to break off her engagement and marry a poor man from a small village. He expedited his daughter's wedding. It took place in Mohilev-Podolsk, and on the following day Reizl and her husband left for Romania.

Mohilev-Podolsk was on the right bank of the Dnestr River. The newly-weds had to cross the river. They were to cross it on a boat. There was another boat crossing the river. A man and his wife, older people, were on board. In the middle of the river they decided to change places, lost their balance and fell into the river. My mother's sister Reizl swam well. She grabbed both old people and managed to reach the bank with them. My mother said that those were scaring moments when she was watching her sister from the bank helplessly. The brothers ran to get another boat, but it all took time. They were all so happy to see Reizl and the survivors safe on the river bank.

My future father was also there when this incident happened. He was comforting my mother. When it was all over they threw themselves into one another's arms. Afterwards they started seeing each other. After some time my father asked my grandparents to allow him to marry their daughter. In less than a week my parents had a civil ceremony in Mohilev-Podolsk. My mother's parents insisted that they had a traditional Jewish wedding, but my father was a Soviet official and couldn't have a religious wedding. My father had given up his religious views, and my mother was under the influence of his revolutionary ideas and became an atheist, too. My grandmother made dinner and the newly-weds left for Zhvantsy.

Reizl and her husband lived in Bucharest. Her husband owned a few shoe stores. His business was successful. The man rescued by Reizl turned out to be a popular jeweler in Bucharest. He had a beautiful set with emeralds made in his shop and gave it to Reizl as a gift. Reizl and her husband had two sons. The family was doing very well. Once Reizl injured her leg. It didn't heal. Her brother Israel went to see her. He told her that she had gangrene and needed surgery. She was afraid of seeing a doctor. When she went to hospital at last, it was too late. She had surgery, but the amputation of her leg resulted in sepsis, and she died in 1923 at the age of 27. I don't know anything about her husband or sons. She was buried in the Jewish cemetery in Bucharest, according to Jewish traditions.

My grandfather Haim died in 1922. My grandmother Inda lived two more years. A year before she died she went blind, which caused her a lot of suffering. My grandparents were buried according to Jewish rituals in the Jewish cemetery in Mohilev-Podolsk.

My mother's oldest sister, Sima, married an owner of fishponds from Bendery, Romania. Sima and her husband had three children. In 1940 Moldova joined the USSR. The Soviet power expropriated the fishponds of Sima's husband. Bendery was in Transnistria 5. Sima and her children were in ghetto in Transnistria until 1944. They stayed in Bendery after the war. Sima died in 1976. Her three children live in Israel.

My mother's older brother, Israel, lived and worked in Mohilev-Podolsk. He was a nurse, a surgeon and a very good specialist. He was very popular with his patients. He didn't ask for any money for his services from the poor and often left them some money to buy some food and medication. He was married to a Jewish woman from Mohilev-Podolsk. They had four children. Israel died in the 1970s. One of his daughters died; two sons and a daughter live in Israel.

My mother's second brother, Velvl, moved to Chernovtsy, which belonged to Romania then, after finishing financial college and in the 1920s. He worked as an accountant and later as an economist at a plant. He was married and had three children. He died in Chernovtsy in 1978.

My mother's youngest brother, Elia, moved to Kiev after finishing financial college. He and worked as an accountant at a metallurgical plant. He was married. His wife's name was Sheiva. They had five children. On 29th September 1941 the Germans shot their whole family in Babi Yar 6 in Kiev.

My mother's brothers and sisters grew up atheists. They studied in higher educational institutions. It wasn't popular to be religious at the time. Religious people were considered old-fashioned. Religiosity was ridiculed by society.

My father continued to work as chairman of the village council in Zhvantsy. My mother didn't work. She didn't want to live with my father's parents, so they rented an apartment first, and later my father received a dwelling. In 1923 they had a daughter. I don't know her name, because she only lived 6 months. I was born on 4th September 1925.

My mother didn't want to stay in Zhvantsy after I was born. She thought it was better for a child to grow up in a bigger town to have more opportunities to study. She left for Mohilev-Podolsk with me. My father visited her and tried to persuade her to come back, but she didn't want to. So in the end my father moved to Mohilev-Podolsk, too. He became human resource manager at the sugar factory. My mother didn't work. My parents rented an apartment from a Jewish family. The landlady's son was my best friend.

My parents weren't religious. They became atheists either under the influence of the revolutionary propaganda or because they had to adjust to the demands of the time. They spoke Russian with me. They sometimes switched to Yiddish when they didn't want me to understand what they were talking about. They didn't celebrate Jewish holidays, just the Soviet ones. Of course I knew that I was a Jew and about Jewish holidays, but I thought it was all a hopelessly outdated vestige of the past. Nationality didn't matter at all to me. On holidays and on Sundays we always had guests - my father's colleagues. My mother cooked and made cakes. I remember our landlords celebrating Chanukkah. Their children's grandmothers visited them bringing gifts and money. My father's parents lived in Zhvantsy and my mother's parents had died. Nobody came to see me. I cried and asked my mother why I didn't have a grandmother and grandfather, who would bring me gifts. So, my mother gave some money to the neighbor boy's grandmother. She brought it to me saying that she was my grandmother. I was a little girl and this made me quite happy.

When I was young my parents took me to Zhvantsy every now and then. Sometimes we stayed with my father's parents and sometimes with Aunt Shprintsia. She was married, and her husband was a clerk at the grocery store. He was a very nice man and theirs was a happy marriage. They had two sons, Israel and Berl, both older than me. Aunt Shprintsia and her husband were religious people. They celebrated Sabbath and Jewish holidays and went to the synagogue. Their sons studied in cheder, but neither wanted to go there. Israel, the older one, used to hide in the attic to avoid going to cheder. In the 1920s many children had atheistic ideas. My aunt followed the kashruts strictly. I remember that my father left me with my Aunt Shprintsia for a couple of days. I incidentally confused a spoon for dairy products with one for meat. 70 years have passed since then, but I still remember how angry my aunt, who was always so nice and reserved, got. She threw the spoons on the floor stamping her feet. Later she boiled the spoons for a long time and scrubbed them with sand and ashes before she used them again.

Once we came to Zhvantsy and my grandfather hired a cart and took us to visit my grandmother. She was ill and in a health center in the woods. We stayed with her a whole day. She was very weak. This was the last time I saw my grandmother. She died in 1932. She was buried according to Jewish traditions in the Jewish cemetery. My grandfather was very sad and lonely after my grandmother died. He often visited us in Mohilev-Podolsk. He was a very nice and quiet old man. He prayed quietly in the mornings and evenings and didn't force his way of life upon anybody else. He didn't tell me anything about Jewish traditions. I didn't ask him any questions either. I was just not interested. In Zhvantsy he often saw my grandmother's friend, who was also lonely. After some time my grandfather decided to marry her, but he died unexpectedly in 1935. He was buried next to my grandmother. My mother's sister Sarah got married for love. Sarah and her husband Gersh Shnaiderman, a Jew, knew each other from childhood. They fell in love and got married. Gersh was a shop assistant. Unfortunately their marriage wasn't happy. Gersh took to drinking causing Sarah much suffering. Their first daughter died in infantry and later they had twin daughters. Before the war Sarah and her husband moved to Kharkov. Shprintsia, her husband and their children were living in Dunaevtsy then. Shprintsia's husband came to Sarah and her husband and they helped him to get a job in Kharkov. When the war began Sarah asked Shprintsia and her children to come to Kharkov, but Shprintsia refused. Aron went to Dunaevtsy to pick them up. Shprintsia, Aron and their two sons perished in concentration camp in Dunaevtsy.

The famine of 1932-1933 [famine in Ukraine] 7 didn't have any effect on our family. My father worked at a plant and received food packages. We didn't starve. My mother made little pies and put them in my pockets for me to take them to other children in the yard.

I went to the Ukrainian secondary school in town when I was 8. Mohilev- Podolsk was a Jewish town, and about 80% of the children in my class were Jews. There were also Jewish teachers at our school. I remember Kleineschiffer, the teacher of physics. Physics was my favorite subject at school. There was no anti-Semitism before the war. I had Jewish and Ukrainian friends. We didn't care about nationality then - we were common Soviet children. I became a Young Octobrist 8 at school and then a pioneer. In the 8th form I became a Komsomol 9 member. I wasn't interested in it, really. I wasn't an activist. I wasn't interested. We celebrated Soviet holidays at school. We performed concerts for our parents. I sang in the school choir.

The arrests of 1936-37 [during the so-called Great Terror] 10 didn't affect my father. He was head of the department of personal records at the plant. Several individuals were arrested at the plant, but my father remained untouched. Now I realize how my parents were expecting an arrest every night. The lights were always on in their room at night. Sometimes I heard them talking, but they stopped when I came into their room.

In 1939 my father received a nice three-bedroom apartment from the plant in the center of Mohilev-Podolsk. We all had a feeling that life had just begun. I got a room of my own.

The occupation of Poland by Germans in 1939 and the Soviet-Finnish War 11 didn't affect us. They were far away and had nothing to do with us. I knew that the USSR was the strongest state and that nobody would dare to attack us. In June 1941 I finished the 8th grade. On Sunday, 22nd June 1941, we were expecting guests; my father's colleagues. My mother had been cooking the day before, and on that morning she went to the Jewish cemetery. She went to the graves of her sister and parents. On the way back she noticed people listening to the radio in the streets. She stopped and listened to the speech of Molotov 12. He announced that Germany had attacked the USSR without declaring a war. My mother came home in tears. That was how we first heard about the war. Kiev was bombed on the same day. Mohilev wasn't bombed then. Refugees from Bessarabia 13 were coming to Mohilev. People were crossing the Dnestr in their effort to escape. My mother took refugees home to give them some food. They stayed to wash themselves and relax before they moved on. My mother said that we might need to leave our home in the same way as those people did. Soon the bombing of our town began. Our neighbor boy was scarred stiff and became numb.

Mohilev-Podolsk was cut off from the railroad and an organized evacuation from the town was out of the question. We were encircled. The three of us left Mohilev-Podolsk on foot. We covered 30 kilometers every day. We didn't have any food for days. We only had little food with us and even less money. We reached Poltava after covering 800 kilometers. From there we went to Krasnodarskiy region by train, and moved further on because the Germans were approaching. My father wired his brother Iosif in Novosibirsk, and he sent us money for the road.

In Novosibirsk we stayed with Iosif for some time. My father's sister Sarah and her children were in Novosibirsk already. They had evacuated from Kharkov. Sarah's husband worked as a conductor at the railroad in Novosibirsk. Sarah told us about Shprintsia and her family.

My father got a job in Krivoschokovo, a suburb of Novosibirsk. He was site manager at the peat factory. He received a dwelling in the barracks, and we moved to Krivoshchokovo. After some time my father received an apartment in Novosibirsk and we returned there.

We didn't have any clothes with us. My father didn't have a shirt to wear to work. Iosif gave him some clothes. My mother and I had one dress between the two of us. When we washed it, the dress wouldn't get dry for a few days, and we had to stay at home. I didn't go to school at first for this reason. Later, when my father started earning more money, we bought a few clothes at the market.

Iosif went to the recruitment office day after day asking them to send him to thee front. He volunteered to the front in late fall 1941. He perished at the Leningrad front in 1943. My father didn't go to the military registration office. He was 42 years old and of poor health. Besides, he didn't want to leave us.

I went to work at the Sauna and Laundry Trust. I was only 16 years old, and I didn't have a passport, but they still hired me as a cashier. My mother got work at a canteen. Things were improving for us a little. I worked for a year and then decided to continue my studies. I went to the 9th grade. There were many evacuated children at school. Local children sympathized with us. I finished the 9th grade and fell ill with tuberculosis. I couldn't go to the 10th grade because I only got better in the middle of the winter. I found out that there was an institute where one could study by correspondence, and went there. After obtaining my certificate about secondary education I entered the Medical Institute in Novosibirsk. In summer 1944 I finished my first year.

In 1944 mass re-evacuation began. Almost all evacuated people left Novosibirsk before the summer. My mother said we had to go home to Movilev- Podolsk. Our trip home was safe. Our house had been destroyed. My father decided to go to Chernovtsy, where my mother's brother Velvl, lived. Chernovtsy hadn't been destroyed by the war. Shops were open, and there was plenty of food and goods. People treated Jews nicely in Chernovtsy. There was no demonstration of anti-Semitism. We felt at home soon. The local people told us that the atmosphere had been like that for ages. Jews were patrons of the arts and music. The area initially belonged to the Austro- Hungarian Monarchy, and then Romania. There was a Jewish school and hospital for poor Jews and a Jewish children's hospital in Chernovtsy before the war. There were 67 synagogues! At present there is only one synagogue in town. Velvl wrote to us that there were many apartments available in Chernovtsy. My mother stayed at her friend's in Movilev- Podolsk because we wanted to travel light, and my mother stayed behind waiting for us to return and move all our belongings. My father and I went to Chernovtsy to find out what was awaiting us there. My father's sister Sarah and her family stayed in Novosibirsk. Sarah died in 1984.

My father and I stayed with Velvl. My father got employed as human resource manager at the furniture factory. Velvl helped us to find an apartment, and we obtained all necessary documentation allowing us to live in it. We went to Movilev-Podolsk to take my mother to Chernovtsy.

After the war there was anti-Semitism in Chernovtsy, both in everyday life and on the state level. I intended to enter the 2nd year at the Medical Institute in Chernovtsy. I had my record book for the first year in the Novosibirsk Institute. I wasn't admitted - they told me I had to take entrance exams and start over again from the first year. I didn't remember my school program any longer and didn't take these exams. My father worked, and my mother and I did the housework.

In 1948 we heard about the establishment of Israel. We were very happy about it. I had a feeling that we had finally got a home. In the same year the campaign against cosmopolitans 14 began. The Jewish theater and school in Chernovtsy were closed. Later the Doctors' Plot 15 began. Many people understood that it was just a preparation for the next round of the persecution of Jews, but there were many others who believed in what they heard on the radio and read in the newspapers. There were horrible articles about doctors poisoning and murdering their patients.

Stalin died in 1953. One of our acquaintances put on her mourning clothes on the day of his death. Many people were saying that it was the end of the world and that life wasn't possible without Stalin. I didn't think so, but I didn't argue with those who thought otherwise.

My daughter was born in 1950. I don't want to talk about her father. It's important that she came into this world and brought happiness into our family. I called her Inna after my father's mother Inda. These names sound alike.

Inna started to study at a Russian secondary school in 1957. She was an ordinary Soviet child. She was a pioneer and a Komsomol member at school. There were no Jewish traditions in our life back then. She studied at the secondary and music school. She studied successfully in both schools, and I was proud of her success.

My father died in 1959. My mother received a miserable pension, and I was only paid a small allowance for the child. I had to go to work. I got a job as a registrar in the polyclinic in 1962. They didn't pay much, but we could manage with the money I made. I worked there until I retired. I was trying to do everything I could to support my daughter and my mother.

In the 1970s the mass emigration of Jews to Israel began. I sympathized with those who were moving there and felt a little bit envious. But I didn't even think about emigration. I had to take care of my ill mother and my daughter. If there had been a reliable man in my life, I would have gone. But I was alone. I was afraid to take the responsibility of making a decision about departure.

Inna finished music school in 1965. She entered the music college. She also finished lower secondary school and went to the evening higher secondary school. She finished school with a gold medal and college with honors. She and I went to Leningrad. My daughter wanted to study at the Conservatory in Leningrad. She passed her exams well, but she wasn't admitted. She went for an interview, and the manager advised her to come again next year. We understood that it was next to impossible for a Jew to enter the Conservatory. Inna went to Kamenets-Podolsk by bus: it was about two hours' drive from Chernovtsy. She entered the Pedagogical Music College there. My mother and I stayed in Chernovtsy. My daughter finished college and got a job at a music school. During her studies she got married. Her husband's name is Alexandr Grinberg; he's a Jew. They didn't have a wedding. We couldn't afford it. I had to turn every penny twice. My mother needed expensive medication, and I had to support my daughter. My grandson was born in 1972, and my granddaughter in 1980. My mother died that same year.

My daughter and her family left for Canada in 1992. She asked me to go with them, but I didn't want to be a burden to her. So, I live alone here.

I cannot imagine what my life would be like if it weren't for Hesed. I don't go out, so I only know about the interesting events at Hesed from what people tell me. I receive nursing services and medical aid. A doctor from Hesed attends to me, and I get free medication. People bring me Jewish newspapers. I read them with interest. Volunteers visit me. I enjoy their visits. If it weren't for them I would be sitting here all alone. I receive food packages, and it's a big support for me because my pension is very small.

My daughter calls me and writes letters. She invites me to come and live in Canada. I'm ill and cannot go, and she cannot afford to come on a visit. However, I don't feel so lonely now thanks to my friends from Hesed.

Glossary

Martin Glas
Prague
Czech Republic
Interviewer: Lenka Koprivová
Date of interview: August - November 2006

Mr. Martin Glas spent part of his childhood in Terezin 1. As he says, he himself didn't experience anything terrible, but despite this, he describes those years as the most horrible in his life. He is not only thankful for having survived the war, but also feels a deep responsibility towards his friends that didn't have such luck. Thus, when I approached him as to whether he wouldn't tell me something about his life, he didn't have to be asked twice and began a long, long story... He was an excellent interview subject. Not only was his approach that he must convey as much as possible, but thanks to his having an excellent memory, he also enriched the story with minute details. And because he is an immensely perceptive person, who what's more isn't afraid of talking about his feelings, a very human story came to be...

Remembering my childhood
My family background
My pre-war childhood
Terezin
"Heim 236"
My friend Benno Pulgram
Living together with my family at Terezin
Liberation
My time at the convalescence home
Our post-war life
My wife
Glossary

Remembering my childhood

I have to admit that fate has been kind to me. Not only because seventy years ago it allowed me to be born, when at that time my mother had tuberculosis and doctors weren't pleased to see her expecting another child. But mainly because I survived the concentration camp. And finally, also because it made a part of my mental facilities: the feeling that I'm glad to be in this world, that I always need to be looking forward to something, and that I grew up with the notion, as it were, that the meaning of life is to endeavor that as many people as possible around me be glad that I exist, and that our paths in life had crossed.

My life was divided, more or less by force, into several phases. I was born into a German-speaking family from Prague, so my mother tongue was German. When I was supposed to begin attending school, my parents decided that I'd attend a Czech school, because we weren't Germans and wouldn't continue in increasing the number of German-speaking inhabitants of Prague. We then spoke Czech at home as well. While my father did know Czech spelling and grammar, he had a problem with pronunciation. My mother, on the other hand, learned the language through everyday conversation on the street, and had perfect pronunciation, but made errors in writing until the end of her life.

Back then, when I started Grade 1 and didn't know a single world of English, the head teacher, Mr. Korda, had to translate every word into German for me. At the end of my first year I could already read and write Czech; by the end of Grade 2 I'd forgotten how to speak German, but understood everything a child of around six understands. Then, after the war, I wasn't able to speak any German for a long time; I had a mental block.

That was the first turning point. The second, and perhaps even more fundamental one, were the years spent in Terezin during the war. I didn't go any further, because I had the luck that my mother worked in agriculture, and so protected me against the transports. Despite this, I consider what I lived through there to be the most horrible things in my life, even though I admit that in comparison with other people, actually nothing that terrible happened to me. I constantly have to think about my friends, about the little children I saw in Terezin, who never returned. My father didn't return either...

My family had the luck to be allowed to live in Terezin together for some time. But then first my brother and then my father left, until my mother and I were left alone together. We talked with each other a lot, which of course also continued after the war, which is also why I know quite a bit about my family.

My family background

My father's father was named Rudolf Glas. He was born sometime around 1860 in Prague, but his official home residency was in Hermanuv Mestec. Home residency was a hereditary institution, and when it was cancelled after World War II, we received a document in the mail that my father's home residency had also been in Hermanuv Mestec. Hermanuv Mestec had most likely had a large Jewish ghetto; they've recently reopened the synagogue there, I went there to have a look, but didn't find any names at the local cemetery that would seem to have a connection with our family.

So while my grandfather was from Bohemia, I have no clue whether he spoke Czech, perhaps as a child. Later he spoke German, and most likely probably also Italian. He worked as a bank clerk, and moved to Terst [Trieste] because of work. There he got married and had a son, my father. Sometime around 1905 he returned to Vienna with his family, and soon after that he and his wife were divorced. He then raised my father alone, and was very afraid for him, so he didn't let him attend gym class, which is why my father didn't know how to swim. Right up until World War II, my grandpa lived almost right in the center of Vienna, a little ways away from Beethoven Square.

In 1942 he arrived in Terezin. I remember him as an old person, lying on a bed, and they brought me over to him and said, 'This is your grandpa.' My mother used to tell me that he apparently wasn't quite right in the head anymore, because he would say to my father: 'Julio,' as my father's name was Julian, 'go down to the corner for me and get me a glass of red.' About four years ago, I was in Vienna and was looking for the street where my father lived with Grandpa. Today, probably the same as back then, there's a wine shop on the corner. Maybe that explains why Grandpa used to ask Father for a glass of red. My father liked to joke around, and so it's possible that Grandpa also liked humor, and in this way wanted to remind my father of the time of his youth in Vienna. But my mother took it that Grandpa wasn't in his right mind anymore, after all, how could someone want something like that in Terezin? My grandfather actually had a very sad life. He died in Terezin in 1942, and I was at his funeral ceremony.

Grandpa Glas had two brothers. One of them worked at the train station in Jihlava as an engineer, and in 1916, when my father went to visit him as a soldier on vacation, he met my mother. This engineer uncle of mine died before the war, then in Terezin his two grandsons, Pavel and Tomas Glas, were in the same 'Heim' ['Kinderheim,' or children's home] with me. My grandpa's other brother was probably younger. I remember him from Terezin as a relatively chipper person; he wasn't too tall, wore a mustache and limped. Before the war he'd been a lawyer, and this is why my father entered law school, so he could take over his practice. But that never happened. That brother of my grandpa's left me a leather cigar case, which I've got to this day, and when - quite rarely - I smoke a cigar, I use it.

My grandmother on my father's side was named Riesa. Her father was named von Reiss, and when he was a little boy, they moved from Hungary to the Italian part of the Austrian monarchy. In Terst he became a rich shipbuilder, but apparently when he was older he became poorer, and lived alone in a large palace with just his Italian wife. They had several children together, and one of the daughters, Bianca, my grandma's sister, married a man named Hercole Gasperini. Apparently they were a very-funny looking couple. While my [great] aunt was statuesque, portly, Hercules was, on the contrary, tiny, petite, and obediently pranced about my aunt - but apparently at home he 'terrorized' the family. When my aunt talked, she was apparently always waving her arms and yelling: 'Mama Mia!' - she was very noisy.

My mother also told me that my grandma had a little niece, who every evening and every morning, when she prayed, ended her prayer with the words: 'E viva la patria a e viva le duce' ['Long live the nation and long live the leader']. You see, this was already when Mussolini 2 was in power, so perhaps in 1932. Grandma Riesa was raised in a convent, and it's even possible that she was christened.

My father [Julian Glas] was born in Terst in 1896. Before the war broke out, this fact was very important for us. Because he was born on Italian territory, though of a no longer existing monarchy, the Americans included him in the Italian quota for moving away, and we had a certain chance to emigrate. Why we didn't succeed in emigrating, that'll come later. From the age of five, when he moved to Vienna with his parents, my father didn't speak Italian, so I think that he quickly forgot the language, but a love for Italian cuisine stayed with him throughout his entire life, especially spaghetti, which we had at home very often.

After moving to Vienna, my grandma and grandpa got divorced. Because my grandpa caught her in flagrante with a certain Mr. Hoffmann, the owner of a real estate agency, who she then married. Because Mr. Hoffmann was an Aryan, this marriage saved her life. But her son didn't survive the war, and my mother told me how Grandma collapsed when she found out that her Julio, her only child, was no longer alive.

My father attended a classical academic high school for eight years, always with straight A's. He was oriented towards the humanities and wrote poems, but didn't publish them. He sang in a choir, later in Terezin as well, and apparently played the mandolin. On the other hand, he didn't know sports at all - my grandpa was so afraid for him that he didn't allow him to attend gym class. I remember that in water my father used to do all sorts of hijinks, somersaults, but didn't know how to swim - as opposed to my mother, who was an excellent swimmer.

During World War I my father fought on the Eastern Front. He fell into captivity, from which he managed to escape, and on 28th October 1918 he arrived in Vienna - right on the day that Czechoslovakia proclaimed its independence, and the old monarchy was falling apart. Because they were counting on him to take over my uncle's law practice, he began studying law at the university in Vienna. I personally think that that type of work wasn't right for him. Because my father was too upright and honest, which is why I can't imagine him defending all sorts of scoundrels, or on the contrary sullying an honest person. One way or the other, after four semesters my father ended his studies, went into finance, and became a managing clerk at a bank. Not long after, he married my mother, so this is the right place to also say something about her and her origins.

Grandpa Carl Fischer, my mother's father, was born in 1861 in Mlada Boleslav. Grandpa's forebears lived in the ghetto there even after Joseph II 3 allowed Jews to leave the ghetto gates. This branch of our family isn't purely Jewish, because my great-grandfather came about as a result of a Jewish girl being raped by some German soldier. The girl brought a boy into the world, but after giving birth jumped into some water out of desperation and drowned. My great-grandpa was brought up by her sister.

My mother also told me that in the Fischer family it was a custom for cousins to marry. This rule was meant to keep property in the family, but it had very serious consequences in the risk of genetic damage and various illnesses. Grandpa Fischer broke with this tradition when he married Charlotta Kollek, my grandmother, who was from far-away Zdanice na Morave. The marriage was arranged by a so-called shadkhan, or matchmaker. Grandpa Fischer died when I was two, and so all I remember is once visiting, and him sitting by the radio, cutting pieces off a pear and giving them to me.

The Kollek family was relatively wealthy, my great-grandfather supposedly had a leasehold farm and a sugar refinery, and also owned a store. But during World War I he put everything into government loans, and lost his property. He may not even have lived to see the war's end. But his wife, my great-grandmother lived long enough that I also knew her as a small boy in Jihlava. When at the age of 85 she broke her arm, upon examining her, the doctor apparently proclaimed that she was as healthy as a young woman. In my reminiscences she plays the role of the 'kind great-grandma' who gave me candy, even though in reality she was said to be selfish and wouldn't give anyone anything. When in 1938 the Germans arrived in Austria 4, she lost her zest for life and soon upon that died.

Grandma Fischer I remember very well. I used to see her when we'd go to Jihlava to our summer house, and at one time as a small boy I lived with her. She never got a proper education, perhaps only for one year did she have a home tutor with her other siblings, which is why she didn't know how to read and write properly. During the occupation 5 she moved to Prague, and would often come over to visit us. Then she arrived in Terezin, where she stayed until the end. After the war she immigrated to Australia where her two daughters were, and where she died in about 1965.

My mother had three sisters and one brother. The oldest of the sisters, Berta, had two children. She did amateur theater and in 1938 had already immigrated to Australia, where she married a second time. Her sister Heda married a Brno lawyer named Felix Loria, and lived with him and her two children in Brno. Felix Loria was a drawing-room Communist, and when in 1933 Georgi Dimitrov 6 was accused of setting fire to the Reichstag 7, this uncle was supposed to defend him. But because he was a Jew, the Germans didn't let him go to Leipzig. The family immigrated to England and then to Australia, where Uncle Loria started some sort of factory. That's actually a paradox, a Communist, but despite that a factory owner. Be that as it may, his business burned down anyways. After the war he apparently sent my mother a letter of recommendation for Klement Gottwald 8, but she didn't want anything to do with Gottwald, and so burned the letter.

My mother's brother was named Emil. During World War I he lost his left arm, for which he received a medal. Actually, it helped him during the second war, because, though a Jew, he was despite that a war hero, and so in Terezin wasn't allowed to be put on a transport, and stayed there the whole time. Otherwise, with one arm he wouldn't have had any chance of survival. He had a legal education, and before the war he owned a bookshop in Jihlava, after the war he immigrated to Israel, where he died in 1972. My mother used to keep in touch with his two daughters, but I didn't.

Finally, the last, youngest sister was named Greta. For a long time she lived in Jihlava with her parents, then got married and divorced and before the war managed to immigrate to England with her son. If her son Fredy, who was born in 1928, is still alive, I have no clue. He was a tailor - cutter and apparently was a master in his field. Out of all these relatives, I only met Uncle Emil and his two daughters personally. I've never seen any of the others.

Because Grandpa worked as a chief clerk for a sawmill in Dreveny Mlyn near Jihlava, the family was definitely among the more well-off. From today's perspective it's strange, but during the time of my mother's childhood, it wasn't the custom to indulge children. Going for ice cream - that didn't exist. As a child, my mother liked sweet buns. She loved them, but never got them. Which is why when my brother and I were little, she wanted to buy them for us, but we for our part weren't interested in any sweet buns.

My mother's name was Gertruda. She was born in Jihlava in 1896. From birth she had eye problems, one eye was askew and blind, and she saw very poorly out of the other one. She was, however, very intelligent, and not only had she graduated from lyceum, just that being exceptional in a girl's case in those days, but she even absolved four semesters of chemistry at university in Vienna. She told me that during her studies, she much rather spent money on culture instead of food, and got to know and associated with many young, later well-known artists, one name that will speak for all is Josef Schildkraut [(1896-1964): Academy Award-winning Austrian stage and film actor], whom I've seen in the American film 'The Rains Came' [1939]. My mother later got tuberculosis, apparently due to wartime malnutrition.

My parents met in 1916, when my father was a soldier and visiting his uncle in Jihlava while on leave. They were married in 1920, and moved to Prague, because my father's bank opened a branch office there. My father progressed in his career, and worked his way up to the position of managing clerk. My mother was at home, and didn't work, even when she was offered a position in some chemical factory. She would have apparently earned even more than my father, which he, being an old-school type, couldn't allow. And so my mother, out of love for my father, stayed at home and became a 'kitchen- maid' - as she used to say.

Life in a sublet, where they lived in the beginning, must have been misery for her. It was somewhere in Strasnice with some widow, who managed to create unbearable conditions for my parents. At my mother she used to yell: 'Smelly Jewess from a Jewish street!', despite she herself being Jewish, and as opposed to my mother, who had a bit of that Aryan blood in her, also looking Jewish. My mother could no longer stand it there, and when she could, she used to go around to post offices and libraries so that she'd be around her as little as possible.

Once a lawyer came to visit my parents and told them that if they agreed to pay higher rent, the widow wouldn't harangue them anymore. My father refused, and proclaimed that not only would they not pay more rent, but that they'd in fact pay less rent! The case went to court, my parents won, and then paid less rent.

My pre-war childhood

My brother was born in 1924, by which time my parents already had their own apartment. He was named Hanusz, Jan. In they family they called him 'Budi' - I was actually the one that gave him that name, when to a question from our friends 'Und was macht der Bruder?' ['And what does your brother do?'] I answered 'Budi ule det,' my brother goes to school. As a small child Honza [Jan] was apparently physically very weak, but had the potential to develop intellectually, he remembered a lot of things, was curious. The doctor was supposed to have told my mother that my brother was weak because everything went towards his intelligence, and nothing towards his physical growth. That he'd learn everything quickly, but at the expense of being small and weak. Which is why he forbade her to read, sing, tell or show him anything.

I think that it was in 1928 when my mother fell ill with tuberculosis. I was born in 1931, but the doctors didn't want to let her have me. They had serious concerns about her, and argued that the child that had already been born had to be protected. My mother made the rounds of various doctors for so long until the last one told her something interesting: There exists a certain chance that thanks to giving birth she'll get well. And that's really what happened. In Terezin she then worked in the fields, spent a lot of time out in the fresh air, and when at the end of the war Dr. Provizor looked at her, he said that her lungs had once again begun to function.

Back when my mother had tuberculosis and my brother was little, we had a maid. Later, when I'd also been born, we had a nanny. She was German, a Christian, from Sumava. Actually, thanks to her I have 'Kinderstube' [Kindergarten], she was excellent with children. Her sister worked as a chambermaid for some countess, and sometimes also helped out at our place. It was comical, because being used to the countess, she also sometimes asked my mother if she would want help with her toilet. My mother would say no, that she knows how to dress herself.

After the war this young lady had the International Red Cross look for us. But my mother burned the letter, as she didn't want to have anything to do with Germans. I think that later she regretted it, they were decent people after all, who hadn't done anything to us. What later happened to them, I don't know. They were most likely displaced 9. Of the Germans we knew, none of them remained in Prague, nor in Jihlava.

Actually, after the war the only witness of times long past was Ruzena, the maid that had worked for my parents before I was born. Sometime around 1928 she got married and left. In 1965 my mother ran into her in Strasnice, and they both immediately recognized each other, though they hadn't seen each other for 40 years. My mother had aged, and so had she. Mrs. Ruzena asked how the Mister was. Well, he didn't return. She asked what little Hans was doing, my brother Honza. He was also in the concentration camp, but returned. She didn't know me, so didn't ask about me. Then she and Ruzena never saw each other again. My mother then went to Jihlava, her home town, a couple of times, but said that she didn't even recognize some old granny there. Practically all the Germans had been displaced, and the Jews hadn't returned. Nobody anywhere, nothing anywhere.

My childhood is divided into a German and a Czech period. During my early days I was raised in German, and didn't learn Czech until I started Grade 1. Then I on the other hand almost forgot German. This change, the switch to another language, was a major dividing line for me. This is why I've got the German and Czech periods sharply separated in my memory. I don't know German fairy tales, or more likely don't remember them. Once I was at a fairy tale at a German theater.

Compared to my brother, who was exceptionally talented, I was considered to be the dumber one. I guess I thought more slowly, mainly I thought differently, in a different manner. I was very sensitive, perceptive, and pondered a lot. I wasn't into just any type of humor.

For example, I used to very much look forward to my birthday. When I got some presents, I left them wrapped up, and just luxuriated in looking at them. When I for example got a nightshirt, for the next four years it was still 'das Neue' ['the new one']. I also out of principle didn't take my toys apart. I guess I was peculiar in this, too, because most children break their toys to find out what make them tick. This I never did. I wanted to have everything nice and neat, I never took anything apart, I always took care of everything. And even when I got something to eat, I didn't want to eat it, I didn't even unwrap it, it seemed a shame to me. I really was sort of peculiar. I liked the color blue, plus toys that other children would pull along behind them, I wanted to have push versions of, so that I could see them, and my mother always had a lot of work to do before she found such a toy for me. I had a scooter, then a tricycle, and then I also wanted a pedal car, but that I didn't get, because by then we weren't doing so well anymore.

My mother never wanted us to fight. It wouldn't even have occurred to me, because he was seven years older than I. A friend of my mother's from Jihlava used to come visit us regularly, and would bring us chocolate figurines with filling, Mother would divide them up equally among us, and if there was an odd one out, Mother would carefully break it in half, so that we wouldn't have any reason to feel envious. For my part, I never envied my brother; maybe he later envied me my education. He himself only graduated from junior high school, after that he wasn't allowed to attend school 10. After the war he managed to take a one-year business course, and that was it. As he emphasized at my graduation, I was the first Glas in a long time to attend university.

It's said that Honza never put up with anything. When someone did something to him, he would apparently beat him severely. He may have been small and weak, but was very agile. I, on the other hand, never fought. And my father probably never did either, but he probably wanted to make it up with me, and so he promised me from five to twenty crowns [in 1929 the Czechoslovak crown (Kc) was decreed by law to be equal to 44.58 mg of gold], if I gave someone a couple of whacks in self defense. I never got them, because it went against my grain to fight. Not in Terezin, there it was about standing your ground, but otherwise I never fought.

When I was born, in 1931, we were living in an apartment that had been built by the Solo match company. My parents knew its president, Mr. Heller. After the war I knew him as well, he returned from emigration in England. The apartment was on 6 Cechova Street, Prague 12, Vinohrady. Today it's Prague 2 - Vinohrady. We moved out in 1937. Our neighbors, the Stremchas, moved into our apartment, and apparently I used to call their little girl, who was named Jirina, Ii, because at that time I didn't know Czech yet. Recently I searched this lady out, she still lives in our apartment. So I once again got to see the room where I was born, and saw the garden where our parents apparently planted a Sparmannia. Today it's a huge tree, a witness to my happy childhood and our family life.

Some family named the Reiners had a little shop beside our building. I remember that one time Mr. Reiner had his leg in a cast, because he'd broken it when he was jumping, as was the custom up till then, onto a streetcar while it was moving. But this was already a modern motorized car with folding steps, onto which it wasn't possible to jump up anymore. Later I saw them when they arrived in Terezin with a little girl; that was five years later. Probably they never returned.

I remember one more resident of that neighborhood: on nearby Krkonosska Street lived an old, tall, bald and fat coalman. He had a little shop there, would sit on a bench in front of it, and when my mother and I would walk by him, to Rieger Gardens for example, he would always nod his head at me and say: 'Yes, yes, young man.' So I used to call him Coalman Yes. Back then I didn't yet know what that word meant in Czech.

I've got a very good memory. Always, when I experienced something peculiar, something unusual, I didn't have a problem remembering it. When I was little, I was in some doctor's office where we used to go in Podoli, under a viaduct, and where they would put bandages soaked in plaster on my feet - making me casts for shoe inserts for my flat feet. My mother was amazed how I could remember it, because I was two or three years old. Well, and I remembered it precisely because it was this peculiar experience. That building is still there, and apparently there's still some sort of doctor's office there.

One Jewish holiday we celebrated was Chanukkah. Dad would put on a hat, open the prayer book and read something from it. He knew how to read Hebrew, but whether he also understood it, that I don't know. He probably read the text aloud, but I don't know exactly. We, my brother and I, would just stare off into space, because we didn't understand it. The only thing on our minds was how much longer before we got presents.

We also observed Passover, which is like Easter. I believed in the Easter bunny and always found some presents behind the window, and so would shout, 'Thank you, bunny!' in German.

I don't remember Yom Kippur or other Jewish holidays. I can't say that we were brought up in any particularly Jewish fashion. I know some stories from the Old Testament, but we never used to go to synagogue with our parents, for example. From 1939 onwards I was a Roman Catholic, because to make emigration easier we had ourselves christened, and then we celebrated Christmas; at that time I was eight. My last Christmas in Prague was in 1942. Now, in my old age, I've got time to think, and so I think that Judaism is much more beneficial to a person than Christianity. Because Jews are still waiting for their Messiah. And it's better for people to be able to look forward to someone who has yet to come!

In 1935 our family was granted Czechoslovak citizenship, as up to then we'd been Austrians. My father was attending Czech lessons, he knew Czech spelling and grammar and also his intonation was correct, just pronunciation gave him a bit of trouble, he never learned to say the trilled R properly. My mother didn't take lessons, she learned Czech just like that, on her own, on the street. She had problems with grammar, but on the other hand had excellent pronunciation, she even knew that trilled R. Neither of my parents knew Czech culture well, they were brought up in German culture. The books we had at home were in German, just my brother had some Czech ones as well.

In about July 1937 we moved to an apartment building on Tolstého Street, which the Securitas insurance company had built as a capital investment. That was already during the times when the atmosphere was 'thickening,' and when I was supposed to start attending school that September. My parents registered me in a Czech school 'to not increase the number of people who speak German.' I attended a Czech public boys' school in Vrsovice on Kodanska Street.

Thanks to our homeroom teacher Korda, I became a Czech. Always when we were going over something, he stood beside me and translated every word into German for me. At first I didn't understand my classmates at all, and so that 'I wouldn't be afraid,' for perhaps 14 days my mother sat in the desk next to me - to this day I can see her there in my mind. At the end of Grade 1 I already knew Czech, and along with the other children, how to read and write.

Once, when I was walking home from school, my mother went to meet me and saw me crying. Because I was supposed to perform at a school concert. My teacher wanted to make me happy, but I however didn't want to be seen. So my mother arranged it in such a way that she contributed something to the poor, and I was freed of the obligation to perform.

In Grade 3 my teacher was Vaclav Mejstrik, who, as I recently found out, also taught Zdenek Sverak [Czech playwright, scriptwriter and actor, born in 1936], and became the inspiration for the character of the teacher Hnizda in the film 'Obecná skola.' He used to teach me math, and he'd hit everyone that didn't know something with a ruler. I didn't like it because I knew that corporal punishment was no longer allowed.

We didn't know too many of our new neighbors, but I was friends with Fanda Mlejnek, the superintendent's son. Fanda had several older siblings, who'd all died before he'd been born. I couldn't understand it, how could they have died as children? I also knew Fanda's younger sister, who also died. I was at her funeral, she had this little coffin, and I was thinking to myself, how can a little kid die?

When I returned from Terezin, Fanda came over one day to welcome me back. I remembered him, but that which had been before Terezin seemed to me like from a past life. Fanda was glad to see me, but I stood there and didn't know what to do, for me he was someone from a past life. My mother then reproached me for ignoring him. It also bothered me, that I had behaved like that toward him, which is why about four years ago I went to apologize to him. He, of course, didn't remember anything. But on the other hand, he remembered how my father used to teach his mother German. I also remember very well that when I was about seven, by then I already knew Czech, I helped her wash the stairs, from the attic all the way down to the cellar, and talked to her about family and about life.

The 1930s meant big economic problems 11. Compared to other people we were probably well off, we weren't in actual need, even though we definitely weren't rich. I remember that various beggars used to come by our place. Once some mother came leading her child by the hand, and the child was naked. My mother called me over, took off my pants and gave them to the beggar woman. She then went and bought me another pair of pants. My parents had a deep social conscience, but I think that perhaps that was the case with Jews in general.

In 1935, the bank where my father worked went bankrupt. My father found himself out of work. With difficulty he managed to find work as an accounting inspector for the Omnia company. Then he was often on business trips and thus away from home. From that time on, we weren't as well off as before. When I began attending school, my mother bemoaned the fact that while my brother had always gotten ham with his lunch for school, I only got bread with butter and an apple. She felt sorry for the fact that she couldn't also provide it to me. I actually didn't care one way or the other.

It's hard to say what my father was really like. I experienced him under normal conditions only when I was very small. Then the war came, and Terezin. When my father left on the transport to Terezin, I was a little over 13. I remember how once he came home from a business trip, and I then laid on his stomach and along with him repeated 'Käsbrot, Käsbrot' ['Slice of bread with cheese'].

I think that I was almost never out on a proper outing with my parents. I was either too small, or later, during the occupation, we weren't allowed into the forest and outside of Prague. But I do remember one outing very well. At that time we were still allowed into the forest, so our whole family was there. My father didn't bring any games with him, but for lunch we had two hard-boiled eggs, one with a light-colored shell and the other with a dark one. So my father took a napkin, drew a board on it like for checkers or chess, broke pieces off the eggshells for figures, and we played checkers.

One more outing has stuck in my mind, this one was just me, my father and my brother. I might have been around nine, because at the age of ten I was already not allowed into the forest, and when I was eleven I went to Terezin. On this outing I wanted to pick some dandelions or something like that for my mother. My father and brother were telling me that the flowers would wilt, for me to throw them away, why bring my mother wilted flowers. I didn't listen to them and brought them to my mother anyways. She was delighted, because she knew I'd done it of my own accord; she put them in water and the flowers revived. Suddenly she had a fresh bunch of flowers at home. It's possible that at that time Jews weren't allowed to buy them. Actually, we weren't allowed to do anything, absolutely nothing. Just drink water, breathe and eat food from a small ration 12.

Even when we were in Terezin, my father tried to devote himself to me. Every Sunday afternoon he'd pick me up from the 'Heim,' and we'd walk to the Dresden barracks to watch a soccer match. Or he'd go for a walk around Terezin with me. Terezin is tiny, and we weren't allowed outside the fortifications, so they were always walks along the same, intimately familiar places, but I used to greatly look forward to those afternoons with Father.

When we were still living in Prague, I very much liked going to the puppet theater that was run by the Methodist-Baptist church on Kodanska Street in Vrsovice, not far from us. They had large puppets and I liked it there very much. The minister always stood by the door and showed people where they should sit. I had to sit in the back, because I was big, and my mother would sit with me. These theater performances actually represented my one and only regular cultural experience, which however didn't last long, as later we were forbidden from attending theaters as well. The same went for the cinema. As a substitute, in 1940 my father made me a puppet theater with two curtains and lighting, and even wrote some plays for me. I was thrilled by it, but then when we left for Terezin, we left the puppet theater in the apartment - where it ended up I never found out.

And which of the restrictions whose goal was to make life impossible for us Jews affected me the most? Maybe for some school-age readers this may seem incredible, but the thing that had the worst impact on me was that I wasn't allowed to attend school. However - if children would have kept on playing with me, it wouldn't have been so terrible. But I ended up alone. I couldn't go out into the street, because there my former friends yelled: 'Smelly Jew!' at me, and that I didn't care for. When the guys turned their backs on me, some girls let me play with them for another few days. Suddenly they lost interest, girls are simply like that. But back then I got very upset at them, because suddenly I was completely alone.

Before the war I managed to finish only three grades of public school 13. My father did teach me something at home, but it was irregularly and he didn't have the patience for it. In Prague there was a school for Jewish children in the Old Town, but that was too far for me. Already back then we weren't allowed to ride the streetcar, and I wouldn't have managed to walk there every day. And so I sat at home and read.

My first book, at the age of eight, was 'Klapzubova jedenactka' ['Klapzub's Eleven'], I read it at least ten times, and to this day I know some passages off by heart. We didn't have a lot of Czech books at home, which is why I secretly read 'rodokaps' [Czech abbreviation for a line of pocket adventure novels (roman do kapsy), which later came to mean any cheap adventure literature]. My father pretended he didn't know about it, but my mother then told me that he'd known about it all right, but what was the poor guy supposed to do with me. I became an enthusiastic reader of the genre. When after the war a 'rodokaps' that I had read before my departure for Terezin came into my hands, three years later, actually, I realized that it was unreadable. It's strange, because I hadn't actually had any opportunities to refine my tastes.

An interesting chapter was the possibility of our emigration. We could have saved ourselves, because in the fall of 1938 my mother was in England visiting her sister, Aunt Heda, who had emigrated there with her family in the spring of that year. When she was crossing the border, a border official started a conversation with her, my mother knew English fairly well. He told her to not return home, that it would end up badly here. But she said that she had her family in Prague. So he told her to go, get her family and return to England, that we could live there. She objected, that we weren't rich and that we didn't have anything to live on. He told her that she could work in England. And really, later she realized that she had gotten a work permit in her passport. At home she showed the permit to my father, but he said: 'I'm not going to let my wife support me, that's out of the question. England and France won't abandon us.'

After the occupation, when my father realized that England and France had abandoned us after all, he himself tried to find a way out. At the American consulate he found out that thanks to his being born in Terst, the Americans had included him in the Italian quota. We could have moved out of the country immediately, but we didn't have enough money for the security deposit. If we did know someone in America, they were people that had just managed to gain a foothold there, and weren't willing to commit a large amount of money for us. Which is why my father wrote a letter to the mayor of New York, LaGuardia, originally an Italian Jew, in which he asked him to help us. LaGuardia even answered him, but wrote that he couldn't help us, for us to not be upset with him, but that it could ruin his chances in the next elections. [LaGuardia, Fiorello Henry (born Fiorello Enrico LaGuardia; (1882-1947): mayor of New York for three terms from 1934 to 1945.]

So we stayed here. As long as there was hope that we'd succeed in emigrating, so until the war broke out, we were preparing for it. My father was attending pedicurist lessons, once he even gave me a pedicure as practice. For mother, he did it several times. He bought this beautiful leather briefcase, where he had his tools and some bottles with various tinctures. The briefcase still exists, my children used it for paints, and I still use the clippers for cutting my nails. My mother attended courses at a confectioner's. At that time she was baking a lot at home, to practice.

Because of the eventual emigration, we had ourselves christened in 1939. The point wasn't for us to rid ourselves of our Jewish identity, but we were led to it by the fact that abroad they liked it more when Christians immigrated, and not Jews. We wanted to increase our chances of being accepted somewhere.

For me it represented one additional advantage: at a time when I was no longer allowed to attend school and had no duties, I joined a church group at the Church of St. Ignatz on Charles Square, and every morning I'd go there as an altar boy for the morning mass. Then the friars would give me breakfast, coffee with milk with a skin on it, I absolutely hated the skin, and a piece of dry bread. At that time we weren't that badly off yet, and though we no longer had butter, we did still have margarine, so I didn't like dry bread too much. I ate breakfast not out of hunger, but from a feeling that it wasn't polite to return it. Then, in Terezin, I remembered the skin and the dry bread, too, with misty eyes. Until they forbade us from riding in the last streetcar wagon, I had at least some duty. Then I lost that one, too - Charles Square became too distant for me.

In 1939 we moved from the apartment on Tolsteho Street a bit further on, into a building on Bulharska Street, number 17. My parents wisely chose a two-room apartment with a kitchenette. They removed the partition that was there, and so this double bachelor apartment was created. Then when the Germans were going around Prague and picking apartments for themselves, ours didn't seem attractive to them, and this is why we were able to stay in it until the transport.

Already living in that building was the family of Mr. Auerbach, my father's former colleague from the Omnia company. The Auerbachs had two sons who had left before we moved in there, on Nicholas Winton's 14 transport to England. The Auerbachs then arrived in Terezin and were also in the same wagon as my father in the transport to Auschwitz. After the war the young Auerbachs came to ask my mother whether she didn't know what had happened to their parents. She probably told them that they'd left Terezin on a transport.

Terezin

My brother's last school education was Grade 8, he wasn't allowed to school after that. I don't know how, but he then got brigade work with some farmer in eastern Bohemia. He actually could have stayed there for the whole war, because no one knew that he was a Jew. He got normal ration coupons like everyone else, he even got tobacco coupons. But when Jews had to register with the Gestapo, our parents were suddenly afraid that someone could inform on them, that they've got one more son. So they persuaded the police commissar to register my brother after the fact. My brother then registered in Prague, and then left with us for Terezin.

One evening someone rang at our door, and brought a summons to the transport. It was about a week or 14 days before our departure, because Mother then managed to hide some of our things with friends. I know that she hid a piece of family jewelry that she'd gotten from my father's father. Reputedly at the beginning of the 19th century, an ancestor of his had had it made for his daughter. It's said that since then there hadn't been another daughter. After the war we got it back, and my son and I have already agreed that when my granddaughter is grown up, she'll get it. I don't know what else Mother hid. I hid a bag of marbles, a game called 'fifteen' and a wooden 'hedgehog in a cage' brainteaser, which I got back after the war and still have to this day.

We were supposed to report to the Gestapo in Stresovice on 16th April 1942, for which we got permission to ride the streetcar. We had hand bags with us, the large ones were probably carted off by truck, as we would scarcely have been able to carry the permitted 50 kilos. I had a transport number, my parents were constantly repeating it to me, that I have to remember it, EZ 24, by brother EZ 22, my mother EZ 23 and my father EZ 21. The abbreviation meant 'traveling individually.' As I found out only after the war, my real number was ST 34. Back then about twenty other people left for Terezin with us.

My parents didn't explain much of anything to me, I knew only that we were going to Terezin, and they asked me what book I wanted to take with me. It was 'Záhada hlavolamu' ['The Mystery of the Brainteaser'] by J. Foglar.

Along with my parents, I believed that by my birthday in June I'd be back home. This faith, that by the summer, by Christmas, and again by the summer and so on it would be over, this conviction buoyed us the whole time in Terezin. Whether this was also the case in Auschwitz and further on, I don't know. We survived on faith in the future. After the war I brought this trait with me back from Terezin, I need to constantly be looking forward to something, perhaps I was born with this trait. I always say that the only thing I don't look forward to is the dentist.

At the Gestapo, a Gestapo officer stole our jewels and a watch from us while checking the list. Then we got lunch and in the afternoon, a jail paddy-wagon, a so-called 'Green Anton,' drove us to Hybernské, today Masaryk Station, and then we left on a normal passenger train under the watch of several civilians - probably from the Gestapo - to Bohusovice. At that time there wasn't yet a spur line from Bohusovice to Terezin, and so we then walked to Terezin, the luggage and old people were probably carted there on trucks.

In Terezin I was actually better off than in Prague, because there I had friends. Even though I was of course hungry, was afraid of the transports, and experienced and saw various bad and very sad things, but nothing actually happened to me; I returned. I like living, that I learned in Terezin. I'm glad to be in this world. That's probably the most valuable thing I brought back with me from Terezin. Once I told my friend from Terezin, Petr Seidemann: 'Terezin was a good school of life.' And he said: 'It was, but a little too dangerous.' He's right. Terezin gave me the fact that I'm able to value life - and that's priceless. The fact that I think about Terezin like this, and that I think about it at all, is I guess given by my tendency for 'eytsenizing' [from the Yiddish eytsn, to advise]. In Terezin, they called me Eytsener, or in Jewish Wiseguy. It's only now, in retirement, when I go to Terezin for seminars and so on, do I have time to think about things again and again.

At first we lived in the shloiska in the Magdeburg barracks, then I was with my brother and father in the Sudeten barracks, and I arrived, the same as my mother, in the Hamburg barracks. Our entire family used to regularly meet at my mother's place in the Hamburg barracks. Then everyone was moved out of the barracks, and she lived in some house, perhaps on Crete. She worked in agriculture, which had several advantages. For one, her tuberculosis improved. Being out in the fresh air was very beneficial to her, and her lungs began to function again. Then it was also good that she could eat some vegetables in the field from time to time, and so help herself and us. It wasn't all the time, not everything could be eaten raw, but for example when it was tomato season, Mother ate her fill of tomatoes and then left her ration for us. By the way, after the war she never ate another tomato.

What was probably the most important, people working in agriculture were protected, they didn't have to go into the transports. Up to the age of sixteen their children were protected too. Which is why I also stayed in Terezin until the end.

My brother became a coachman, so he lived with the other coachmen, at first in a barn across from the stables, and then in this little room in a nearby house. Our family then would meet night after night there at his place. To this day, my nephew has a cabinet that he had there, in his washroom.

"Heim 236"

In the Hamburg barracks we lived in 'Heim 236,' which was on the second floor. Here I spent a long part of my stay in Terezin, which is why I'll describe it more closely for you. At the end of the same hallway as ours was also 'Heim 233,' where the younger boys lived, around six or seven years old. That's also where Aki Hermann came to us from, his father was a Hebrew teacher. Aki Hermann survived, after the war he was in a convalescence home and then left for America, I think. This 'Heim' was the first room, so on the facade you can see two windows.

Across from 'Heim 233' was a toilet, but it was always 'flooded,' so we preferred to use the toilets quite far away, in the center of the barracks. That it was far from us is something I found out for myself, when at night I had to go No. 2; I had to absolve that long trip, and when I returned and had barely put my leg up on my bunk I had to go again, so I began running, but didn't get there in time and had it in my pants. How the smaller boys managed to make it, I don't know. The practically permanent stress that a small child in Terezin had to endure led to the fact that I peed myself every night. I was terribly ashamed of it, an eleven, twelve-year-old boy!

Then there were four windows of the hall where mothers with little children lived, about four or five years old. Then there was our 'Kinderheim 236.' It was one room that had a door on one of the shorter sides and across from it two windows.

In the beginning, in 'Heim 236,' we slept on mattresses on the floor. Small children on one, older ones on two. The women that minded us slept with us, behind a partition of blankets. One day a minder came up to me and asked me whether I wouldn't give up one mattress, because additional children had arrived and there weren't enough mattresses, that after all I was big now. I was eleven, and for my age was quite big, so I gave up the mattress. After that sleeping wasn't very comfortable, because the mattress ended where my back ended, and so the edge of the mattress pressed into my back. Some time later, the minder came again, that more children had arrived and that there weren't any mattresses for them, whether I wouldn't give up the other mattress, too, since I was after all a big boy now. So then I slept just on a blanket on the ground.

One night I'm sleeping like this, and suddenly was wakened by someone tugging on my arm. I looked about in the nighttime shadows, and saw that the boy lying next to me was pointing at something. And there I saw a smaller boy, how, apparently in his sleep, he'd kneeled, pulled down his pajamas or sweatpants and was peeing behind the head of the boy lying next to him. Then he pulled his pants up again, laid down and slept contentedly on. At that moment I had the feeling that I'd just grown up.

Between the windows there were these small, square cabinets for the most essential things, like things for washing, a food dish with cutlery and so on. I don't even know anymore if everyone had his own cabinet. Our clothes were somewhere else, today I don't even know where. In front of the cabinets there was a little bit of space left, where there were four tables pushed together and chairs and a blackboard, and that's where we studied.

Then, when we didn't all fit on mattresses on the floor anymore, they put two-story bunk beds with ladders along both longer sides of our 'Heim,' but I managed to climb up on my bed without using the ladder. On the left side of the windows, the bunks began with Jindra Brössler's bed. He used to quite often sit there and stare into space, and we'd then cluster around him and plead with him: 'Brézl, move your stomach,' and he'd puff up his stomach in an amazing fashion. Brézl then disappeared from the 'Heim.'

Sometime around 1958, a young man began coming to the newsroom of the Prague Central TV Studio as a part-time cameraman, and his face reminded me of Jindra Brössler, whom I'd however last seen fifteen years earlier. For a long time I didn't dare approach him, until finally I got up the nerve and asked him whether he hadn't by chance been in Terezin during the war. He said yes. And in 'Heim 236?' That, too. So I asked him: 'How is it that you're alive, I thought that when you weren't with us in the convalescence home, that you'd gone on a transport to Auschwitz, and I thought you were long dead.' It came out that he'd left the 'Heim' for his mother's room because he'd been sick, and at the beginning of 1945 left on a transport to Switzerland in exchange for senior SS officers. He didn't remember his stay in the 'Heim,' his nickname Brézl nor being able to puff up his stomach. But he told me that their stay in Switzerland hadn't been any special treat; not long ago I found out that the Swiss had been expecting important, prominent Jews, and then just ordinary Jews arrived.

Jindra became a TV cameraman in Brno, and in 1968 emigrated to West Germany, and up until recently was working as head cameraman for the ZDF news department. He occasionally comes to Prague, and so I can always again remind myself of my amazement when I experienced his resurrection.

On the other side by the window, up above, were the beds of two brothers, Ivan and Petr Hochberg. They left and didn't return. Their father returned after the war, remarried and had another son. When the Jewish Museum held a drive, for people to bring in photos of their friends and relatives, his wife brought in an album where those boys were with their mother, and left without saying anything. That's why nothing else is known about them.

Below them was Harry Knöpfelmacher's bed, who we used to call Knoflicek ['Little Button']. He was about three years younger than I, so he might have been eight. He had a round face with freckles, and curly hair, the same as his mother. Knoflicek slept under a flowered duvet. Every morning his mother used to come to wake him up, and we used to shout at him: 'Knoflicek, wake up, your mommy's here!'

Up above, beside the Hochberger brothers, was Jirka [Jiri] Oppenheimer's bed; instead of 'r' he use to say 'f.' Jifi! A little further on were the beds of my distant cousins Pavel and Tomas Glas, who stayed in Terezin up until the end, after the war they might have emigrated to Israel, but I've never heard of them again. Up above was also my spot, and at the end of that row was the bed of Tomy Katz, the son of the head of our 'Heim,' Mrs. Katz.

At first I'd been sleeping in the opposite row of bunks, but then I moved. Because beside me was Wolfgang Sorauer, who was apparently in the throes of puberty, and was constantly rolling over onto me, which I, of course, didn't like, and so complained to my mother. My mother realized what was up, talked to Mrs. Katz, who transferred me over to the other side. Wolfi was one of the few boys that returned, but after returning from the convalescence home I never heard of him again.

In the 'Heim' we were tormented by fleas and bedbugs. Bedbugs may have been bigger and so drank more blood, and when you squashed them they stank, but they were easier to catch, because they just crawled, while fleas jumped. We learned to find, catch and reliably kill fleas - you gripped them between your nails and tore them in half - otherwise there was the danger of them jumping away and continuing to bite. And so a regular part of our everyday schedule, like morning hygiene - with ear inspections, whether they're not dirty - breakfast and so on, was the compulsory catching of fleas at 7:20am. One boy once caught a record 28 fleas!

Then when bedbugs multiplied excessively, they moved us out, sealed all the cracks and filled the room with gas. When the gassing ended, and the 'Heim' aired out, we went inside again and I went to my bed and without thinking stuck my hand between the edge board and the mattress, and scooped up a handful of dried-up bedbugs. I don't even dare guess how many of them they had to sweep out of the whole 'Heim.'

Teaching was forbidden in Terezin, but children studied in secret. As far as I know, no one learned to read and write there. He who arrived illiterate, and returned at all, then again illiterate. For one, the collective of children changed a lot, then there were no teaching aids, and there weren't enough experienced teachers.

In the Hamburg barracks, we were taught by Dr. Ebersohn. At first we addressed him as Mr. Ebersohn, but Mrs. Katzová, the 'Heim' leader, told us once that we should address him as Mr. Doctor, because he had studied, after all. That was a new bit of information for me: people study not so that they'd know something, but to have a title. I have him to thank for learning to write numerals. That's something I hadn't known from public school up to then. He also showed us a map of the Mediterranean Sea, which was a novelty for me. I had known that the Mediterranean Sea existed, but I'd never held an atlas in my hands; in Grade 3 I had no reason to look at maps.

In the Hamburg barracks we, the children, had a library from our own resources - the way it worked was each one of us made his books available, and in exchange he could borrow the books of others. I don't remember anymore where it was, nor how exactly it was organized. Its opening hours are written in an issue of our magazine. But then everything fell apart when the young man who served as librarian left on a transport. We then took the books back. However, I'd contributed 'Záhada hlavolamu,' and then ended up with some piece of trash.

After being moved to L 417, I was put into 'sekunda' [second of eight years of high school. Equivalent to Grade 7], but was missing Grades 4 to 6. So when our teacher Irena Seidlerová, for example, teaching us what specific weight was, today it's specific gravity, I didn't understand what, for me, was such an abstract notion. For me, everything in Terezin was concrete, even though I probably didn't know either of those words back then.

In the afternoon we were off, and when it wasn't raining, we used to play on the barracks grounds and later soccer up on the fortifications. Sometimes there were organized games up on the fortifications, then we'd play for example dodge-ball, sometimes even with the girls. When the weather was bad and we couldn't go out, we'd play button soccer in the 'Heim,' with a team of 11 buttons we even had a league. Everyone played with everyone. The guys scrounged up an ordinary piece of board somewhere, and we marked the goalposts with nails. One guy even had a watch, so we could time it, two times 20 minutes. We set up the buttons on the board like soccer players. We cut large ladies' buttons in half, those were goalkeepers, who you were allowed to put in the way of a shot, but not to then hold them. Some player would then be moved by flicking, and then was left lying where he ended up. The ball was a button from a fly, back then zippers weren't used yet. When the button was laid down on its flat side, it slid along, on the curved one while being shot by a winger - that was a button filed down on one side - the ball was centered into the space in front of the net.

During the day, in the aisle between the bunks in 'Heim 236,' one of our caretakers, Hanka Sachslová, took care of the children that didn't know how to read and write yet, so she would tell or read something to them, or sang songs with them. But they couldn't be too loud, so that they wouldn't interfere with our studies. During the evening, there were various amusements. Sometimes Hanka's sister Eva read 'Huckleberry Finn' to us, or we'd put on various skits.

Once Mr. Katz, Tomy's dad, rehearsed scenes from R. Kipling's 'Jungle Book' with several boys - it was a quite an 'epic' performance, with a curtain, hanging from a broom laid across both rows of bunks, lighting, makeup and 'costumes.' The performance began quite ingloriously, during the opening of the curtain it fell down along with the broom, but then everything continued successfully and for most of the boys it was most likely the first 'real' theater performance that they'd seen. In the end, for me, too.

I saw Mr. Katz once after the war on Jecná Street in Prague, but I didn't muster the courage to say anything to him, because I knew that neither his wife nor his son had returned. What's more, he was with some woman I didn't know, so I was embarrassed to dredge up old memories.

Mostly, however, those of us that knew how to read, read something exciting, and then improvised it for the other boys, without rehearsals, decorations or costumes, with just the most basic of props. The younger boys were grateful to us, because what else did they have to do in the evening? It was too late to be allowed out, and they didn't know how to read.

Once we 'staged' like this a story about a town where fires were starting under mysterious circumstances. There was this one detective there, who calculated that the fires were originating from one place. He then set out for that place, and found a man polishing a lens in a tower. With it he was concentrating the sun's rays on buildings insured by an insurance company that he was taking revenge on for some wrong they had once done him. The lens was represented by a tin sink.

Once we even 'put on' Don Quixote according to a children's version of the book. I don't remember the performance much, just that I was the innkeeper who knighted Don Quixote. In the book, the innkeeper read grain prices as the knighting ritual, and because I didn't know how in the time of M. Cervantes they weighed and paid for grain, I sang: 'Four kilos of oats for four crowns fifty.' Well, the other guys didn't know it either, which is why they didn't mind.

We had other caretakers in 'Heim 236,' but basically most of all we liked Hanka Sachslová, mainly the younger boys, because she paid the most attention to them. When a few years ago, we met up in Terezin during some event, Hanka's husband was there, too, and Hanka was introducing me to friends of hers as her ward. Everyone was laughing, because I'm an old man now, so some ward, but in Terezin that age difference really meant a lot. In 1943 I was 12, and she was 17; for me she was an adult woman and I was a little kid.

Hanka didn't remember me, but then she remembered me in connection with one embarrassing matter. This was in 1943, when she was still with us and we were preparing for Mother's Day. So I wanted to express to her something akin to recognition that she was taking care of us like a mother. But it had to be something I could manage to make on my own, without anyone's help, preferably out of paper. And so out of a piece of paper I cut out two headpieces of a cradle, and between them glued paper folded like an accordion, so it was this crib that you could unfold and rock. I gave it to her, and she blushed horribly and ran away. I couldn't understand why. It wasn't until we met years ago that she revealed to me why: she thought it was a reference to the fact that in Terezin she was going out with one young man. But back then that didn't occur to me at all.

Hanka also remembered my distant cousin Pavlík Kraus, who was with her in the transport to Auschwitz, but never returned. His mother and mine were cousins, and of that entire family, I think only Pavlík's brother Harry returned.

Hanka's younger sister Eva sometimes used to come read to us in the evening, when her sister was off. She'd sit on a chair in the aisle between the bunks, 35 boys around her. So it's no wonder that she didn't remember me when I met up with her after the war. Neither did she remember that she used to read Huckleberry Finn to us, but she did know that it was her favorite book. The Sachsl sisters left with their mother, they'd already lost their father before the war, in December 1943 on a transport to Auschwitz-Birkenau. They then went to work in the Christianstadt camp [subsidiary camp Gross-Rosen, in Polish Rogoznica], and from there they went on a death march in the winter of 1945 to Cheb, they then ended up in Bergen-Belsen 15, where they caught typhoid fever, had high fevers, hallucinated and almost didn't make it.

Of all the caretakers, we most obeyed Marta Kacjevová, who was about 18 back then. She looked like an older boy, slim, with curly hair, and she said that once she'd been shaved bald. We worshipped her, despite the fact that when someone didn't listen, a cuff to the head would come flying in his direction right away, no questions asked. Marta left in the fall of 1943 and didn't return...

I also remember our caretaker Milena Pirnerová, perhaps a relative of the painter Maxmilian Pirner. There's one peculiar scene connected with her. Back then, water was carried to 'Heim 236' in two pails. Most often Milena Pirnerová used to send me and my friend Jirka Silberstein for water, and this by calling out: 'Silberstein and Glas for water!' And so back then it occurred to me that Jirka and I could play a scene on this theme. It took place there, where those pails really stood, by the door, and Milena would play along with us. The scene began with her usual calling out: 'Silberstein and Glas for water!' Jirka and I would at first explain to her that we're not that strong to be always going for water, and would try to convince her that someone else should also go with the pails, and then we'd just mouth off. Despite the fact that I'd never been to the theater before, I had some 'drama experience' as a reader of books, and so the scene ended as it began, that is, with Milena calling out: 'Silberstein and Glas for water!' Neither Jirka nor Milena returned.

Another time, in the infirmary, I experienced a heart-rending scene. A small, five-year-old girl was there with us, who her granny used to come visit. She was a real granny, because she had a kerchief on her head and the little girl used to call her Onubaba. One time her granny came to see her and was weeping terribly, she covered the little girl in kisses from head to toe and back again, the girl was laughing and kept calling out Onubaba, Onubaba. They then had to lead the granny off, and we later found out that her grandma was in the transport and had come to say goodbye to her granddaughter, because she suspected that she'd never see her again.

Sometimes Sister Ilse would be on duty, who would play the guitar for us and sing in German. Otherwise I just remembered that she had long hair coiled in a bun. I recalled her when I was in Germany several years ago for forums about Terezin, and one man brought me a brochure about her with her portrait drawn in pen.

Then I was in Terezin at a concert of one female Norwegian Jewish singer, who was singing her songs. Finally, at the Czech exhibition in Auschwitz, I found a remembrance of her with her portrait. She was named Ilse Weber, and was a Sudeten German 16 Jew, a poet, who left on a transport to Auschwitz, and along with her child, went into the gas. Her son might still be alive.

In Terezin we also studied Ivrit, which is modern Hebrew, and also the Hebrew alphabet, but not systematically. We did group exercises using Hebrew commands, but those then evaporated from my head. We practiced the Hatikvah 17, the Jewish hymn, and I also remember the song 'My Homeland is Palestine.' I knew that I was of Jewish origin, I was, after all, imprisoned in Terezin because of it, but from the time I know Czech, I feel myself to be a Czech, and ever since then the Czech lands have always been my native land.

When after the war I then married my wife, who wasn't Jewish, for a long time I had this strange notion that my Jewish ancestors were looking at me accusingly, that I'd betrayed them. In the end I came to terms with it in some fashion, and I say that I'm a Czech Jew, a European, and that in Terezin I learned to be proud of being a human being. I also say that here in Central Europe it's nonsense to talk about any sort of racial purity, after all, nations traveled back and forth, so races and nations mixed together.

When I go to talk with students, I say that everyone is born as a human being, but if he'll really be one, that that's not something that his mommy and daddy can arrange, that's something that depends only on him. And right away I add that I don't know how to define 'human being,' except perhaps anthropologically. It's especially difficult in recent times, when you can't even preclude the existence of child criminals and even [child] murderers and soldiers. Because of my experiences in Terezin, I'm very hung up on protecting children. So it's then horrible when children do each other harm.

Terezin cured me of much foolishness. In Terezin we sometimes had sweet cream-filled buns for lunch. Leavened buns, from flour, water, yeast and powdered eggs. It was neither paper nor wood, so it was edible. They were served with a cream made from fine flour mixed into melta [a coffee substitute made from chicory and rye], a bit of sugar and a bit of margarine. It was cold, it had lumps inside, but it was sweet, so it was good.

I tenaciously wished to once be able to eat a proper portion of it. I looked forward to being able to eat it once the war would be over. After the war, I, of course, didn't even think of such buns, but back then my mother arranged for me to get three or four portions of it, she exchanged it for tomatoes. How I was looking forward to having it! I ate the first portion, and was delighted. Then the second portion, by then I already knew what it tasted like. Then I had the third portion, by then I wasn't that thrilled by it, and by the fourth I was sick of it, because I'd had too much. Plus I realized that it wasn't worth it, because it really wasn't that good. This experience was priceless. Since that time, I've never wished for something I can't have, and before I wanted something, I thoroughly thought it over, whether it's worth it.

In this sense, Terezin was useful in many ways. I learned many things, which were painful, but not all that terribly so. For example: Terezin also had a Scout 18 movement, secret of course. That was in the first half of 1944, when I was no longer living in the 'Heim,' but in the 'school' in L 417. The guys elected an advisor from amongst themselves, who was supposed to lead the others. But then some kid appeared who began agitating against the current advisor. He ran off at the mouth for so long, that I'd be better and so on, until the guys recalled the previous advisor and I became the leader.

I was leader for some time, but then that guy started talking again, that I was doing it wrong. And so the guys recalled me and elected him. What people won't do to get a certain position. I'd figured it out, plus I soon moved out of that home anyways. It was a good education. Without great pain I found out how things went in life, and also that I wasn't any sort of manager. Neither did I seek out management positions later in life, and I was glad that no one forced me into them.

I learned all sorts of things in Terezin. That food is sacred is something I learned in Terezin. That loving someone is sacred. That you shouldn't cause anyone pain. Even unwittingly, that's the saddest thing, when you don't want to, and you cause someone pain. In Terezin, and then after the war, my mother explained to me that not just anyone could offend me, only a person of my own standing. To which I've added, why should a person of my standing want to offend me, unless by mistake, but that doesn't count.

In 'Heim 236' I met Petr Seidemann, and we then became friends 'for life and in death' as they write in boys' books. He was the same age as I, was from Prague, was an only child, and as opposed to me, was a Czech Jew with Czech as his mother tongue. I knew both his parents, mainly his Mom. After the war, they both moved to Venezuela. We still write each other, I went to [South] America to visit him, and he on the other hand sometimes comes to Prague.

In Terezin we published a magazine together, which we called 'Domov' ['Home']. To this day, we still don't understand how with such scant knowledge we could have published a magazine at all, and made it look like it did. We were very inspired by 'Mlady Hlasatel,' where a comics serial about the 'Rychlé Sípy' [Fast Arrows] boys' club was published. Back then we didn't know other Terezin children's magazines from various 'Heims,' and neither did we know that they existed. None of the adults interfered with the magazine, just once someone arranged a meeting for us with a former writer for Prager Tagblatt 19, who gave us a few pieces of advice. We took work on the magazine very seriously, we imagined that we were addressing our readers. That a large part of our readers didn't actually know how to read is something we somehow didn't realize.

Because I understood German, I could read German books and watch German plays. I for example read the book 'Baumwolle' ['Cotton'] by Anton Zischka, an educational book, actually the first of that kind that I'd read, and which greatly captivated me. Of the plays, I for example remember the dramatization of Erich Kästner's book 'Emil and the Detectives,' which I'd read in the Czech translation still back in Prague. The play was put on by a group of German Jewish children, it had singing, and for example Emil sang: 'Ich bin Emil aus Neustadt, Emil aus Neustadt, Emil aus Neustadt, bestohlen war ich von diesem Kerl, von diesem Kerl, von diesem Kerl.' It was only after the war that I found out that it was a melody from the operetta 'Beautiful Helena' by J. Offenbach. I'm King Menelaus, King Menelaus, King Menelaus...

Another German theater performance that captivated me was one where Mrs. Zobelová, a colleague of my father's in Terezin, played a clown. She'd apparently made herself a clown costume and played very convincingly, probably also because she was hunchbacked and so looked like a dwarf. When my father was leaving Terezin, it was Mrs. Zobelová that he asked to help us if we needed something. As far as I remember, she kept her promise. She was from a mixed marriage, had a daughter in Germany and apparently returned to her after the war.

A big help for prisoners in Terezin were food parcels sent by their friends or relatives. We also used to get some, our neighbor from where we last lived, on Bulhlarská Street, used to send them. But probably only in the beginning, at least I don't remember it later anymore. It was harder and harder to send someone something. Quantities were limited, you had to send the person in question a correspondence stamp from the ghetto. The package had to contain something that would keep, there was no point in sending bread or margarine. They'd send sugar, barley, grits, there was no rice, and dried milk was impossible to find. You also didn't know if they didn't check the parcels. Our neighbor didn't have a lot of money, and getting food coupons was a problem. It really wasn't that easy to send someone something.

At one time in Terezin, there was a disease called encephalitis. Not the one from ticks, but some epidemic where apparently one of the symptoms was that a person saw double. Father had it, too. We boys from 'Heim 236' wished very much that the lady that was by the window where they handed out food and kept an eye on the food cards, would also have encephalitis and would thus see two stubs instead of one, and so would yell 'Zweimal!' into the window, and we'd thus get two portions. But she never got it. Children in Terezin were still children, and our ideas were still childlike.

In January 1944 they moved us to 'Heim No. 2' in the school at L 417. This was a building with several 'Heims,' ours had the youngest boys. We had different caretakers, and there was also a different schedule. I remember only one of the caretakers, Irena Seidlerova. She was strict with us. During one reunion of former Terezin children several years ago, she proclaimed that in 'Heim 236' in the Hamburg barracks they'd spoiled us, that they even used to bring us food, but that wasn't true, we used to go for food ourselves, to the barracks kitchen in the middle tract.

My friend Benno Pulgram

Connected to Irena Seidlerová is a peculiar story regarding my friend Benno Pulgram. About eight years ago, my wife, who works at the Old New Synagogue, came home and told me that that day a Czech-speaking man had been making the rounds at the Jewish community, asking about children from the Hamburg barracks. My wife told him my name, but he didn't recognize it, but he gave her his business card. When on it I read Vaclav A. Simecek, Toronto, it didn't mean anything to me, just that it isn't after all a Jewish name. But then I looked at the next line down, and there, written by hand, was BENNO PULGRAM. Right away I jumped up, that was a friend of mine from 'Heim 236,' who I thought was long since dead, because after the war he hadn't been in the convalescence home.

I remembered him well, because when he came to our 'Heim' in the fall of 1943, we older ones looked him over, and it seemed to us that for a half -gram [the Czech word for half is 'pul'], Pulgram, he seemed quite large, and so we began calling him Celygram [Wholegram]. And that he seemed kind of weird to us, because he was in Terezin all by himself.

So I sent him a letter to Canada, with the salutation Hi Benno Wholegram! Then in the spring he came to Prague, I went to meet him at the main train station, and carried a sign saying BENNO PULGRAM in my hand. Suddenly I saw a smaller man coming towards me and waving, still with slicked-down hair as I remembered him from that time more than 50 years ago, even through the hair was a bit thinner.

As Benno told me, he had been from Brno, from a mixed marriage, and he had been in Terezin with his little sister, who died after the war. His father was a Jew, and had come to Terezin sometime earlier. The children, with a stopover in Prague, came somewhat later, so their father was no longer in Terezin when they arrived. Benno came to our 'Heim' when we were still in the Hamburg barracks, and then together we were moved to the school.

Benno and his sister were scheduled for the last transport to leave Terezin, my father was on it, too. Now Irena Seidlerová arrives on the scene: Both of the children were already standing in the courtyard of the Hamburg barracks, and were checked off for boarding the transport, with a sign hanging from their necks, even though as half-breeds they weren't supposed to be in the transport. At that moment along came Irena, took them by the hand and led them away. She locked them up in some janitor's closet with rags, pails and brooms; for a while Benno and his sister listened to the commotion out in the courtyard and then fell asleep. The next morning they woke up, and the courtyard was empty.

Irena most likely then arranged for them to get into some building on the edge of Terezin, where upstairs there were girls and downstairs boys. They couldn't go back to school, because it was assumed that they'd departed. They stayed in hiding like this until the end of the war.

Their mother had absolutely no news of them. As soon as the war ended, she and her partner, Mr. Simecek, took a car, put a bed sheet with a red cross on it, and drove to Terezin. Terezin was under quarantine at the time, but apparently the impression that they were from the Red Cross helped them get inside. Benno doesn't know how, but their mother managed to find them, undressed them, put them on the floor of the car so that they wouldn't be found out at the checkpoints, and drove them back to Brno.

Living together with my family at Terezin

In May 1944 our entire family moved into one room together. My father was a staff member, and so as patronage got one room for the family in a building that is no longer standing. Today most buildings in Terezin have two or three stories, but this one had only a ground floor. It was located in a side street that was perpendicular to Langestrasse, abutted to the stables, and its gates were designated L 409. Behind the gates there were actually two houses, but there was only one common designation. You went inside from the courtyard, where there was a so-called block kitchen and a mess window. This kitchen and window served people who lived scattered about outside the barracks, otherwise the barracks had their own mess halls inside. I remember how in the courtyard there'd always be people standing in line, and they would eat the food they got right there on the spot. Or they'd take it home to prepare it somehow, because in the courtyard there were no benches or even chairs that you could sit on.

From the courtyard you went in through a hallway, at whose end was the door of our room. The room had two windows facing the street, and was divided in two by a wooden partition, ending about a half meter from the ceiling. My brother and I had beds in the smaller part, and in the larger was my mother's and father's bed, a kitchen table with a marble top, and a stove which could be used to heat food.

Today our building is no longer standing, after the war it was one of the few that was demolished. When I lead tours through Terezin, I go to at least show people where it stood. I at least have a key from its door, which is no longer, and its lock, which is no longer, which I always carry on me.

And one more thing often reminds me of it. After the war, my mother took the marble slab that was on the table to Prague. At first she had it on the table in the kitchen, then she put it out on the balcony, and finally I had a plaque for a gravestone made out of it; the names of my mother and brother are on it, and I also had them add my father, even though he's not buried there, and has no grave, and his ashes are just scattered somewhere. Now the name of my sister-in-law, recently deceased, is going to be added to it, too, and in time my wife and I as well.

My parents argued terribly in Terezin - about food. We all lost weight in Terezin, but my mother used to say that especially Father had. His clothes were hanging off him, and so she tried to give him more food. Which is why he was always angry. He said that it was out of the question. My mother worked hard in the garden, while my father didn't work manually, he sat in an office, and for that reason, too, it was unacceptable for him to eat Mother's portion. But my mother put one over him. When she was putting food on the plates, she gave herself more and him less. Father was already automatically switching the plates, because he thought that Mother was, as always, putting more food on his plate. By switching them, he actually ended up with more food. When we then remained alone in Terezin, my mother told me that Father had never found out the truth.

Once my brother came home with a few grits in his pocket, because he'd been transporting a sack that had been torn. Maybe he helped it along a tad. The grits spilled out, and Mother crawled around on the floor and gathered up each individual grit. Food was truly precious. When my brother used to come home after work, my mother would regularly say to him: 'Honza dear, don't go anywhere, lie down so you don't get hungry!' That's because he'd often pick up a heel of bread - of course for him, anything less than half a loaf was the heel - heft it in his hand, and ask: 'Mom, can I eat this heel?' Well, and that would for example be his ration for half the week.

The Terezin Council of Elders is sometimes criticized for not putting up resistance upon finding out what was happening in the East. That they continued to dispatch transports, that they didn't rebel, didn't resist the Germans. But I can put myself in their shoes, I'm able to imagine their fear for their lives. They lost them anyways, yes. But how could have they known that in advance? That's something you know after the fact. I'm sure that up to the end, they said, believed, hoped, that if they won't be an irritation, they'll survive.

In my opinion, the possibility of some uprising was completely illusory. It would have been heroic, but in that situation, when Jews didn't have weapons at their disposal, but on the contrary, at their backs had Germans from the Sudetenland, from Litomerice... I also heard my former colleague, a Jew, who's of the opinion that Jews shouldn't have boarded the transports at all, because the Germans didn't have that many soldiers and policemen to catch them all. And it didn't at all occur to him where they would have lived? If they would've returned to their original homes, in a while they would've rounded them up again. Pitch a tent somewhere? In the countryside? In a forest? Plus what would have those people lived on, where would they have gotten money from? Where would they get food coupons from? Every month they issued different ones. And identification, this was checked often. Or clothes. Let's say that an adult person could take his own clothing with him. But for a child that's constantly growing.

But also you had to count on the fact that Czechs inform on people. Alas. Not all of them, there were also those that hid Jews and rebels, but there weren't enough of those. Would it be possible to hide 170,000 Jews like this? When the Germans caught someone who was for example in the resistance or was hiding some partisan, did they execute him?

Of course, we witnessed the so-called 'beautifications' of Terezin. I remember that there were tents containing war production in the Terezin town square, which was for the greater part of my stay there. When Terezin was being beautified, they removed the tents, the fence, too, and put in a lawn and planted flowers. I also remember there being a café in Terezin, where you could get melta, and where some sketches, cabarets, took place.

In the corner of the square was a music pavilion, which interested me the most. Two bands used to play in it, one of them played swing. Up till then I didn't know swing, we weren't allowed to have a radio, and the second one played symphonic music. That was more familiar to me, that I knew from earlier. The local orchestra was roughly the size of a chamber orchestra, and played all sorts of things. I really liked the drummer, who not only played on the tympani and beat a small and big drum, but also had a harmonica and a triangle and some sort of gong and chimes... He was constantly playing something, and I liked that a lot, just like the music itself.

They would, for example, play the 'Ghetto March.' Later, after the war, I found out that it had actually been Julius Fucíks's 'Florentine March.' Why they renamed it the 'Ghetto March' I don't know, but perhaps they didn't want the name of Julius Fucík to be heard. [Fucík, Julius (1903 - 1943): a Czech writer, journalist, politician, literary and theater critic and translator. Executed by the Nazis in 1943.] Because that was not only the name of the Terezin bandleader, but also of a Communist journalist, his nephew.

My father and brother were members of the Terezin mixed choir. My father had already been singing in a choir before the war, and now he continued in it. They met about twice a week. I used to like going to their performances, I saw 'The Bartered Bride' about three times, and 'The Kiss' perhaps even five times. In 'The Bartered Bride' I really liked the comedians with the trumpet and drum. They also put on Verdi's 'Requiem,' and I admired Rafael Schächter, who, when he was playing the piano and didn't have his hands free, conducted with his head. I'd never seen anything like it before - actually, I'd never seen any sort of concert before, all I probably knew were the organ and choir from church.

Culture was a significant part of life in Terezin. That was precisely what distinguished life in Terezin from other concentration camps: people tried, in quotation marks, to continue in their prior lives. Family life may have been seriously disturbed, because families mostly didn't live together, but despite that, they tried to get together as much as possible. Especially culture was for us a reminder of times when we'd still lived a normal life.

Another manifestation of the desire for a normal life were visits. I know that my parents often met with the Auerbachs, who they knew from before the war. Mr. Auerbach also worked on staff, he and his wife had gone on the same transport as my father. Because food was scarce and there wasn't anything to offer guests, everyone always brought something along with him. The desire to lead a normal life in Terezin was admirable. There, it was still possible. People were still trying to remain human.

My brother was going out with one girl in Terezin, and the story of their relationship is a very sad one. I think her name was Lixi, her last name I don't know. She was a bit younger than my brother, and had a hump. She had beautiful long hair, was very kind and her parents even arranged a wedding for them. It, of course, wasn't officially valid, weddings from Terezin weren't officially recognized. Lixi then left on a transport. I think that as a hunchback, she immediately went into the gas. Whether my brother told his future wife about that, that I don't know.

In Terezin we tried to celebrate holidays. We celebrated birthdays, but there wasn't too much gift-giving, there wasn't anything to give. So I for example made gifts. Once I gave my mother, probably for Christmas, a New Year's card. On it was Libuse's prophecy with a picture of the Prague Castle. I didn't have any example to work from, I remembered the panorama only vaguely, and so I drew some towers against the sky. And underneath: 'Behold, I see a great city, whose fame will touch the stars.' My mother likely didn't even know it, because she'd never studied Czech history, but I don't think it mattered. The main thing was that she had something from me. I'm also delighted when my granddaughter draws something for me. That's the thing that's nice about it, when a person feels that no one gave a child advice, that it expressed itself on its own.

As far as religious holidays go, Chanukkah is a family holiday, but how could have one celebrated family holidays in Terezin? I remember Passover. In 1943, Rabbi Feder 20 came to our 'Heim' to perform a service. During Passover you're supposed to eat root vegetables. But where to find those in April, in Terezin? Under different circumstances, they'd be grown in a greenhouse, but there were no greenhouses in Terezin. And if there were, then for Germans, not for us. So I remember that Rabbi Feder brought us these skinny little parsnips and skinny little carrots. And all the while he sang: 'Elbeneybe, elbeneybe, elbeneybe, zuzi chad'kad'kad'oo...' What it means, I don't know. I'd never heard it before nor ever again after that. I guess it was important for me somehow, I don't know how, I don't know why.

There were about 35 of us boys there. Those of us that had a cap put a cap on their heads, others used a handkerchief or their hand. I'd been christened, but I didn't say that I won't celebrate Passover, after all, it was still the same God. For Jews, for Christians, and for Muslims. My mother told me many times, that I returned from Terezin as a child with an old man's head. Probably she was right.

Our whole family lived together from May until September 1944, when my brother left. At the end of October of that same year my father also left. He left on the last transport from Terezin, on 28th October 1944, and apparently died on 30th or 31st October 1944. The entire staff, who went into the gas without any selection, left on the last wagon of that transport. The Germans probably wanted to get rid of witnesses, even though everything was finally exposed anyways. Three weeks later, the gas chambers were blown up, so my father was one of the last people to die in this way. For the next 30 years, up until she died, my mother was a widow.

My mother and I remained, alone, but Grandma Fischer used to come visit us regularly. Almost every day, my mother and I would say to each other that when the war ends, my father and brother will return and we'll all be together again. In those peculiar circumstances in which my mother and I lived alone, without my father and brother, a very singular relationship developed between my mother and me, one which I very much like to recall.

My mother would leave for work early in the morning, when I was still asleep, and when she returned home late in the afternoon, I'd be tired and asleep again. So I began saying that we lived like those two that don't like each other - how I came by this comparison I don't know, because I didn't know any such couple. Neither for a long time after the war was I able to comprehend how people who don't like each other could live together, or even how a father and mother could get divorced and abandon their family!

After some time my mother began having some female health problems. I didn't understand it, but I knew that she was bleeding. Dr. Klein then operated on her, and so she needed to eat well. By coincidence, at that time they were issuing marmalade in the commissary, and Miss Porges allowed me to scrape out the already scraped-out marmalade barrels for myself. So I lowered myself to the bottom of both barrels, and scraped them out right down to the wood, so thoroughly that I eked out a full pot of marmalade from them. I was miserable from that work, because I was all sticky from marmalade, but my mother indulged herself, and was constantly telling me that I'd saved her life. I was embarrassed, because you don't say that to little boys. My mother used to say that even long after the war. Back then I actually wasn't at all little any more, even though I wasn't an adult yet either. As I mentioned earlier, my mother also used to say, after the war, that I'd returned as a child with an old man's head.

Being embarrassed for an adult was always especially awkward for me. Once I experienced greater embarrassment than ever before, which was when my mother and grandmother told me to go get a haircut. The barber was across the street, but because in the morning I'd out of habit wet my hair before combing it, because back then I had a 'mattress' on my head which was hard to comb when it was dry, the barber told me that he couldn't cut wet hair. So I came back 'empty-handed.' Just my grandma was home, who was upset, and because just then it was tomato season and my mother always brought some home, Grandma stuck three tomatoes in my hands, to give to the barber.

So I set out once more, and as soon as I arrived, I clumsily gave him the three tomatoes, because I'd never 'bribed' anyone before. I immediately saw something unbelievable: the barber 'broke' in half as if he'd cracked, sat me down with deep bows into a barber's chair and began fawning over me, cutting, dusting, it's a wonder he didn't shave my smooth child's face, and finally he also sprayed me with something, and then bowing accompanied me to the door, where he once again bowed deeply, as if I was some sort of princeling. What three tomatoes could accomplish in Terezin - apparently at that time he'd seen them again for the first time in a long time. I was terribly embarrassed for him, and will never forget this experience.

I then moved into the larger part of our room, as they'd put Mrs. Hellerová and Mrs. Tumová into the smaller one. Mrs. Hellerová was the aunt of the last Jewish elder, Mr. Vogel, an engineer, who died a few years ago, she herself has been long dead. Initially Mr. Vogel had been head of the Terezin plumbers, Petr Seidemann apprenticed with him. I remember that once in the Magdeburg barracks a plank fell into the latrine and got stuck there, and so they lowered Mr. Vogel on a rope into that pipe to bring up the plank. Then he had to go wash right away, because he was very dirty and stank terribly. Otherwise, Mrs. Hellerová played solitaire, Napoleon's Square. I don't remember the rules precisely anymore, but she always laid out the cards while saying that this year the war would finally be over. I'd look on, and occasionally give her a bit of advice. Sometimes it worked out, sometimes not.

Starting 16th June 1944, when I turned thirteen, I had to start working, because back then compulsory labor started at thirteen, and I've still got my time book from back then. At first I worked in the food commissary, where Mrs. Baschová was in charge, and when she left on a transport, Miss Porges took her place. She was completely new there, so I and one older 'colleague,' Mrs. Neumannová, taught her what and how things were done in the commissary.

Liberation

My last workplace in Terezin were the ramparts, where I worked with other boys and girls. Our main activity was pulling up a pail of water hanging by a rope from a pulley, which we would fill in a stream that ran between the ramparts, in times of danger the space between the ramparts was supposed to be flooded with water from the Ohra River, but that never took place. We then poured the water into watering cans and watered the gardens with it. I was still in the gardens when we were liberated.

That long-awaited day came on 8th May 1945. It was already almost evening, I was standing by the road that passed by Terezin, and was watching the cars with German soldiers that were running away. Someone threw a hand grenade in our direction from one of them, but luckily nothing happened and the grenade didn't explode. The Germans were gone, about a half-hour's silence ensued, which was interrupted by the arrival of the Red Army.

Terezin was being liberated by a mixed army, cars, tanks, which had a tough time turning a 90 degree turn, galloping by us came a soldier on a brewery mare. The mare slipped on the cobblestones, but regained her balance and galloped on. Can you imagine what we were feeling? Finally the day we'd wished for since the beginning of our suffering had arrived. I stood there with the others, and we were roaring like wild animals in the jungle. I until midnight, the others greeted the liberators with hollering and celebrated the end of the Terezin ghetto perhaps until morning!

What came next? One day this, the next day that... Terezin was liberated, but despite that we couldn't leave it -in the ghetto a typhus epidemic was raging, brought by prisoners from the death marches 21. A quarantine was declared, and doctors, mainly from the Red Army, had their hands full quelling the danger. I remember an army ambulance, quite decrepit with age, that was constantly criss-crossing Terezin. A doctor or medic with a glass eye used to ride in it. But despite these unpleasant things, I remember this time as being full of euphoria from new-found freedom. On the square in front of the former barracks - a remnant of the beautification - Jewish electrical technicians had stationed a radio truck, which played dance music and broadcast radio news. Back then people were posting obituaries that 'after twelve years, the Great German Reich had finally died, to the great delight of those left behind' in Terezin, too.

Even though almost 60 years have passed since the Terezin ghetto ended, I meet up with it in one way or another very often, especially from the time I started going to schools to talk about Terezin, and Czech Television broadcast a documentary called 'A Magazine Named Domov.' Thus, after long years I met with friends from 'Heim 236' who I had thought were long dead. Recently I met a cousin of my friend Jirka Lagus from 'Heim 236.' I showed her our magazine, Domov, where I'd drawn him picking fleas out in the hallway in front of the 'Heim.'

Even though nothing all that bad really happened to me - I survived, experiences from Terezin keep coming back to me time and time again. I constantly have to think about friends that didn't have that kind of luck, who never returned. I feel that I owe them something. I constantly think of those little children who were carried by their unsuspecting mothers along with them into the gas chambers. On various occasions thoughts about the suffering and destruction of so many human lives awaken in me again, and so it seems to me that for me, the Holocaust won't end until I die. A psychiatrist told me that it's a guilt complex. I guess so. I feel a great responsibility for my actions to those who died, I know that I can disappoint them.

Shortly after the war, my mother also told me about how she'd met Kurzawy, a Sudeten German, who'd been the head of agriculture in Terezin. I don't think he ever hurt anyone, just addressed them familiarly and good- heartedly expressed his superiority. He used to see my mother daily, so he knew her well, and when he saw her that time, he deftly took of his hat, bowed, and in German said: 'I kiss your hand, your ladyship!' Times had changed...

My time at the convalescence home

Exactly a month after the liberation, June 8th, Czech Jewish children left Terezin for convalescence homes, set up for them in the former chateaus of Baron Ringhofer in Kamenice and Stirin by Prague. There, I one day got a letter addressed in handwriting that I knew very well - it was my brother's. First my mother wrote, that she's terribly happy, that our little Honza had returned, and all that remained was for Father to return, and we'll all be together again. Then my brother wrote, I saved the letter, but to this day I know what it said off by heart:

'My dear brother! Today I returned from Kaufering and went to have a look at our house, and by utter chance I found Mom there. Eat lots of dumplings, so that I won't recognize you when Mom and I come to visit you! Alas, I don't know anything about Dad.'

I don't remember the regime in the convalescence home much anymore. I know that we had to wash dishes, I have this one peculiar memory of this. I had this one friend there, Alfred Holzer was his name. He was a bit older than I, and his father had been the Terezin fire chief. When they had drills, I'd go watch them, and so I knew Mr. Holzer. Once he and I were washing dishes together in Kamenice. He put a plate on the tips of his fingers, spun it around like this, and the one that fell and didn't break got a gold, or silver medal. If it broke, bad luck, it got nothing. Once he broke a whole pile of plates like this right when a caretaker walked in. We said that he'd accidentally dropped them. Alfred later graduated from medicine, and after 1968 he emigrated. In 1993 the guys from Grade 9 had a met up, and I also took part in their reunion. Fredy was among them, already laughing at me from a distance. I told him this anecdote, and he was recording it with a movie camera, he didn't remember doing it at all.

At first, boys and girls from Terezin were in Kamenice together. But then the management began to have qualms regarding that sort of coexistence, so we boys moved to Stirin. I remember one girl, I don't remember her name anymore, and I really have no idea anymore what possessed her, but she began provoking me and wanted to fight me. I didn't even like fighting with boys, much less girls. In Terezin I used to brawl, that's true, but I had to brawl to preserve some sort of right to exist, otherwise everyone would have dared to come at me. But I'd never fought with girls. And when this one came and started provoking me, I still remember to this day thinking about where I should slug her. Not the stomach, not below the belt, that's not allowed, for sure not the head. So where? In the breasts, that's inappropriate. So I hit her with all my might in the shoulder and walked away. And with this I got her to then leave me alone.

From Stirin, I remember the fishpond, which was right by the chateau. There, some Max from the Lieder-Kolben family taught me to swim. He was a swell guy, probably around 17, later I never saw him again.

If I'm not overly mistaken, I was in the convalescence home until 15th August 1945. In the morning they said that I was going home, so I went. The others still stayed there, I was supposed to go because I was supposed to start school in September, and was supposed to devote the coming time to 'civilize' myself in some fashion. I surprised Mother, she had no idea that I was going to appear that day. It was right around noon, and my mother was all flustered because she didn't know what to feed me. Finally she pan- fried some cooked potatoes in some butter for me, and I remember to this day how I was sitting at the table and saying: 'Mom, these potatoes are so good...'

Our post-war life

My mother was unhappy, because she thought that I'd be eating well in that convalescence home. But there wasn't much food there, and we used to make fun and say that they were saving up for World War III. We didn't have much food, and neither was it particularly tasty, I remember us once ostentatiously eating paper, saying we were hungry. But that was more of a provocation. So I finally properly ate my fill with my mother at home, and in the afternoon I went with my friends to the cinema, which was around the corner, to see the movie 'San Demetrio [London].'

My mother was also very much influenced by her war experiences. She used to say that the only language that she really knew well, German, she hated. Which is, of course, nonsense, how can someone hate a language? A language can't be responsible for something. She was brought up in German, studied in German and didn't learn Czech until before the occupation, and never properly. She also used to say that Germans should be castrated. I understood it, it was an expression of her desperation.

My mother actually never enjoyed her life. She saw World War I, then had tuberculosis, then there were worries as to what my father would do when he lost his job, well, and then suddenly the occupation was here, war... Even before it broke out here, there was news about what was happening in Germany, in Vienna, Crystal Night 22. And finally my mother lived as a widow. Later, when German friends of mine used to come visit, who'd certainly done nothing wrong, because they'd been little children at the time, she behaved very coldly towards them. I'd explain to them that they shouldn't be upset at her, that she simply couldn't deal with it.

After the war we didn't return to our apartment. Right at the end of the war, some people that had been bombed out moved into it. My mother was issued this tiny little apartment, one small room plus another one with a kitchenette, about 16 square meters all told. The kitchenette had only a sink and a hotplate, in the other part of the room there was a table plus room for a bed that she had brought over from Terezin. My brother and I lived in the larger room. Then my brother got married and moved out. Then I got married and moved out, so Mother remained there alone.

When the Benes Decrees 23 began being enforced, we were terribly afraid that they would also deport us, as Germans. Everyone who'd registered themselves as being of German nationality before the war were, according to the Benes Decrees, supposed to be deported, and whether or not they'd been imprisoned in a concentration camp wasn't taken into account. Only those that proved they'd been anti-Fascists. But where could a Jew who'd been locked up in a concentration camp find that sort of proof? Those decrees didn't take this into account. My mother didn't know what nationality our father had registered us as in 1930. In the end it came out that as Jews, and so we were allowed to stay here.

What would have moving to Germany meant for us? After all, we weren't Germans. For a long time, neither I nor my mother wanted to speak German! For Jews who'd returned from the concentration camps, it must have been horrible, living among those that hated them, and they on the other hand hated Germans. You can't live like that. I didn't return to the German language until 1956, when I met some Germans from East Germany. Then in 1964 I was on business in East Germany, during Christmas market time, and I heard little children nattering daddy, mommy, buy me.... and at night my childhood years with my father and mother returned to me, it was quite horrible...

My brother left Terezin for Auschwitz, and from there onwards to Kaufering, a branch camp of Dachau 24. There was a secret airplane factory there, but my brother worked for the funeral commando, he stood in waist-deep water and buried corpses. He caught tuberculosis from this. He actually only talked about what he'd experienced immediately after his return, with our mother. His experiences were so terrifying that he never wanted to return to them. After the war he always had a big complex that he hadn't gotten a proper education. Yet he was very talented and would definitely have had the abilities for it. But he didn't get the opportunity.

Before the war he managed to only finish kvarta [equivalent of Grade 9], and after the war he took a one-year business course. Then he had to start working, because I had an orphan's pension, my mother a widow's, but who would have supported him? Maybe that after the war he wasn't even inclined to further studies, the most important things he learned in that one-year course, and his head was probably too pumped dry for anything more.

As a 30 percent invalid, he was quite badly off. I remember once going swimming with him in the Vltava River. He had a very hard time swimming across, even though it was quite narrow. Though after the war he did do canoe racing and skiing, it apparently didn't agree with him. He got a job with Kovospol, a foreign trade company.

Actually, after the war my brother became the head of the family. He used to fill out various questionnaires and forms, that's something I couldn't do. So it was he, my brother, who decided that we wouldn't emigrate, that we'd stay here. My mother's two sisters lived in Australia, and Grandma moved there, too. But I wouldn't be able to get used to any other country, my home is here. My mother and brother were also of the same opinion.

In September 1945 I started attending academic high school in Prague, in the Vinohrady quarter. I started in tercie [Grade 8], and luckily they postponed my entrance exam until the end of the year, because how would I, with three grades of elementary school, have passed exams on material from first and second year of high school? It wasn't only a boys' high school, there were girls that attended it as well, however, not in our class. Up until oktava [Grade 12] I would only meet girls in the hallway, it was only then that three girls joined our class.

In Grade 8 there was a boy in our class who was a hunchback. But it wasn't only his back that was deformed, but also his soul. That's the worst, because then people are nasty, they're actually crippled twice. Once during Russian class I was called up to the blackboard, he stuck out his foot and I tripped. I never fought, but I had returned from Terezin with the notion that one couldn't put up with this type of thing, so I went back and gave him such a whack that his little head bounced off his hump. For Russian we had this one Russian lady, we called her 'baryshnia,' and she started at me, aren't I ashamed of hitting a cripple. And I told her with eyes ablaze, that in that case he shouldn't have stuck out his foot. I guess I was quite inflexible, I'd brought back knowledge and experiences with me from Terezin that to a significant degree determined my behavior, which, however, for people without similar experiences was incomprehensible.

After the war we were no longer members of the Jewish community. My mother did consider converting back to Judaism, but the ceremony that she would have had to undergo, for them to take her back, discouraged her from it. While when I was becoming a member of the community, they weren't interested in whether I'd been christened or not. The wanted to know my mother's origin. The reason my mother wanted to return was that she wanted to be together with Father. But I used to tell her that she'd meet up with him one way or the other. I think that what a person has in his heart is more important than what religion he formally belongs to.

When I was in my graduating year, I wanted to study production at FAMU [Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague]. I knew, however, that this subject wasn't taught at FAMU. Despite that, when there was a presentation on what subjects it was possible to study there, I went to have a look at it. And so I hear: camera, dramaturgy, production! I woke up and went to the lecturer to ask about the details. Not only he, but no one knew what exactly was going to be taught. I was the first who applied for that year, and they accepted me.

My other classmates were recruited from the ranks of those that had unsuccessfully applied for other subjects. I must say, that my high school classmates' company didn't overly suit me. Especially with my experiences from Terezin, they seemed to me to be overly trite. Luckily, before I started attending, my mother had warned me that I'm not suited for that sort of society. And so later, when I didn't like it there, I couldn't really complain.

In 1953 I began participating in the Stavar [Builder] folklore ensemble belonging to the Faculty of Civil Engineering. My friends, classmates, brought me into the ensemble. It had started up the year before I arrived, in 1952, during the time Gottwald was in power, and still before the Slansky trial 25. It was this socialist ensemble, our hymn was the song 'Come along nation, loyal nation, with President Gottwald...,' but I didn't sing it. Up until about 1958, ensembles like this were very much in fashion, then they gradually declined, and around 1961 or 1962 our ensemble broke up.

The ensemble had several components, a vocal group, a dance group, an orchestra and a variety show group, which is where I was. The choir was the biggest, the orchestra and dance group were relatively small. When we were traveling to go perform somewhere, there were as many as a hundred of us. I did puppet theater there, and other various such tomfoolery for the amusement of others.

I enjoyed imitating various sound effects. I had actually always liked doing that, once in Terezin I sounded the all-clear for an air raid alert like that. Our courtyard had a mess window, and if someone came for their food and the air-raid siren announced the start of an alert, they had to wait there until the all-clear was sounded. Once, on a lark, I sounded the all-clear myself. Right then there was one old lady who'd come for her lunch resting at our neighbors', and when she heard my siren, she thought that the alert was over, and left. Luckily there was a guard at the gate, so he didn't let her go any further. Now, when I'm showing friends around Terezin, I take them to that courtyard, where the kitchen of course no longer exists, and 'our' house is also demolished, and I sound the end of an air raid like back then.

My wife

In the ensemble I met my future wife, Hana Mazánková, who sang in the choir. My wife always looked very young. When we met in 1953, she was 23, and I was 22. But I thought that she was around 13 or 14. I didn't talk to her at all, I thought she was a kid. Then once we were on an outing with the ensemble. We were divided up into groups, and I led one of the groups. We got a map, I had my own compass from home, so I was explaining something about it, and my future wife says: 'I know that.' And from where? 'From army training.' How can you have army training in high school? So that's how I found out that she's not a high school student, but that she's in 3rd year of university and is a year older than I.

Maybe she wouldn't have even married me, because at first she refused me. I'd bought a ticket for some folklore concert. I offered it to her, and she said no. But when a girlfriend of hers heard that, she rebuked her, my wife returned and said yes. I'd already made up my mind, that if no, then no. I took it as a fact and wasn't going to plead with her. I don't think I'd ever fight because of a woman, I guess I wouldn't be up to it. To me it's not dignified. I'd either have remained a bachelor, or I'd have found someone else, even thought that's not likely, I don't know if I would have had the courage to ask out another girl.

My wife didn't have anything to do with Jews, except for marrying one. And also that she had a Jewish girlfriend during childhood. When they wanted to go for a walk together, that friend of hers would lend her a star 26, she had two of them, and off they'd go. After the war, her friend didn't return.

Hana attended family school, then took a one-year Alumnus of Labor Courses, which was instead of graduation. Then she started attending the University of Political and Economic Sciences, which was then dissolved, and so she transferred to the Faculty of Philosophy, where she graduated.

She got a work placement at some physical education school in Nymburk, where she was supposed to teach Marxism-Leninism. She refused that, worked as a secretary, and then went to the Pioneer House and worked in the mass- media department. Later they let her go during a reorganization, that though she was a party member, she'd become obdurately anti-Party. So she got a secretarial job in Chemapol, a company that exported chemical products. She wasn't there long either, she then worked for the House of Culture in Branik in Prague 4, but after 1969 27 there were purges, like everywhere, and she had to leave and started working at the Regional Cultural Center for Prague West. There she stayed until 1990.

Our wedding, which was at the Old Town Hall, was quite a big embarrassment, because the ensemble arranged a little surprise for us, and plenty of them participated. After the usual ceremony at the town hall, they strung up a clothesline, hung various things on it, and I had to take them down. All the while, I was sticking the clothespins in my pocket, like I'd been used to doing when I used to gather the laundry for my mother, and everyone laughed at that. There were foreigners standing around and filming everything, and one foreigner called out to me, for me to kiss the bride, which I didn't want to do, but in the end did it. We delayed the other weddings by perhaps as much as half an hour.

Normally, however, I wasn't used to making fun of serious things. I can't stand practical jokes and black humor. Once in the ensemble, a friend borrowed some money from me, and returned it to me all in 10 haler coins. He thought that that was a good joke, but I'm not into things like that, because people are capable of even killing for money. And that's not a joking matter. Like food isn't a joking matter. One colleague of mine thought it a good joke to stick a brick or some slippers into my bag along with my food. I told him that next time I'd kill him, that food is sacred and you don't treat it that way. Terezin taught me that.

After the wedding, my wife and I went on vacation. We were pulling along a wagon with our suitcases, and I heard some locals saying: 'What's this? Are they brother and sister? Or father and daughter?' It didn't at all occur to them that we might be husband and wife. And when we were in Rujan, my wife and son and I went to borrow a beach basket. At that time I was 44, my wife was 45, and our son 12, but the old sea dog that lent us the basket thought that they were my children.

Once, when my wife was taking the streetcar home late at night, the conductor apparently asked her whether she wouldn't catch hell for coming home so late. Or when I was doing military training, and she was with her parents in a restaurant for lunch, the waiter asked her parents whether they didn't want a children's portion for her - at that time she was 30. Which is why my wife has always gotten along very well with children, for them she was actually their peer.

After school, I started working at the Prague Central Television Studio. I'd already been working there during summer holidays. Then I transferred over to the news offices. There I spent six years, and always experienced something new. For example, when Gagarin 28 was in Prague, I was preparing a live broadcast from the airport. Gagarin flew into space in 1961, so this anecdote took place sometime shortly thereafter. I was the first to arrive at the airport, and the last to leave, because I wanted to be sure that everything was in order, even though by myself I probably wouldn't have saved anything.

Yuri Gagarin was this pleasant young man. When people broke through the cordons and ran towards the plane, he was completely taken aback by it. Everything was being filmed by a camera driving in front of him. He probably wasn't used to something like that, and even in our neck of the woods, spontaneous crowds of people like that were unheard-of. So we weren't properly prepared for them. The technicians weren't able to chase them all away from the camera, which occasionally tipped over, so parts fell out of it. The picture disappeared, and on TV nothing could be seen. I was in the broadcast van, and couldn't do anything, well, it really was quite hectic back then. Then Gagarin went to the Castle, where he was given some state award. I was there, too, but luckily that was already a calmer affair.

In 1961 they transferred me into the development and building of CST [Czecho-slovak Television], where I then worked as a consultant on projects for the new TV center in Kavci Hory. I was regularly and frequently required to travel to Bratislava to consult on projects. Sometimes I lived in Bratislava like a pauper, because when a hotel wasn't available, they'd put me up with someone. I lived in a servant's room, which, however, wasn't available until 10pm, so I had to wander around the city. Most of the time I couldn't go to the cinema, there weren't any movies, so what to do? It was very depressing. Some guys were smacking their lips, that they'd pick up all sorts of women, they envied me, but I was homesick.

I actually like home best of all. For me, home is an irreplaceable part of life. My wife likes going to restaurants, but not I. I don't think you should make a show of food. For me food is a matter of survival, not entertainment. On business trips I perhaps went to some restaurants, but even so, many times I preferred to make it myself in my room somewhere, and just ate something cold. My brother once told me: 'Well, I know, we only go to restaurants when we have to.'

The concentration camp may have affected my brother differently, but even worse. He told me how once he went to see the movie 'Some Like It Hot.' It's this comedy and gangster movie, and the film's opening scene is from real life. One gang kills another gang on St. Valentine's day in a garage, and then what happens after that is that a couple of men accidentally saw it, and the gangsters try to catch them. My brother told me that with this scene, the film was over for him, that he couldn't watch it any further. To shoot people in a garage... What he'd gone through in Auschwitz and Kaufering returned to him again.

My brother worked in Kovospol, in foreign trade. In 1958 they wanted to fire him, that he had relatives abroad. That was sort of an echo of the events in Hungary 29. But back then that was the last quarter where that had to be approved by the National Committee. The National Committee didn't agree, because my brother was a 30% concentration camp invalid, so they had to leave him there, but transferred to a different position. First to the transport department, then the accounting department. As I later found out, because he was capable, he still unofficially managed foreign trade from the accounting department, but wasn't allowed to travel anywhere, and actually wasn't anything. Then they thought of him again in 1962, when they were starting to introduce computer technology, so they pulled him out of the accounting department. Back then, computers were punch-card machines.

Then he had his first heart attack; in 1964 my son was born, and when he was coming up to our place to have a look at him, he had serious problems. They diagnosed him with angina pectoris. In 1968 he had a second heart attack and went on disability pension, which was lucky for him, because in the purges after the help of the brotherly armies 30 he would definitely have been thrown out, he was on the plant's board. In 1976 he had a third heart attack, of which he died. They knew that he had tuberculosis, but during the autopsy they found out that he had it on his kidneys, and that his adrenal glands were infected, that he suffered from Addison's disease.

My brother actually didn't get much out of life, he didn't have a normal life. Except for the two years when he worked in foreign trade and could travel. His wife was also Jewish. She was named Hana Kirschnerová, was from Prague, and managed to stay in Terezin until the end. How, that I don't know. After getting married, our wives had the same names, so when my wife would call her, she'd say: 'Hana Glasová here, Hana Glasová please.' My sister-in-law is also no longer alive.

In 1951 they had their first son, Petr, then a second son, Tomas. Both of them are engineers, and live in Prague. Petr has two children, a daughter and a son. Tomas also has two children from his first marriage, and another two stepchildren and one of his own from his second one. My brother never spoke with them about the concentration camp, what they know, I told them.

When my brother worked in that foreign trade company, he was in the Party 31 for some time, then when he went on disability no one was really interested whether he was or wasn't. I was never in the Party. They probably would have pressured me when I worked in news, because when someone was in a management position, he had to be a party member. But before the pressure started, they'd transferred me to construction at Kavci Hory, and there they didn't care about me, because I was no longer a manager. I had them record in my cadre materials that I wasn't interested in a management position, so whoever was above me could remain calm, he knew that I wasn't interested in his position, and I was also left in peace.

At work I was reliable, but as far as private life goes, completely useless for my colleagues. I purposely made myself into as unsociable a person as I could, and thus achieved the fact that no one invited me anywhere. I was left in peace and that was the most important thing for me. I also realized that as a Jew, I had to be very careful to not mix myself up in any funny business.

But once it happened that they started investigating me, without telling me what it was about. When I asked, they said: 'But you know very well why.' Well, those two colleagues behaved like the Gestapo towards me. It wasn't until a long time had passed that during the meeting of one commission it was explained to me that a colleague and I hadn't written in some form, that while we'd been shooting a reportage about Christmas in a mountain chalet, we'd been given accommodations and food for free. Then they themselves realized that we didn't have anywhere to write it, because the form didn't have a place for it. Nevertheless, my colleague lost his job anyways. Not I, because they knew that I was honest.

In 1960 they caught Eichmann 32 in Argentina. A colleague of mine at the time, also a Jew, the foreign editor Vladimír Tosek, lent me a book about Eichmann's kidnapping. I read it, and because I myself didn't remember Eichmann much, I wanted to see if my mother knew the name. There was a lot written about Eichmann in the papers, but my mother didn't read papers, didn't have a TV, and on the radio listened only to music broadcasts from Vienna, so she didn't know anything about what was going on with him. I came over to her and asked: 'Mom, does the name Eichmann mean anything to you?' She turned deathly pale, and just whispered, almost inaudibly: 'That's transports, that's transports.'

I realized that whenever Eichmann appeared in Terezin, that meant that there'd be more transports. That was his responsibility. His office was grandly named the Office for Jewish Emigration. When they were gassing Jews, that was supposed to be that emigration. I then felt terribly sorry that I had tried my mother like that, even so many years after the war, it was still an absolutely living memory for her.

Once my mother and I were in Terezin, and saw a movie being shot there, 'Daleká Cesta.' We knew that it was only a movie shoot, my mother knew it, too, but when a gendarme walked by, an actor that was playing a gendarme, my mother turned pale and asked him: 'You're a gendarme?' He had a gendarme's uniform, so for her he was a gendarme.

When I used to go for trips about the Czech countryside, many times I conversed with my father, but never heard an answer. I needed advice. Then later, I sometimes got it mixed up, and spoke to God. Despite the fact that I don't believe in him. I guess there I was also talking to my father, or to myself. Because with decent people, what's God is their conscience. Precisely that a person talks to himself, and things about what he's done. Whether it's right or not. Whether it's allowed or not. American gangsters had no problem having someone murdered, and then sent a wreath to his funeral and crossed themselves in church. I don't think it had anything to do with God. And German soldiers had 'GOTT MIT UNS' ['GOD WITH US'] written on their belts. In World War I, they had the slogan 'GOTT STRAFE ENGLAND' ['MAY GOD PUNISH ENGLAND']. Why should God punish England? They'd commandeered him. And what if Jews, Christians, Protestants, Muslims also commandeered God? And all the while, it's the same God. And which one of them had the right of first refusal?

I think that talking to God is a private matter, no one needs a middleman for that, if he wants he'll talk to him himself. When a person goes on a date, he also doesn't need an advisor or interpreter. Years ago, I was in Susice, and suddenly in a shop window, I saw an engraving showing Abraham sacrificing Isaac. I had a son, I had Terezin behind me, and so I thought to myself, that God can't after all want anyone to sacrifice his son as a mark of his obedience. That's something that people thought up. I can't imagine it. After Terezin, thoughts like that send a shiver up your spine.

My mother was lucky to not be there for my brother's death. He died three years after her, at the age of 52. His last words to me were: 'When will I see you again?' I said I was going to Germany on business, and that when I return I'll call him. Of course, I never did call him again. My brother died in this strange fashion. He was supposed to take the radio to get repaired. It was hot, he wasn't feeling well, and he wanted to first got to Pruhonice, where he always felt well. But because he had the radio in his car, he said he'd go to the repair depot first. On the way, somewhere in Vrsovice, he ran into a former lady colleague from Kovospol. So he picked her up, and she invited him up to her place for a coffee. And he died in her apartment of a heart attack.

That lady didn't know what to do, she didn't know his home number, and it was only sometime in the evening, when they were, of course, already looking for him at home, she remembered the phone book, called and told them what had happened. When I returned, my wife told me what had happened to us. And I then cried like a little boy. I realized that I was the last of our Glas family, a witness of Terezin...

Glossary

Theodore Magder
Kishinev
Moldova
Interviewer: Zhanna Litinskaya
Date of interview: July 2004

I heard about Theodore Magder in the Jewish library of Kishinev. He was said to be an interesting conversationalist, but a rather difficult and very busy man. The people at the library assured me that he would never agree to an interview. I was thus surprised that it didn't take me long to make an appointment with Mr. Magder, though he mentioned that he was available for 30 minutes maximum at the Jewish community center that he heads. Theodore Magder is an old, thin, hunched man. He met me in his office. He wore a snow-white shirt and a suit despite the heat. Our meeting happened to be longer than expected. Mr. Magder agreed to give me an interview and we met two more times. Being a really intelligent man, well-raised and well-educated, Theodore Magder knows how to conceal his inner world hardly ever showing any emotions. Only when he talked about his son and his visit to the Promised Land his voice trembled. However, behind his seeming dryness I managed to discover the fine vulnerable heart of a man who had lived a long life and loved it. After our last meeting we went for a walk in the center of beautiful Kishinev. We went to the park and Theodore Magder told me about his youth. During this walk Theodore rescued a homeless kitten, which had fallen into a construction pit. He pulled it out and stroked its fur with tenderness. He said he loved dogs and cats, but after his wife's death he couldn't afford to keep a pet at home.

My family background
Growing up
During the War
Post-war
Glossary

My family background

I don't know much about my maternal or paternal ancestors. We lived in different towns. My parents were rather shy and reserved and they hardly ever told me about their parents or childhood. My paternal grandfather, Yakov Magder, whom I never met, came from the Romanian town of Vaslui [c. 80 km from Kishinev]. I think he was born in the 1850s because in 1877-78, during the Russian-Turkish War 1, he was involved in the struggle for independence of Romania. When I was in my teens, I read a poem by a Romanian classic - I don't remember his name - who wrote about ten volunteers from Vaslui who distinguished themselves in the war, and one of them, who had a 'tempered heart', was my grandfather Yakov Magder. After the war a decree of granting political rights to the Jews who had distinguished themselves on the battlefield was issued in Romania, while Jews had had no citizenship in Romanian before. So my grandfather became a national of Romania. He and my grandmother, whose name I can't remember, lived in Vaslui all their life, and I never met them.

I don't know what my grandfather did for a living. He provided well for his family and gave his children excellent education, so I believe he was a wealthy and progressive man. I don't know any details of my grandparents' religiosity, but I can say they observed traditions, celebrated Sabbath and Jewish holidays. From what I know my father and his brothers didn't go to cheder. My grandfather wanted to raise his children to be progressive people and he managed it well. Grandfather Yakov died in 1926. My grandmother had died a few years before. They had four children.

My father's older brother, Adolf Magder, born in the early 1880s, suffered from a chronic disease since childhood. He was single for this reason. Adolf got a higher pedagogical education at Bucharest University. He was a teacher and a progressive activist in Bucharest. During the Great Patriotic War 2 he had an acute condition caused by his disease and was taken to the Jewish hospital in Bucharest where he had to stay a few years. He set up a nice library in the hospital. Adolf died in this hospital during the Great Patriotic War.

I was surprised to hear that the Jewish hospital was operating during the fascist regime in Bucharest, and I spent some time studying this issue. It turned out that Antonescu [see Antonescian period] 3, then Romanian leader, was tolerant to Jewish residents of Bucharest, but he mercifully exterminated residents of outside areas, primarily Transnistria 4. There were a number of anti-Semitic laws issued 5, restricting the rights and lives of Jews, but basically they presented no direct threat to their life. There was a Jewish Theater in Bucharest during the Great Patriotic War. Its director told me many years later that the German officers heading to the Eastern front also used to visit it.

My father's younger brother, Benjamin Magder, born in 1889, was also in Bucharest during the Great Patriotic War. Benjamin had distinguished himself when he served in the Romanian army during World War I. There's a mention of him in the book 'Jewish veterans of WWI', published in Bucharest. ['Evrei din Ruminia in Rhzboiyl de reirntregire a shrii 1916- 1919', issued in 1996 by HASEFER - Publishing House of the Federation of Jewish Communities in Romania, Dumitru Hunke.] Benjamin was a well- to-do attorney and owned a house in Bucharest. His wife's name was Anna and his daughter's name was Beatrica. Being a veteran of the war, he was allowed to stay in his house with his family. Benjamin lived a long life, but for quite obvious reasons - living in the USSR - I had no contacts with him. [The interviewee is referring to the fact that it was dangerous to keep in touch with relatives abroad] 6 He died in the late 1980s in his own bed. His daughter Beatrica, whom I met when I visited Romania after 1990, still lives in her parents' house. She has six grandchildren. My father also had a sister, whose name I can't remember. She lived in Bucharest and died young. That's all I know about her.

My father, Solomon Magder, was born in 1887. I know that after finishing a Romanian state-funded gymnasium, he entered the Law Faculty of the University of Iasi. Like many students at that time my father gave private classes to earn his living. That way he met Israel Feinzilber, a grain dealer, who hired him to teach his younger daughter. My father met my mother, Sima Feinzilber, the older daughter, and they fell in love with each other. They got married around 1912.

My mother's father, Israel Feinzilber, was born in Iasi in 1860. I don't remember my maternal grandmother's name, perhaps, because I just addressed her as 'granny'. My grandfather provided well for his family, though his earnings were based on many factors like crops, market demand, etc. There were six children in the family, so supporting all of them wasn't an easy task for my grandfather. I visited my grandfather in my childhood, and I remember his house well. My grandfather rented an apartment from Bokin, a wealthy Jewish landlord, who had a house on Captain Palui Street in a row of similar stone houses. There were four spacious rooms and a kitchen in the apartment. There was polished furniture in the rooms. My grandparents had a piano for their children to study music. There were velvet curtains on the windows.

My grandfather had Romanian and Jewish acquaintances and had good relations with them. I remember the nearby synagogue. There was a significant Jewish population in Iasi and there were several synagogues for the guilds of craftsmen, traders, etc. My grandfather Israel and my grandmother were rather religious and observed all Jewish traditions. My grandfather wore a wide-brimmed black hat to go to the synagogue on Friday and Saturday. I liked going with him when I was there. My grandmother wore a wig like all Jewish matrons. She took care of the household, did the shopping and cleaning.

I cannot remember how all the holidays were celebrated in my grandfather's home, but Pesach was my favorite. We usually joined my grandparents on this holiday - this was a family tradition. I remember how my father dressed up and reclined on cushions at the head of the table. There was plenty of food that my grandmother cooked on the table besides the Haggadah dishes. According to the rules, my grandfather put away a piece of afikoman. I watched him and found it instantly, and one time I asked my grandfather to buy me a bicycle that I had dreamt of for some time. My grandfather bought it for me, of course.

My grandfather and grandmother spoke Yiddish to one another. Though I didn't study the language, I could understand them all right. In 1930 my grandmother and grandfather moved to Bucharest. They rented a small apartment there, I remember. My grandfather Israel died in 1939. He was buried according to all Jewish rules. My mother, father and I went to his funeral. I saw many religious people and the rabbi reciting a prayer. My grandmother died a few months after my grandfather, but I didn't go to the funeral. She was also buried according to the rules.

My mother's older brother, Mathey Feinzilber, lived in Paris and was a doctor and a writer, when I met him in the 1930s. He wrote a number of novels that I read many years later. I saw him several times when I was 14-15. We corresponded in French. I didn't know Mathey's wife. Mathey had two sons: Jamin Feinzilber, the older one, had kidney tuberculosis. He died before the Great Patriotic War. The other one, Samson Feinzilber, was a cinema and theater critic. He was an actor as well; he performed in French theaters. During World War II he was wounded in his back - probably during an air raid. That's all I know about him. Most likely, he died in a concentration camp. I saw Mathey in 1939, when he came to my grandfather Israel's funeral.

My mother's older sister, Tonia Rozenstein, nee Feinzilber, also lived in Bucharest. Her husband was a wealthy man. When the fascist regime of Antonescu came to power in Romania, he moved to Palestine with his family. He died there in the middle of the 1940s. His wife died a few years later. Tonia's son, Emil Rozenstein, perished in France during World War II.

My mother's younger sister, Sonia Feinzilber, married a Mr. Nadler, a Romanian Jew. They moved to Egypt. They lived in Alexandria where her husband owned a confectionery. I visited Sonia at the age of 12. I was struck by the eternal beauty of Egypt. There was a rather big Jewish community, a synagogue and Jewish community activities in Alexandria. During and after the Great Patriotic War Sonia and her husband lived in Switzerland. They died in the early 1950s. Sonia had no children.

My mother's younger brother, Simon Feinzilber, also finished the Medical Faculty in Iasi and lived and worked in France like his older brother. Simon was single. That's all I know about him.

Emil, the youngest brother, became a businessman. He owned a textile factory. He lived in Iasi and then in Bucharest. In the late 1930s he moved to Palestine with his wife, whose name I don't remember, and their son, Edwin. Emil and his wife died after the war. I have no information about my cousin brother Edwin.

My mother, Sima Magder, nee Feinzilber, was born in Iasi in 1889. Mama had a private teacher at home and then finished a Jewish or Romanian gymnasium. My parents spoke Romanian to each other for the most part, but they knew Yiddish as well. My mother learned to play the piano and did so quite well. She also studied foreign languages. She was quite well-educated for her time. Neither my father nor my mother knew Hebrew. My parents got married in Iasi in 1912. My grandfather Israel insisted that they got married under a chuppah and had a traditional Jewish wedding.

After the wedding my parents rented an apartment. In 1913 my father and his brother were drafted to the army. When my father's term of service was over, World War I began. He finished an officer school and went to war. One of those years my mother gave birth to her first baby named Emmanuel. Unfortunately, the boy died of scarlet fever at the age of five. I don't know when exactly my father was demobilized, but he moved to Kishinev immediately. He may have been offered a job there. My mother followed him.

Growing up

Before I was due my mother went to her parents in Iasi, and I was born there on 30th October 1921. My name, as well as my relatives' names, seems to be of Romanian, French or even Spanish rather than Jewish origin. I was a long-expected child, particularly since my parents had lost their first baby. Though my father wasn't religious, he obeyed his relatives and I had my brit [milah] ritual on the eighth day. At home I was affectionately addressed as Theo, and this became the name that my family used for me. My first childhood memory is of my mother sitting on the sofa, calling my name and stretching her hands out toward me - she probably taught me to walk thereby.

Another one of my memories is our house, or apartment, I'd rather say, which my parents rented on 16 Pushkinskaya Street. We had four rooms: a living room and a piano in it, my parents' bedroom, a children's room and my father's study. Mama spent all her time with me. She read me fairy tales and poems by Romanian authors, and she took me for walks in the beautiful town garden [in Kishinev] that is still there. There was a visiting housemaid, who did the shopping, cleaning and cooking at home, but my mother tried to do as much housework as she managed herself: at that time the progressive intelligentsia, which I think my parents belonged to, inspired by democratic ideas, tried to avoid using hired labor. My father worked a lot. Lawyers usually had their offices at home. My father was working and I liked watching him as he was sitting on the sofa. There were armchairs, high bookcases with thick volumes in them, and a desk in the center of his room. When my father had visitors, I had to leave his study. He was basically rather strict, but not my mother who was spoiling me.

My parents didn't observe Jewish traditions. My grandfather Israel usually told me about Jewish traditions and holidays, when I visited him in Iasi. My father didn't go to the synagogue and was an atheist, but he had ties with the progressive Jewish circles and defended Jews in court. Leaders of Jewish Zionist organizations often visited him at home and they had discussions in his room; even a rabbi visited my father once to consult him. My father wrote articles mainly on the eternal Jewish issue. I heard the word 'anti-Semitism' in my childhood, though I didn't know the meaning. My father was involved in civil, criminal and political cases. However, my father never discussed his work with me. I don't even know what kind of organizations they were; my father didn't tell me about them. Only much later did I learn about his support of Jewish organizations from his comrades and the media. I found out that my father was one of the founders of the Maccabi 7 local organization for young people in Kishinev. He also spent time with members of this organization. My father was a progressive attorney, supporting and defending those who struggled with the regime for a bright future. He didn't belong to any political party, but his views were close to the socialist ideology. My father also wrote articles about the Jewish history. I learned this, when I studied the history of my family in the 1990s.

I wouldn't say that my father spent little time with me. He read to me, taught me about arithmetic and nature. At the age of five I actually completed the syllabus of the 1st grade of elementary school. I was to take an exam in front of a big commission and this was the first exam in my life. My father was sitting in the conference room where I was standing before the commission. There was the 'intuition' subject in the first grade, something close to natural sciences [Editor's note: the subject certainly had a different name than 'intuitsiya' (Russian), but its content could have been similar to science classes for children of this age.] So the commission asked me to name home pets. I named a dog, a cat, a cow, a duck, etc. When they asked me which of them was my favorite, I said 'duck' and explained that it walked in a funny manner. I even demonstrated how it walked and the commission and my father burst into laughter. The commission gave me the highest mark and explained to my father that I was a smart boy and had an original way of thinking. So I became a pupil of the 1st grade. My grandfather and grandmother already lived in Bucharest, and we didn't join them on Jewish holidays. When I turned 13, my grandfather got angry with my father: my father refused to arrange a bar mitzvah for me. My grandfather didn't talk to my father for almost a year.

I went to the Romanian gymnasium [Lyceum]. There were 40 pupils in my class, seven or eight of who were Jews. Other classes had about the same ratio. By the middle of the 1930s the Jewish population of the town was about 80,000 people. [Editor's note: In 1930 the 41,405 Jews living in Kishinev constituted over 36 percent of the total population numbering 114,896.] There were 65 synagogues and prayer houses and a developed network of Jewish organizations in the town. There were Jewish schools, gymnasiums, and vocational schools preparing young people for repatriation to Palestine. There was a network of Jewish charity organizations, orphanages and a Jewish hospital. There was a Jewish newspaper called 'Neue Zeit' ['New Time' in German/Yiddish] published in Kishinev.

I didn't take part in any Jewish activities and, like my father, identified myself as a Romanian to a bigger extent. It should be noted that before Romania became fascist, Jews had no problems in their relations with other nations. There was no segregation in the gymnasium: when Christian children had their religious classes, Jewish children studied the history of Judaism and Jewish history. This was an elective course and my father didn't force me to attend it, but I did as I found it interesting. Later it was closed.

I began to take interest in politics, when I was rather young. By the age of twelve I clearly defined my own political interests. I had Romanian, Jewish and Russian friends. Anti-fascism was our common view. Fascism was spreading in Romania through such organizations as the Cuzists 8 and the Legionary Movement 9, but there were also anti- fascist organizations. Constantinescu, a professor of Kishinev University, was at the head of this movement. He was also the head of the Society of Friendship with the USSR [a local society]. In 1935 he was brought to trial and my father spoke as his attorney. This movement also involved gymnasium students. Two of my classmates were arrested for their participation in the underground Komsomol 10 organization. My father couldn't defend them in court to avoid being accused of bias considering that they were my friends. The guys were sentenced to six months in prison, though they were just 15 years olds, and they were expelled from the gymnasium. When they were released, I continued meeting them and shared their views, but I never joined the underground Komsomol organization.

I took a great deal of interest in the Soviet Union like all young anti- fascists; we tried to learn as much as we could about this country. Of course, we had no information about the mass persecutions or arrests, occurring in the USSR at the time [during the so-called Great Terror] 11, though the Romanian press occasionally mentioned large political trials - against Kamenev 12, Zinoviev 13, etc. Later I read records of these trials in a book published in the Soviet Union in many languages. I received one copy of the book in French translation, 'The book you know not about', and when I read the trial records and the words of confessions of espionage and all deadly sins that Lenin's comrades had committed, I couldn't believe this had happened and asked my father to explain. Papa told me strictly that I had no grounds to doubt that what was published in newspapers and books was true: as long as Lenin's former comrades confessed, this meant they were enemies.

Besides politics I was also fond of literature. I read Romanian, French and German books in the original language. I studied these languages with private teachers. I also read the following Russian classics translated into Romanian: Tolstoy 14, Pushkin 15, Chekhov 16, Dostoevsky 17. I didn't know Russian. At that time it was even forbidden in Romania. There were announcements that Russian wasn't allowed in public places. I wasn't fond of Jewish literature. I only read Sholem Aleichem 18 in Romanian. I also wrote essays and they were published in our gymnasium newspaper. After visiting my aunt in Egypt I wrote a few travel notes. I wrote critical articles and journalistic essays. My fondness of literature helped to pass my exam for the 'Bachelor's degree' very successfully. [Editor's note: In Eastern Europe the term 'Bachelor's degree' refers to the graduation after taking the final exam at high school.] This was a very important exam: about 140 incumbents from all gymnasia of the town had to come to a big hall. The commission included teachers and professors from Bucharest, whom we didn't know. We were to name a writer and be ready to answer any question regarding his life or work. I chose Caragiale 19 a complex and contradictory author. However, I answered all questions and was awarded my Bachelor's degree.

I finished the gymnasium in 1939 and had to think about the future. I decided to go to a medical college - firstly, I was fond of medicine, and secondly, doctors belonged to the wealthy level of society. I went to Bucharest where I stayed with my mama's sister Tonia. Uncle Emil was in Bucharest at that time. He spent a lot of his time with me. I submitted my documents to the Medical Faculty of Bucharest University. Applicants had to sit in alphabetic order at the exam. My companions were Makariy and Manchur, non-Jews, of course. I finished my test and did theirs. We passed the written exam and were allowed to take the oral exam. Makariy and Manchur demonstrated their friendly feelings toward me. Between exams we walked around Bucharest together. One of the guys, a landlord's son, invited me to his mansion, and the other one promised to introduce me to his sister and arrange for me to marry her. During the oral exam I answered very well, but I didn't find my name in the list of students. This was the first time I faced anti- Semitism on the state-level. My 'friends' turned away from me immediately. I had a real depression - I was extremely upset about my first experience associated with the realization of my national identity.

I didn't know where to go or what to do. Wandering about the streets in Bucharest, I saw an announcement of admission to the Faculty of Literature and Philosophy. Since my medical career was over before it started I took my documents there. There was a rather big competition for this faculty. Besides, I was to take exams in subjects that I wasn't particularly ready to take. However, I managed well and became a student of Bucharest University. Throughout this year I attended lectures by the best professors in Romania and acquired invaluable knowledge. One of the best professors was Nicolae Iorga 20, a prominent Romanian historian. He spoke 42 languages fluently and was an honored member of many European and American Academies of Sciences.

This was the period of the boom of fascist parties in Romania - Cuzists and others. They had similar programs propagating racial hatred, anti- Semitism and fascism. Today it seems strange that many young people were fond of racial theories and were members of these parties. After the Great Patriotic War they changed their opinions, understood their mistakes and became a part of world literature and philosophy. One of them was Emile Cioran 21, whose works I admire. It should be noted that there were no direct anti-Semitic demonstrations at university. I even remember a case when one of the lecturers, a member of the Legionary Movement, who didn't conceal his views, speaking depreciatingly about Jews, gave me the highest mark at an exam, despite my Jewish identity.

During the War

After passing my exams for the first year, I went on vacation to Kishinev in June 1940. My father was recruited to the Romanian army in 1940 and was away from home. The Soviet Army arrived in Bessarabia 22 on 28th June [see Annexation of Bessarabia to the Soviet Union] 23. I stayed in Kishinev, and my studies at university were over - Soviet citizens weren't allowed to travel abroad. This was a hard period. I was alone with my mother, with no earnings, without my father, and besides, I knew no Russian. About a month after Bessarabia was annexed to the USSR, a man from Romania found me to tell me the tragic story of my father. He was released from the army like all other Jews. My father was in Romania, had no contact with us, and facing the crash of his views - democracy and respect of people - and understanding that he couldn't stand to live under a fascist regime, he committed suicide. This was a hard period for me. I decided to keep it a secret from Mama and she kept hoping to see him again and didn't give up this hope and love for my father till the end of her life.

I knew I was the only man and breadwinner in our small family. I knew I had to get an education and to do this I had to learn Russian. The best place to learn Russian was the Faculty of Russian Literature and Language. I gathered my courage and went to see the rector of the Pedagogical College that had opened in Kishinev shortly before. Makar Radu, the rector, was quite a young man. He was surprised and even angry about my impudence - I wanted to enter this faculty without knowing Russian and become a teacher three or four years later! The rector turned me down at first, but I managed to convince him to admit me on condition that I would quit, if I failed my mid-year exams. The rector approved my application for admission.

The subject of my first lecture was antic literature. I didn't understand a word of it. I sat beside a pretty girl and continued to sit beside her at classes from then on and started learning the Russian language. It didn't take me long to pick it up, though I kept writing in Latin letters. I passed my midyear exams with excellent marks and became a student of the college. The girl and I became friends and then fell in love with one another. Her name was Asia Shnirelman. She was born into the Jewish family of a doctor in Kishinev in 1922. We would spend the rest of our lives together.

On Saturday, 21st June 1941, I was spending time with my co-students. We had passed our summer exams and enjoyed ourselves dancing, singing, and drinking wine. I returned home at 1 o'clock in the morning. At five we woke up from the roar of bombing: the Great Patriotic War began. I knew Jews had to evacuate. I made Mama promise that she would evacuate with my fiancee Asia's family. We knew we would become husband and wife to spend our life together.

On 6th July I was recruited to the army. I took my college record book and a student's identity card - these were my most valuable belongings. I served in the rear units following the front-line forces. We were to install temporary ridges and crossings. I covered this doleful road of retreat with the Red Army. In each town our unit passed I found a pedagogical college, asking its lecturers to be my examiners. They were looking at me as if I was crazy, but they couldn't turn down a soldier who might actually die any moment. I found libraries or archives, which at times had been turned into scrap heaps, and was looking for the textbooks I needed. I studied at intervals between marches and battles - my goal was studying.

In late 1941 all Bessarabians, including me, were demobilized - the Soviet people didn't trust its new citizens. This distrust hurt me, but now I understand how fortunate I was - it helped me to survive. I was in Krasnodar [Russia], 1,500 kilometers from home. I asked the people in the evacuation inquiry office to give me information about my mother's whereabouts. My mother, Asia and her family were in a village in Kuban region, near Krasnodar, not far from where I was staying. I went to join them there. On the way patrols halted me a few times since I was wearing my military uniform. I showed them my demobilization certificate and they let me go. When I found my mother and my fiancee, we were boundlessly happy to see each other again. We stayed in Kuban for a few months and then moved farther to the east, when the front line approached.

We stopped in Dagestan for some time waiting for a boat. I was captured in a raid, one of many to be checked for 'men fit to serve in the army'. They checked my documents and let me go. From there we took a boat to cross the Caspian Sea with thousands of other people who had left their homes like us. Then we took a train to Uzbekistan. It was a freight train; it was a long trip. When the train stopped, we exchanged clothes for food. We arrived at Tashkent where my fiancee's father got a job offer to work in a hospital in Bukhara. So, we found ourselves in Bukhara, 3,500 kilometers from Kishinev. When Asia and I decided to register our marriage, I was recruited to the Labor army [mobilized to do physical work for the army]. I had to go to a mine in Sverdlovsk region. I was trained to work as a rigger in a mine. This was hard work, but I was young and didn't fear hard work. I lived in a hostel with other young workers. We received bread cards [see card system] 24 and got sufficient food for them. In 1942, the hardest period for our country and army, I joined the Komsomol and it was a sincere step on my part. I didn't work long in the mine. I fell ill with typhus. After I recovered, I was released from hospital and from work. I returned to my family in Bukhara.

This was in fall 1942. I went to the Russian Faculty of the Uzbek Pedagogical College. I also went to work as a German teacher at school. We all lived in one room. We had to stand in line to get bread at night. However, this was quite common at the time. The Uzbek people had never heard about Bessarabia before we came to their town. We were like from a different planet for them. I was struck by the low educational and cultural level of the population that seemed to have been stuck in the middle ages. They thought that Germans would never be able to cross the 'wide water', as they called the Caspian Sea. They respected me and the rest of us for having managed to cross this 'water obstacle'. I liked Uzbek children and enjoyed teaching them. It didn't take me long to pick up the Uzbek language.

In late 1943 my mother fell ill and died. I never told her what had happened to my father, and she never lost hope to see him again. We buried Mama in the local cemetery without observing Jewish traditions since she wasn't religious. Shortly after my mother's death, Asia and I registered our marriage in a registry office. We became husband and wife and she became my only and dearest person.

Post-war

When Bessarabia was liberated in early 1944, my father-in-law started making arrangements for us to obtain a permit to return to our hometown. In Kishinev many buildings that I had liked so much were destroyed. There were only few buildings left in the center, and the monument dedicated to the great Pushkin was there as well. A new stage of my life began. I went to work in the Moldovan department of the TASU [Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union], and also studied in my last year at college. I usually worked at night, receiving news by telegraph and preparing it for the morning broadcast. I attended lectures in college and then passed my state exams successfully. I was also involved in editing and journalistic work, and, in time, I became chief of the foreign department.

For some time there were no demonstrations of anti-Semitism; even in the early 1950s, during the burst of anti-Semitism on a state level, we only knew about the Doctors' Plot 25 from newspapers. I never concealed my nationality. When I received my first postwar Soviet passport I thought about my nationality. The officer at the passport department was struck when he heard my question regarding the procedure in choosing the nationality. He said it wasn't based on religiosity, since we were atheists, or racial, since we were not racists, but it might be that the mother tongue determined the nationality. And I said, 'Then write 'Jew', please', knowing that my mother tongue was Romanian, though.

I joined the Communist Party in 1949, and I did so knowingly. I had been raised in the family of an anti-fascist man and communist ideas had been close to me since my boyhood. I felt real grief when Stalin died in 1953, and the denunciation of his cult by Khrushchev 26 was a sort of crash of ideals for me. I was involved in the coverage of the Twentieth Party Congress 27 in Moscow and was horrified to hear about the crimes of the leader. My trust in the Communist Party was broken.

In 1950 our son was born. We named him Victor in honor of the victory of the USSR in the war. Victor studied well at school. He finished it with a medal. Victor entered the popular faculty of the prestigious Electrotechnical College in Leningrad [today St. Petersburg, Russia]. I rented an apartment for my son. Some time later my son's friends informed me about strange things happening to my son: he fainted occasionally without any obvious reasons. Victor never mentioned it to me. I went to Leningrad and took my son to different doctors. They couldn't find the reason for what was happening. I made an appointment with a prominent neuropathologist, general of the medical service. He examined my son and told me that the ecology and climate of Leningrad were disastrous for my son and he had to move away from there. Victor wanted to stay, but I picked his documents and we returned to Kishinev.

Victor entered the university in Kishinev and studied well until he became a 5th-year student. He married Rita Vaksman, his co-student. Their daughter, Ada, was born in 1973. All of a sudden my son was expelled from university for immoral conduct. I wanted to know the truth: my son was a nice young man and he was devoted to his family. I heard rumors that Victor was expelled after someone reported having seen a map of Israel in his room in Leningrad where Victor had marked relocations of the Israeli army during the Six-Day-War 28. This was nonsense, but I failed to prove anything.

When he was expelled from the last course at university, my son decided to move to Israel. At first, my wife and I were against his decision, but then we understood we couldn't force him to stay and signed a permission for him to depart. As soon as I had signed this permission, the party committee summoned me, and then there was a meeting. The issue on the agenda was my expulsion from the Party, but they decided that a strict reprimand for failure in the upbringing of my son was sufficient. I understood that, according to the rules and morals of the time, all relatives of those who had moved to Israel were subject to ostracism. By the way, the authorities were loyal to me: they didn't fire me, but just asked where I wanted to work. Therefore, having worked for the TASU for 29 years I quit my job there. My wife, who was head of the editor's office of a magazine, was also fired from this position due to our son's departure. She was transferred to an editor's position.

I went to work at the publishing house of the Academy of Sciences, where I worked a few years before I went to work at the 'Tribune', a small and unpopular magazine. Then, the chief engineer of the Moldavhydromash industrial association, which was engaged in the industrial machine building and included three big plants and scientific research institutions, approached me. He offered me to write a book about the association on the occasion of its 100th anniversary. I thought it over and agreed. I visited this enterprise, familiarized myself with documents, and I understood that I couldn't write a proper book from the outside. I quit my work with the magazine and went to work as a laborer at this enterprise. I wrote the book in cooperation with the employees of the plant newspaper. Later the management offered me to establish and become the director of the museum of this enterprise. The museum I established got the status of people's museum and became very popular in Kishinev. We received many national and foreign delegations.

I worked in the museum until 1990. Then something happened that had an impact on all of us in one way or another: perestroika 29, the breakup of the Soviet Union. The premier [Snegur, Mircea, president of Moldova from 1991-96] of the first government of independent Moldova 30 offered me to take part in the establishment of the department of national issues. I was so dedicated to my job as director of the museum of the plant that I accepted this offer on condition that I could keep my position at the plant. I worked in the department for national relations for ten years. I had very good relations with the premier. He also involved me in diplomatic work. I did a lot for the Jews of Pridnestroiye, when the war began there [see Transnistrian Republic] 31. [Editor's note: In a nearly-forgotten corner of the former Soviet Union, a region of Moldova sandwiched between the Dniester river and Ukraine is celebrating twelve years of unrecognized independence. Despite economic hardship and diplomatic rejection, the self-proclaimed Dniester Moldovan Republic - recognized by the world as the Trans- Dniester region of Moldova - appears determined to preserve the traditions of its recent past. The Trans-Dniester region, with a population of less than a million mostly Russian and Ukrainian speakers, unilaterally declared independence from the then-Soviet Republic of Moldova on 2nd September 1990 as people became increasingly alarmed at the prospect of closer ties with Romania. Fighting broke out in the turmoil following the collapse of the Soviet Union, with hundreds dying before the introduction of Russian peacekeepers in mid- 1992.] 1,400 people, who had lost their home and relatives, were to be transported to Israel. We arranged for the buses for these Jews to pick them up at the border of Moldova. They were accommodated in a hotel in Kishinev and given free meals. Those who had documents were sent to Israel promptly. As for those, whose documents had disappeared, burnt in the blasted houses in Bendery and Tiraspol, I prepared a solicitation to the government of Moldova for its approval of simplified procedures for these victims. Two months later they took a train to Bucharest and from there traveled on to Israel.

There were no flights to Israel, and I need to say that I contributed to the resolution of this issue. At my work I had meetings with an American diplomat of Jewish origin. He asked me whether the president of Moldova, Snegur, would come visit if he received an invitation to Israel. I promised him that I would find out what Snegur thought about it. When the President gave his consent for a visit, I verbally passed this message on to the American diplomat. The President's advisors confirmed his decision. I convinced the President to expand the circle of issues to be resolved - the problem of diplomatic relations, airlines, economic issues - and, in the long run, I headed a delegation of ten people to Israel. Our delegation spent ten fruitful days in Israel and resolved a number of issues.

I also met with my son whom I hadn't seen for 18 years, since 1973. My darling wife Asia never saw our son again. She died on 8th August 1989. My son told me his touching story: He had arrived in the country with his wife Rita and their one-year-old daughter, Ada. At that time departure to Israel was only possible if one had an invitation from some people of straw, who declared they were relatives, and with the support of some international Zionist organizations. I don't have the slightest idea how they did it, but somehow these invitations reached the destinations. When my son was asked at the airport in Israel whether he had relatives, he mentioned this man who had signed his invitation. Of course, he had never seen him and the name was the only information he had about this man, or Israel for that matter. My son was given a car with driver, who took them to a specified address in a town. It was night, it was raining, and Victor, Rita and Ada were standing by the door of a stranger in a strange country. The owner of the house was at home. He remembered that he had signed an invitation one day, invited my son's family inside, accommodated them in his house and supported my son and his family for some time at the beginning. I thank this man from the bottom of my heart. My son is doing very well. He works for a big company. Ada got married and has two children, a son named Odet and a daughter named Sarrah - my great-grandchildren. In 1982 my son's daughter Ilana was born. She recently returned from her service in the army. So, in the long run my son took the right decision to move to Israel.

As for me, I've always associated my life with my homeland - Moldova - and my favorite town, Kishinev. In 2001 the government changed and I quit my post. In the past I was executive director of the Association of Jewish Organizations and Communities, had ties with Joint 32 representatives and accepted the offer to become full-time director of the Jewish community center. I'm not a religious person: I've never observed Jewish traditions or gone to the synagogue. However, I dedicate myself to the revival of Jewish culture, traditions and the upbringing of young Jews, and I'm content with the place I have in life. I don't feel like quitting my job or my life, I understand I need to train a good and decent successor, who can take over my place in the Jewish life of Kishinev.

Glossary

Daniel Bertram
Cracow
Poland
Interviewer: Edyta Gawron
Date of interview: January 2004

Daniel Bertram is a retired civil servant, a bookkeeper educated at the pre-war Jewish School of Commerce in Cracow. He is active in the life of the Jewish community in Cracow and regularly attends meetings organized by the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation and other institutions dedicated to Jewish culture and tradition. He is one of the few Cracow Jews (presently there are about 180 Jews registered at the Jewish community in Cracow) who regularly attend the synagogue and can pray in Hebrew. He was born in 1920 in the Cracow Jewish district of Kazimierz, where he spent many years of his childhood and youth. During the war he was exiled deep into the Soviet Union. In the 1980s he moved in with his partner, Renata Zisman, and they were one of the few Jewish couples in post-war Cracow. Since Ms. Zisman's death he has lived alone outside the former Jewish quarter. Neither Daniel Bertram nor Renata Zisman had children.

Family background
Growing up
During the war
Post-war
Glossary

Family background

I only remember one great-grandmother, who lived on Szeroka Street opposite Remuh [one of the synagogues in Cracow]. She was called Fajga Sobelman, Butner, Bertram, and then Rapaport. I don't know in which order. Her maiden name was Koszes. She was so healthy that she outlived four husbands and changed her name four times. She lived 90 years. When she was 14 she already had either a husband or a fiance. Guests asked her parents where the fiancee, the 'kale', was. 'Kale' [Yiddish] in Hebrew is 'Kala' - a fiancee or young lady. And her parents said that she was in the courtyard with the other children playing shtrulki [dice or pebbles that children used to throw; a game].

I saw my great-grandmother once in my life. I was two or three years old and I was at Granddaddy's house. She only walked across the room towards the window, looked at me, didn't say a word. She had red rings under her eyes, I don't know if it was from an inflammation or what. And after that I only saw her portrait, it was probably hanging at Granddaddy's house. She was dressed in black, wearing the black hat, already quite an age, nearly 90. One time I asked my daddy: 'Where's Grandma Fajga?' And he told me that she had died. I didn't go to the funeral, but Dad took me to her apartment. And there they were saying the prayers for the dead. I didn't see anything being eaten. Daddy told me that she was a moneychanger, meaning she was involved in the money market on the Main Square. She had this bag and exchanged currencies.

Abraham Bertram, my grandfather on my father's side, had a watchmaker's shop opposite his house. Both the one grandfather and the other were watchmakers and jewelers, you see. My other grandfather had a shop together with my uncle on the same street as their house. Granddad Abraham worked until the last moment of his life. He suffered from diabetes, but he worked. He lived 72 years. He walked very little, led a sedentary life. And then in 1938 or 1939 he died at home. And I had to phone his shop. My mother happened to be in the shop at that moment. When I told her that Granddaddy had died she closed the shop. And then it was the funeral already, because Jews have it very quickly, and after the funeral, there were prayers in Granddaddy's house. My grandfather was a very religious man. He never said a word to me. Once, when he tested me on sidra, he said in German, or in Yiddish, 'Owsky zeykhnet', which means 'excellent' [German - ausgezeichnet, Yiddish - oysgetseikhnt]. Both families - on my mother's side and my father's side - were religious. They kept all the traditions and observed all the holidays, and they were kosher, just as it was supposed to be.

I didn't know my grandma, my father's mother, Estera, or Ester Bertram. She died before I was born, or just after I was born. I only knew her from her portrait. Her maiden name was Tilles. When my dad was working in Belgium as a diamond cutter, Grandma had him come back. She said she was ill. He came and stayed. What his mother probably wanted was for him to get married, for him not to be a bachelor. Dad didn't tell me anything else about his mother. She is buried in the Miodowa Street cemetery [the new Jewish cemetery in Cracow], in the second row, or the third. You used to be able to see the inscriptions from a distance; I wasn't allowed to go closer. And they're not there any more, because all those monuments were stolen during the occupation [see German Occupation of Poland] 1.

Abraham and Estera Bertram had four sons. Bernard was the eldest, and then there was Saul, my father. The third one was Salomon. He was the only one of the brothers to survive the war. As to the fourth one, I don't know what he was called; he died before I had a chance to meet him. He might have been called Jankiel. I haven't even seen a photograph of him.

My father was a watchmaker and jeweler. Uncle Bernard was a goldsmith, but when he married Miss Grossfeld, well, then he worked in her business. She had a corset workshop, 'Gracja' [Grace]. And he started working there with her, probably as a cashier. Dad had a sister, too, Otylia, my aunt Tyla. She married a Ryngiel. Otylia Ryngiel, she was called. And they lived in Mannheim [Germany].

My maternal grandfather was called Bernard Stiel, in Polish Bernard, and in Yiddish Bejrisz. And in the synagogue, when they called him up to the Torah, or when the Kaddish was being recited, they hailed him Dojw. Dojw is 'bear' in Hebrew [Dov], you see, and Bejrisz is 'bear' in Yiddish. He had a shop on the street where he lived. He was a watchmaker, but he had shoes in the shop as well. He would often come and visit us, because we didn't live far away at first. He died in 1929, at the age of 65. He was buried in the Miodowa Street cemetery. I was nine then.

Debora Stiel was my grandmother on my mother's side. Debora, and Doba in Hebrew. [Editor's note: Debora, in English Deborah, is one of the seven prophetesses in the Bible; it is a Hebrew name itself. Doba, the diminutive of Debora was probably affectionately used in the family.] She was an older woman; she wore a wig. She had three daughters. My mother was the eldest - Ettel Bertram. The second was Anna, Hania, Chana, I'm not sure of her name. My grandparents' youngest daughter was Bluma. She married Aleksander Eintracht. My grandmother also had two sons. One son was Lazarz, Luzor in Hebrew. The other son was named Jankiel, Jaakow. I didn't know him; he died in Vienna. He was very devout. Hania, the middle daughter, married Izydor Grinbaum. He had a bookkeeping and audit office. They had two children. Halinka was the older and Heniu was the younger.

Lazarz immigrated to Buenos Aires in 1927. In Cracow he met a girl by the name of Karola. Granddaddy didn't want to allow that marriage, because her family was poor. Her mother sold bagels and Granddaddy didn't like that. They wanted to have an intelligent family, or some money, or a dowry. There used to be this tradition among Jews that she had to have a dowry. When he emigrated, she went after him as an unmarried woman. Three weeks she was at sea, sailing on a ship. He set himself up there; he had friends in Argentina that helped him. He did well; he was a goldsmith by trade, and here in Cracow he had been out of work. And he married that Karola in Argentina. They had only one daughter, a pretty girl. I even have a photograph, a tiny one, which they sent me in a small package. My uncle was a very good goldsmith; he did this very precise work on rings, silver and gold trinkets. Then he opened his own watchmaker and jeweler's shop.

Chaja Molkner was my mom's aunt, so great-aunt to me. I remember that she was a widow, and a very devout person. One time, when I was pre-school age, I was visiting my grandmother and she came. She persuaded me to learn broche for every kind of food. And she gave me this notebook, to write down every broche and for every broche I would get 5 groszy [the Polish currency: 1 zloty=100 groszy]. And so I wrote them down, and in the end I saved up 8 or 9 zloty. She lived very frugally; she was very devout. Because she didn't have kosher milk she wouldn't drink milk at all, only black coffee. And probably because of that she became hunched, and she went around with a hump on her back. She sold cloth; she would just go round various acquaintances and sell cloth. When I was nine, I wanted to go with Mom to see the grave of my granddad, her father. Mom had an anniversary and she went with her aunt Chaja Molkner. And Mom wouldn't let me go in there, but that devout aunt let me. She asked how old I was, and said that if I wasn't 13 yet, I could. Chaja Molkner died in 1938; she was maybe 84 years old. She was trampled by a horse and lay injured at home. I didn't go to her funeral.

My Mom was Ettel Bertram. She didn't like her name, so she said that she wanted to be called Eda, and that's what they called her. Mom kept house in the mornings, brought in the shopping and made dinner. She had her culinary repertoire. In the afternoons Mom went to the shop and sat there, and either wrote letters to her brother in Argentina, or watched the customers, because you had to be careful in that line. Dad often said to Mom in Hebrew 'watch', or 'watch out'. I remember one instance, when a handsome young lady was looking at rings and she hid one ring up her sleeve.

Once there was this case, I think it was in winter, when Dad and Mom went to the shop in the early hours of the morning. They had been called out by the guard who watched the shops and every so often dropped a note in with the time on it, saying that he had been there and checked things. He said there had been a break-in, and a roll-down blind had been damaged. There were things missing: watches from the display. Dad was insured, I don't remember if it was with Fenix [an insurance company], but he didn't get compensation. As it turned out, only the safe was insured, and not the display. Dad always put the most expensive articles into the safe.

Growing up

I was born in 1920 when my parents lived on Krakowska Street with my mother's parents, and then we lived on Mostowa Street, in the same house, in the apartment next-door to Granddaddy [paternal grandfather] and my uncle. I found out that I was born on Krakowska Street from books, because I thought that I was born on Mostowa. I was two, I think, I don't remember exactly, when we were gassed there. I was gassed with my parents. The man who lived beneath our apartment had a shop with cooked meat. And he explained in court that he had been cleaning a gas lamp. On Mostowa Street there was gas lighting, both on the street and in the apartments. So he had been cleaning a lamp and hadn't turned it off, and that was why the gas escaped. An ambulance came; there was a crowd, an awful lot of people gathered then. Uncle Salomon rescued me. They threw me up and down so that the gas would come out. Apparently I was in a terrible way, because I was already yellow or green. And my parents were poisoned just the same, but they saved us all. The people from the ambulance services said that ten more minutes and we'd have had it. My father didn't tell me whether that neighbor was punished, or whether he got any compensation for it. We lived on Mostowa Street for perhaps two years.

After that we moved to a street in a Christian neighborhood. There we had two rooms. And there, once I was seven, I was very close to the elementary school 'Florian' that was a government school named after St. Florian. I was excused from writing on Saturdays. There were a few of us Jews. One was called Reinstein, one was called Romer and one Ginter, I think, the son of a dentist. Four altogether. In the neighborhood I had a few Catholic friends, one a girl. She lived in the same house with her sister, the daughter of a plasterer, a kind of sculptor. Her name was Krystyna Pilchowska. Her sister was called Irena.

Before I went to school I spent a lot of time on my own. Because I didn't go to nursery school I got bored. I really needed nursery school, but my parents didn't want me to go to the nuns' playschool, with Christian children. Sometimes I would play with the sewing machine, I would ride on it as if I was a streetcar driver and I was going along, stopping at all these stops. Sometimes I would sit in the shop too. Then, when the safe was near the display, I would get up on the safe. Customers would come in and I would be sitting on the safe. My brother didn't go to nursery school either, but my sister did.

I remember my bar mitzvah. My father's family came, which meant my father's brother, my father's sister-in-law, and her daughter. There was no one there from Mom's side. The only other person there was Granddaddy. My uncle was there, all from the Bertrams' side. And there was my rebbe, the beak who prepared me for my bar mitzvah, Nuchim Schpitz. He was this thin man who promised me that he would bring me a watch. And apparently he bought me a watch for my bar mitzvah in Vienna, but he said that it had been stolen. When I repeated that to dad, he said to me: 'khusid ganev'. 'Khusid' [Galician Yiddish] means Hasid, and 'ganev' means 'thief'. He could have said 'liar', but he said it so sharply because Dad was a 'misnaged' [an opponent of Hasidism].

That rebbe prepared me a droshe. And I had to talk about tefillin, in Yiddish, which I had never spoken. I learnt it by heart. And I said it. Granddaddy understood, my uncle understood, I don't know if my aunt spoke Yiddish. Then I translated into Polish. Instead of preparing me for something else, to read the Torah on Saturdays, he made me translate a speech like that. But I was allowed up to the Torah, of course. Then Dad said: 'Baruch shebetranu main on shoi sheluze'. That more or less means that I cast all my sins off me. Because that is when you join the community.

I was the oldest of us brothers and sisters. My brother Henryk was four years younger. My sister Ernestyna, or Nusia - that's what we called her - was seven years younger than me. Each of us went to a different school. Nusia went to 'Konopnicka'. That was a girls' school. And on the next street was the boys' school. Henryk went to that boys' school first, and then he moved. After that he went to evening school, to an evening grammar school on the Main Square, and worked at the same time. My brother and sister and I never spent time together. All we did together was eat breakfast, or dinner or supper. And other than that each of us went his own way. For all meals the whole family always sat at the table together. But other than that everyone went their own ways and I didn't know anything, what kind of life my sister led, what my brother did, where he went to school, if he had a tutor. I didn't know anything.

When I finished elementary school, so seven classes, Dad asked me whether I wanted to study or work. So I said: 'I want to study'. So they enrolled me in a school of commerce. But my brother didn't want to study, he preferred to work, preferred to be earning money. And he learned his trade from my father. So in his workshop Dad had both an apprentice and my brother.

I spoke to my brother and sister in Polish, and my parents spoke to each other in Yiddish. Dad talked to us very little, perhaps because he couldn't speak Polish. We talked very little then, unfortunately. Dad usually spoke Yiddish. You see, when he asked me: 'Profitierst?', I had to work out what he meant: 'Is it worth it?' He was talking about a placement in my uncle's office that I was doing at the time. And every Saturday he either read the Hummash or he read 'Kol ish, yesh cheylek, leolam haba'. I'm saying that in the Sephardi 2 fashion now, but then people spoke in the Ashkenazi manner. So Dad would say 'Kol ish, yiesh chailek leoylem habu' - Every man has a place in the world to come. [Editor's note: This sentence is very close to the Mishnah quotation said before studying 'Pirke Avot': 'Kol Yisrael yesh lahem cheylek laolam haba', or in the Ashkenazi fashion: 'Kol Yisroel yesh lohem cheylek loaylom habo', meaning 'Every Jew has a part in the world to come'. It worth noticing that Mr. Bertram -probably unnoticed- replaced 'every Jew' with 'every human being' when citing the quote.] And Dad believed that and every week he would read it, so that I would hear it too. I stayed longest at the table. You see we all ate together at one table in the kitchen, and on Saturdays in the living room. But other than that everybody went different ways.

I was interested in my own subjects; I would sit up until eleven at night. I was the last to bed, sometimes Mom was. I had to get up early in the morning to get to school. Once I was late, and we had the one commerce master in whose class there was a very high standard of discipline. If anyone was late - and I was late - as a punishment I had to arrive the whole week at 7.30 until further notice. Well, and he taught me so well that I'm disciplined now, and wherever I go, I'm always punctual. You could take your breakfast to school and eat at school. I ate in my cap, because that was what I was used to. There were some of my friends, you see, who ate with their caps off. My parents were always telling me about the commandment 'Do not commit adultery.' I didn't even know what that meant. My father wanted me to go to different schools; he was even prepared to enroll me in university. There was money enough for that. When I went to the elementary school I had private lessons. This so-called tutor would come round. It was Mom who made sure I had help. I had problems concentrating, you see. I didn't have 'very good' in all my subjects. I had 'good', or sometimes 'satisfactory'. I didn't have 'unsatisfactory'. My best marks were for behavior. But at home sometimes I'd run riot, fight with my brother.

I went to four schools. First of all to 'Florian', and after that I went to Mizrachi [the elementary school founded in 1921 in Cracow by the local branch of religious Zionist organization 'Mizrachi'], next to the Izaaka synagogue. And another Mizrachi school was being built at that time next to the Tempel [Synagogue], at number 25 or 26. One day, Dad went with me on a Sunday to Mizrachi, to enroll me in the third class there. And the teacher told me to sign my name in Hebrew. I didn't know how to sign my name. I had gone to cheder, to two cheders, but they didn't teach writing there at all. There we only translated from Hebrew into Yiddish. And you paid for that. The students didn't understand anything. Only the ones that understood Yiddish. And as I didn't know Yiddish, I didn't understand. And the rebbe never translated into Polish. And no one asked what it meant. He thought that we all knew Yiddish. I didn't tell my parents. My parents were never interested. They didn't care about anything; they had just the business on their minds. And when I couldn't sign my name, Dad didn't help me by saying 'beyt, reysh...' [bet, resh in modern Hebrew, the first two letters of the name Bertram]. And because of that I had to repeat the second grade and I lost a year.

At Mizrachi in the mornings we had Hebrew subjects and in the evening we went to the new school that was being built for Polish subjects. One of the teachers was Mom's teacher and mine at the same time. Hoffman, his name was. After that, my third school was Kraszewski School. After the war it was called Dietl School. Now the old entrance has been bricked up. We went there five days a week, because it was a government school. The teachers were mixed, Poles and Jews, and the students were just Jews. Well, and the first time I went there, there were more or less 25-30 pupils. Suddenly I saw 14 pupils dressed identically. I thought that one mother had 14 children. And it turned out that each of the boys had a different surname. And they talked about an institution. It turned out that it was the Orphans' Institution.

Next I went to the School of Commerce. I went to school longer than either my brother or my sister. It all cost money. The fees were 20 [zloty] in the first year, but I got in for 15 zloty. Then more and more every year; you paid more or less every month or so. It was a co-educational school. A Jewish high school of commerce, coeducational, a very hard school, one of those with four grammar school classes with a school-leaving exam. We had a few foreign languages: besides Polish there was German, English and Hebrew.

There were 16 teachers there, men and women, 23 subjects altogether. Among those who were still alive after the war was Mr. Aleksandrowicz. Mr. Szlang also survived the Holocaust. He probably immigrated with his wife to Israel. Of the other teachers, I met Mr. Bart in Lwow. Mr. Natel - bookkeeping - and Mr. Mandelbaum - commerce and commercial correspondence - taught there too, in a partner school. Bart taught commodities and calligraphy. There in Lwow there was Mr. Silberfenig, teaching Palestinography. There was Miss Szylingier, she taught geography and history. And Mr. Guzik taught us religion and Hebrew. Mr. Szlang taught religion and Hebrew too. Mr. Mandelbaum was taken away from the school, because some Ukrainian student turned him in, repeating the teacher's words that this was going to change. He meant that the system was going to change, but there you weren't allowed to say anything. And that was how he got arrested. That was probably in 1939. In 1945, in front of the former School of Commerce building, I met his wife, Mala Hofszteter. She was a Polish teacher. They got married before the war. And then she immigrated to Israel and met her husband there, who had served in the Polish Army during the war. But then he had a brain hemorrhage. In Israel a Stanislaw Mandelbaum school of commerce was opened.

I got my best school marks in stenography. I remember all my stenography to this day. I took part in three competitions: at school, in Cracow, and in the Polish national championships in Warsaw. And this guy, the best Polish stenographer, came to me and asked whether I would like to go to Warsaw. I turned him down, unfortunately, because I already had a job then. Since I'd got a job - and it hadn't been so easy to come by, and it was on two shifts as well - I had to refuse. That guy was called Maslowski and he took us for stenography.

After school I had work experience at Izydor Grinbaum's, who was the husband of my aunt Hania. He had a bookkeeping and audit office. And I did my office internship there. He promised that after three months I would get 30 zloty. Unfortunately I didn't. He wanted to give me a fountain pen, but I said: 'thanks, but no thanks'. I said I didn't want it. I wanted 30 zloty. So Dad banned me from going there. Greenbaum was a very clever guy; he ran the office and had two people employed there as well. First of all there were two sisters, then this one guy called Blemmer, and then a girl by the name of Pajno. They were working professionally, earning. But I did typing there, was getting good, using the ten-finger system. Was that what I needed to go to school for, to do typing? Sometimes I helped out with inventories too. There was this firm, Kohn, which was in the iron business. And another firm, his brother Kohn, some razor blade outfit. During the war, in Lwow, my uncle told me that that guy was a spy.

All the men in the family wore head coverings. Only my father wore a hat; all the others wore yarmulkas. Today they're round, but then they were different - these forage caps like the army wore. Usually they were black, sometimes dark blue. There weren't any others, round ones. These forage caps were in place of yarmulkas. My dad didn't wear the gabardine [caftan] and he didn't wear the streimel. Only my grandfathers wore the streimel. They had gabardines too, but they didn't have side locks, just beards. Dad didn't have a beard, he didn't have side locks; he shaved. My family was Ashkenazi Jews, because we're all Ashkenazim here in Poland. And the ones who used to wear the streimel, they were Hasidim 3. My one Granddaddy, and the other, wore the streimel, but they weren't Hasidim. They wore it for tradition; only on Saturdays did they wear the black gabardine. But their sons didn't wear it; they dressed in the European fashion. My father dressed in the European fashion too. It was when my father went to Belgium that he stopped wearing the gabardine.

We went to several synagogues. The first synagogue I went to, when I was of pre-school age, was Shomer Umonim, which means 'Watchman of the Believers'. Dad was the gabbai, the administrator there. And Dad was always complaining that if he weren't the gabbai he wouldn't neglect his business. Once, perhaps, we went to 'Amster', there was a synagogue called that. They held Sukkot there. We went to those synagogues when we were living in the Christian neighborhood. After that, in 1933 or 1934 we moved back into the Jewish quarter. And in the center of town we went to a synagogue opposite the bank, that was Ahavat Rayim, or 'Love for Your Neighbor' [Editor's note: 'Ahavat Rayim' means 'Love for One's Neighbor'].

Dad went with me on Fridays. Once there was a friend from Mizrachi there. He was called Dawidson and when he was still a boy he was a chazzan there. That was the synagogue where Schperber's choir was, famous in Cracow. The boys in the choir had the same black gabardines, and he was the conductor. Schperber conducted at Tempel as well. On Saturdays we went to Migale Amikes Shil. The other Jewish name was Barbl Bes Medresh. I don't know whether that means 'on the hill', or something else. Migale Amikes has been in existence for probably 350 years. [A synagogue and institute in which Nathan Spira lectured, called after his work 'Megaleh Amukot', 'he who reveals mysteries'.] Long ago the famous cabbalist Spira was connected with that synagogue [Nathan Spira (1584-1633): the rabbi of Cracow, devoted to the study of the Cabbala]. Before the war only men went there, and there were Hasidim too. I don't know whether they were really Hasidim, or just Orthodox. There were some who had the streimel, the fox-fur. And there were some that didn't. And if there was a separate prayer, at the Halel festival, in the evening some of them prayed separately in another room. They were probably Sephardi Jews.

All the men from our family went to that synagogue on Saturdays. Granddaddy and Dad, my brother and I, my uncle, Granddaddy's son, Granddaddy's other son, and my uncle's son as well. Seven of us from the family there were. Two friends of mine from school went there as well, this one - Grossbart, his name was - went there. The Bossaks went there and the famous Aleksandrowicz [Prof. Julian Aleksandrowicz]. There was this one odd guy there, too, who wore the streimel and shaved. That was the only time I saw a clean-shaven man wearing the streimel. He would wear it on Saturdays. He had this redbrick shop, a newsstand.

Before the war I only went to a few synagogues, not all of them. I also went to Tempel then. When I went to Kraszewski School we used to go there on all the national holidays, because it was very close. [Most Polish national holidays were celebrated in the religious institutions too, as the members of Tempel synagogue were tending to assimilation and they were involved in politics. The synagogue used to be a place for national manifestations of the Jews.] At Tempel Synagogue they celebrated national holidays like 3rd May [the anniversary of the signing of the first Polish constitution, in 1793], and maybe the November Uprising 4 and others. Tempel Synagogue was the only Reform synagogue in Cracow. The president was Dr. Ozjasz Thon 5. He was a deputy to the Sejm [the Polish lower house of Parliament]. Pre-election rallies were always held in his house. Our school always stood in one of the side naves, to the right of the entrance. And in the middle sat army officers - Jews. I don't know if there were any ethnic Poles among them. Dr. Ozjasz Thon always gave a sermon in Polish. He would start his sermon: 'Dear young people, devout listeners...' But before the sermon they would play the Hatikvah 6 there. And there was a mixed choir. And they played and sang 'Boze cos Polsk?...' ['O God, who Poland...' - a patriotic Polish song, at this time almost chosen as the Polish national anthem]. My uncle, Aleksander Eintracht, my friend Henryk Kleinberger, and the wife of the president of the Jewish Community Organization, I don't remember her name, sang in that choir.

After the death of Dr. Thon, Dr. Schmelkes gave the sermon there. I remember I went to Dr. Thon's funeral. The mounted police were there keeping order, because a very large crowd had gathered. And we stood outside the cemetery on the street, because so many people had come. I only went to that synagogue on a Friday once. No one was praying. They either didn't know the prayers or they didn't have prayer books. Only the cantor was praying. He was dressed in this black silk coat and had a hexagonal black hat, if I remember rightly, like students in the US have, not square, but six-sided, flat. And the porter who stood at the entrance was dressed like that too. I only went in there once. They used to say that it was only progressives that went there, once a year. Always on Yom Kippur there were vast numbers of cars there.

As for other synagogues in Cracow, there was Stara [Old] Synagogue. Except then they didn't call it 'Old' in Polish, but Alte Shil in Yiddish. All the Yiddish names of the synagogues were used. Stara Synagogue, Migale Amikes Shil. Then Poper, then Wysoka [High] - they called it Hoyhe Shil - Izaak [Isaac] Synagogue. And on the left of that one was the temporary Mizrachi school. And opposite that one, Izaak, was another synagogue, but I don't know what the name was. Then there was one on Krakowska Street; I don't know what it was called. I only went there once. That was where my uncle's father went to pray. Then there was Cypres, and after the war there was a printers' school there. There's Kupa Synagogue too, Kupa Shil, that's what it was called. Then there's Mizrachi, but I don't know if they prayed there before the war. That building that's built there now was a school, you see. But after the war they prayed there, there in Mizrachi; I looked in there once. But whether it was a prayer house before the war I don't know. And on Dietla Planty [a strip of grass alongside a road called Dietla Street] was this temporary shack, a prayer house called Astoria. Then there was the synagogue where the rebbe that came to us and taught me at cheder was from. He either came to our house to collect me, or took me home or to cheder. Once, at Yom Kippur, there were prayers in a house on one of the city squares. But I don't know if it was a permanent prayer house. Perhaps there was an inn or maybe a hotel there.

There was another synagogue that I never went to but Mom used to talk about. And where the [Jewish] Cultural Centre is now, was Bnei Emuna - 'Sons of the Faith'. And there was Bnei Sheyrit. And Chevre Tylem [Association of Psalmists], that was where Mom always went, once a month, when they had the 'Blessing for the New Month' prayer. That was where women went before the new month. They were always up in the gallery, up above, because downstairs were the men. Once I went there, on some holiday, probably Yom Kippur.

As I was walking to Szeroka Street one day I saw the first Hasid I'd seen in my life, a young man, who had a black hat, I don't think he had the streimel. He had a black hat, and side locks, and that black silk gabardine, and white socks. That was the first time I'd ever seen white socks. That was an unusual sight for me.

I remember the Jewish theaters too. There was the Ida Kaminska Jewish Theater. And the other theater was the summer one, in the Londres Hotel. I went to both of them. I went to the summer theater with my father and my brother, to see 'Sulamit'. That was the title, 'Sulamit'. I don't remember everything that happened in the play, but there was a priest in it. 'Ikh bin Nussem Hakohen'. 'I am Nathan the Priest'. In Hebrew 'Nussem ha-kohen'. I remember that. That was the first time I'd been to a summer theater like that. Mom had gone away with my sister somewhere then.

I also remember how we used to walk to my grandparents' on Krakowska Street, and later to the streetcar, the number 1. And on the wall of the old town hall there, there was this plaque, a bas-relief showing Jews bringing the Torah to King Casimir the Great [King of Poland, 1333-1370]. I don't know if it was a homage, if they're thanking him for accepting the Jews, who were persecuted in various countries in Europe. That plaque isn't there any more; the Germans took it down. [In fact, the Cracow City Council restored it in 1996.]

In our family no one belonged to any political party. Dad told me never to belong to any political party. I once talked to a man who said: 'A man who doesn't belong to any party is worth nothing.' But I think that it's best not to get mixed up in things like that and to be objective. And observe from a distance, which is the best system. The communist system had its pros and cons, you see, and the present system has its different pros and different cons. There's no such thing as the ideal system.

A few times people tried to get me involved, agitating. I went once on a Saturday to Hashomer Hatzair 7, another time to Shomer Hadati. They had these miserable little places. Once I went to Akiba [Zionist youth movement] with a friend and my aunt's brother-in-law. But it didn't appeal to me, somehow. With hindsight, though, I can see that I should have got involved. I was afraid my studies might suffer, but you had to go to one of those organizations! One of them, because there were various different ones: Akiba, Hashomer Hatzair, Shomer Hadati, Ichud [left-wing Zionist organization], there was the Bund 8, too.

We did support the building of the Jewish state, though. In every Jewish home there were two tins [money-boxes]. We had two: Keren Kayemet 9, and the other one was Keren Hayesod 10. A collector came round, once a month, I think, to collect the money. There was money in those tins and he collected it and passed it on for the restoration of Palestine, to buy land.

All the food in our house was kosher. There was dairy in the morning and dairy suppers. And I asked why we always had dairy suppers except for Fridays and holidays. And Mom said that rich people eat meat suppers. We ate different things, sometimes herrings, usually scrambled eggs, or sardines, or sprats. I don't remember exactly. In the morning it was mostly scrambled eggs and coffee with milk. I remember it was chicory then. I don't know whether it was real coffee or ersatz. On holidays Mom and the maid prepared different dishes. But it was all kosher. The crockery was separate - separate for dairy products, separate for meat. And at Pesach, we would bring out this hamper, which we had special crockery in. The hamper was in the loft all year. And then we changed over all the dishes. The gas cooker was covered with this metal sheet. That was observed very strictly too. And when it was all over, what good did it do... Nothing! More unreligious people survived than religious ones.

At home we lit candles in candlesticks. And at Chanukkah my father always lit candles for 8 days, I mean every day, every evening, one candle more. And he said the brochot, or the Chanukkah blessing. There are three blessings: three on the first evening, but only two on the next evenings.

And after a funeral, if there was a wake we ate either round peas or perhaps egg. You sit on low chairs for seven days. It's only devout people that keep it up for seven days, and then again on the 30th day too. And you recite the Kaddish for the dead person for twelve months.

I remember a few anti-Semitic incidents: seven or eight, a few happened before the war and a few after the war. It started one day when I came home crying, as a preschooler. This one guy attacked me, hit me, near our home in the Christian neighborhood. I didn't know what for, I didn't know what a Jew was, I didn't know what an anti-Semite was. And there were anti-Semites there. There were anti-Semitic youths; they were brought up like that. As I stood there by our gate, as a preschooler, he had a go at me. There were some older kids there, not my friends, walking along the river. They would gather there and sing anti-Semitic songs. I even remember those songs. I didn't say anything to my family. I didn't know that it was important to tell them. It went in one ear and out the other. To this day I remember this one short song that the older one taught the younger ones: 'Jew, Jew! The Messiah is born' and there was another sentence that I can't remember. I remember another sentence from the song: 'Ai vai kimmeshai, don't touch my beard! My beard is blessed, curled on a stick!' But that was nothing. Once they hauled me down there, down by the river. And I wore new velvet clothes. I even have a photograph of them. They were standing there on the bank of the river. The water was dirty. Well, and someone pushed me. I fell into the water and went home all wet. Granddaddy was very angry, and so were my parents. None of my friends owned up. The girl I suspected, Ola Mleczko, told my Mom: 'I didn't do it.' Granddaddy told Mom to go and report it to the police, but she didn't.

Later on, in 1935-36, I went to military preparation lectures. Military service was two years, you see, but if you went to military preparation they shortened your period of service by six months. So you had a year and a half. I went for two years, a friend, Landau, persuaded me. I was supposed to learn how to shoot. I didn't say anything to my parents, because that was how they had brought me up: not to tell them anything. They weren't interested in us at all; they didn't have time. When Mr. Aleksandrowicz, who took us for gymnastics, asked who wanted to sign up, I signed up. So I went for two years. And I went on a two-week camp to Stary Sacz. And in Nowy Sacz we were supposed to have a march-past. I desperately wanted to take part in the march-past, with that rifle in front of the general at arms, General Kasprzycki. We spent a long time practicing for it. And one of the students from the very beginning called me Morytz [perceived by some Jews as a derogatory name, similarly to Icek, often used to replace 'Zydek'- little Jew]. He was in front of me in the line and he would shout: 'Morytz!' OK, Morytz, fine, I didn't say anything. But on the last day, when they all went for their certificates, I couldn't, because of that boy. He offered me some soup, which he must have tipped some powder in. I had a vomiting attack. They all received their certificates except me.

I remember when I was older, school age, I saw this shop, which said 'money- changer', on the corner of the Main Square. Currency exchange. It was the only shop of its kind I saw in Cracow. Other than that, in the park at the foot of the castle, Wawel, just by the Royal Hotel, was what was known as the 'black money exchange'. They were Hasidim, who exchanged currencies, mostly dollars, illegally, I think. 8.90 the dollar cost, and the official price in the bank was 5 zloty 25 groszy, but you couldn't buy it at that price.

I also remember that before the war, when I was seven, Polish Radio was in the center of Cracow. And I even went there, to the radio, in the first grade of elementary school. We gave a performance; we said something on the radio. And that was the first radio, in 1927, the first time there had ever been radio in Poland. And our class put on a performance of some kind. We didn't have any Jewish neighbors when we lived in the Christian neighborhood. And when we were back in the Jewish district we didn't have any contact with our neighbors, because they were mainly progressive Jews there.

From our time in Kazimierz 11 I remember Purim. As a child I always went to Krakowska Street with my parents. We stood on the pavement and thousands of people in masks walked down the road. It was a masquerade, in Hebrew 'adloyada'. Some just wore masks, some were all dressed up. We even met one dressed up as a cat. Mom recognized him as the furrier. We didn't dress up; we just stood on the street. But Mom bought my brother and me masks. I was staying with Granddaddy and my uncle then, on Mostowa Street, I was in the first grade of elementary school. And my uncle told me to sing, so I sang what I knew from school - 'A birdie flew along the street', or something.

During the war

In the summer of 1939 I was with my Mom, brother and sister in Zawoja [a mountain resort in Poland]. And Dad called to tell us to come home immediately, a week early. I asked Mom if we couldn't go just yet, because I didn't want to leave. There was a swimming pool there; it was nice weather, fresh air. We didn't know that war was going to break out. We didn't realize, we hadn't read the papers. But Dad realized, because every day before he went to work he read Nowy Dziennik [Zionist newspaper, published in Cracow in Polish from 1918-1939]. So he knew that war was going to break out. So Mom put our departure off, because we didn't want to go. And then Dad sent this car, and seven families left with us. We went back to Cracow and Dad was angry that we were delayed. But we arrived more or less a week before the outbreak of war. Then Dad decided that I would stay with the family and my brother, four years younger, would go out into the world. But my aunt, Granddaddy's sister, advised my father that I should leave home and escape, and my brother stay, because he was younger. The Germans were taking boys of my age and sending them to the German- French front; those were the rumors. If it hadn't been for my aunt I wouldn't be here and perhaps my brother would still be alive; perhaps he would have survived.

And then Dad went with me to buy a rucksack. I have that rucksack to this day. We bought the essential clothes for two weeks, because everyone was lying, saying that the war would last two weeks. The neighbor also said that I should take my matriculation certificate and my birth certificate. Well, I didn't want the matriculation certificate because it wouldn't fold up; it lay so nicely in my desk. So I took my birth certificate; I didn't have my ID card yet, just my school ID.

So the decision was made that I should go. Dad had approached the neighbor and found out that he was going, that he was going to evacuate, or escape. He was supposed to be going with his brother-in-law and his friend. And on Monday 4th September he said that they weren't going. Dad came back from the neighbor's with the news that they weren't going. And it wasn't until Tuesday 5th September that he found out that they were going. But on the Sunday I'd met a friend called Grossbart outside his parents' shop. And he told me that people were escaping, that there was illness in Wieliczka [a small town outside Cracow] and starvation. He wanted to escape with me, and I should let him know. So I sent my brother on 5th September at 6 in the morning to tell him to get ready to leave. My brother went to his place, and he said that he wasn't going, he wouldn't go. So then I went at 8 in the morning to see him. His mother was there, and his sister too. They stood in a line and he said that he wouldn't go. 'What will be will be!' I wanted to go with him; I wanted to save him. His mother was trying to persuade him, and his sister, but he didn't want to go. And he died! In Remuh synagogue there is a memorial plaque, white marble, in English and Hebrew, saying that he - Joel Grossbart - and his whole family died. One of my friends married Grossbart's sister after the war. She was the only one of the whole family to survive. I suspect that she had Aryan papers. It was a Hasidic family.

I was packed up and I said goodbye to my family. They all stood in a line outside the door: Mom, my brother, my sister and Dad. And they all said goodbye. That was the last time I saw them. I didn't know it was the last time. I thought I would be going back, that I would meet up with them. So I set off then. Mom saw us off; she walked down the opposite sidewalk. She wanted to give me a blanket. I didn't want it, because it would have been too heavy for me to carry. I already had to lug my overcoat during the heat wave, and all that in my rucksack. So my journey was very tragic, because I walked nine days and nine nights. And I slept 15 minutes, in a ditch.

There were four of us: my next-door neighbor, his brother-in-law, a friend and me. We walked in the direction of Plaszow [a station in the east of Cracow] and there we boarded a cattle wagon at noon. There weren't any windows in there, just a bench along, and another bench. It was dark, and all the seats were taken, but they made room for us. We traveled like that until 3am. The others traveled on, but we got off, because the train was going too slowly. It was dangerous, because the Germans were already close to Cracow, and Cracow was taken on 6th September. Then we jumped onto another train. That was the first time I had ever jumped on when the train was moving, and with my rucksack as well! We couldn't get inside because the door was locked. We couldn't open it. And the handle was very cold. And I didn't have any gloves. And we had to hold onto the handle for half an hour and stand on the steps: each of us on a different step, because two of us wouldn't fit on one step.

We were heading east: via Debica, Tarnow, Rozwadow, Przemysl, Lwow, and then on to Zloczow. [see Annexation of Eastern Poland] 4 In Zloczow there was a holiday celebration, the New Year festival, Rosh Hashanah. We slept and in the next room they were praying. Then we went back to Tarnopol [today Ukraine]. I spent a few days in Tarnopol. When we arrived in Tarnopol there was another holiday, this time Sukkot. There this family took us in, or two families actually, because I ate with the older couple, and the others stayed with their daughters, in the same building. They were called Fleischman. They had a daughter, and in the other place there were two older daughters. He was a poor man, a barber; he had one or two rooms and a kitchen. They were supporting me; I wanted to pay them before I left but they wouldn't take anything.

After that we went back to Lwow. In Lwow they left me. For the first time in my life I was away from home alone; it was awful for me. I was without a roof over my head, you see, and I had nowhere to sleep. So I found out that there was a hall where you could sleep. People slept there side by side on the floor: men and women on the same floor. There weren't any straw mattresses there, and there was no room for me, so I slept on the corridor. That was from Friday to Saturday. A guy my age noticed me and took me to the synagogue on the Saturday. I already had a temperature, and neither a place to stay, nor an emergency room, nor a hospital. So there I was with this temperature sleeping in the first room in the synagogue, and there in the next room everyone was praying.

After the prayers that friend spoke to a tailor, a poor guy, who took me back to his place. He had a wife and two daughters. And I didn't say anything, because I never said much. I was shy, didn't have much to say. I just slept for three days, and that friend talked to them. The tailor sewed me a lining in my overcoat. And after three days I thanked them and left, and went back to the [first] house, because I didn't have anywhere to sleep. That time I got into the hall. I hung my cap on a nail and lay on the floor. And in the morning I get up and see lice on my cap - well, there's no way you can live in conditions like that! But it was hard to find anywhere else to stay, so I went back. And then the Germans caught me and moved back to the west, so I worked on the roads in Wieliczka, then in Niepolomice and Biezanow [satellite villages around Cracow]. I worked for a few months and then I escaped from them again, over to the Russian side.

In April 1940 I went back to Lwow, found myself a place to live. First I lived in an apartment with a friend, and then I moved elsewhere, to an apartment with a Russian family [Russian Jews who had escaped from Russia because of the persecution during tsarist times]. It was a housewife with two sons and her mother. Only the younger son lived elsewhere. I lived there with a guy from Sosnowiec, and in the apartment next-door were some people called Meller. One day they started arresting people, first of all capitalists. I heard that they'd arrested Monderer too, as a capitalist. I'd done a commercial internship with Monderer and Erlich [some business owners in Cracow] in the winter holidays before the war. That was a kind of textiles business. Then they arrested Polish officers, and then they arrested 'byezhentsy', or deserters [those who were running away from Poland, to the East].

I was a deserter. So I went with my rucksack to a restaurant run by Redlich, a friend of my uncle's from Cracow. And that uncle of mine, the one I had worked for in Cracow on my office internship, he was there: as a friend and as the bookkeeper. First he had been in Russian captivity; I saw him the first day that I was in Lwow. He wore an army coat and said that he had returned from captivity. He was always trying to persuade me to go back to my parents. I went to my uncle, to that restaurant, with my rucksack because he had offered to let me sleep there. And I slept one night on some chairs. The next day I went to the baths, to the post office, I had a card to send to my parents.

That day, I remembered that I'd left my pajamas at the Russian woman's apartment. I went to get my pajamas at 2 and she offered to let me have a nap. I wasn't at all sleepy, but I lay down for two hours. At 4 I got dressed and suddenly the housewife's son, Marek, comes running in. And he said 'Hide, because they're looking for you.' So I hid in the toilet, but they caught the other guy who was with me. And they wouldn't have caught me if I hadn't given myself up. I came out of the toilet and went with them. I even had to pay 30 rubles' lodging, several days in advance! I thought they'd catch me the next night anyway, so I gave myself up. I did right, because if the Russians hadn't caught me then, the Germans would have caught me later, and shot me like they shot my uncle.

Two of the Russian soldiers from the NKVD 12 led us. They had loaded rifles. They took us to the barracks. We were there for three weeks, without baths. We slept on bunks. We didn't know how long we'd be there. And when I was asleep that guy from Sosnowiec stole my watch. I got it back, but there's no knowing how many times he stole from me at the house. He could have stolen money from my wallet, because I never kept tabs on it. I was trusting; I never thought that anyone would rob me. And then he said goodbye because he was going with a different group. After three weeks they took us away in this lorry, to the station in Lwow. We didn't know where we were going. They loaded us into cattle cars. There were these bunks with palliasses, and a tiny window with a grille. The heat was terrible, but every day it got colder, which meant that we were traveling north. They gave us a meal once a day. They gave us this kind of round loaf to share between four. Then some of the others among us, in their underwear, got out at lunchtime and carried a pot with noodles. They were pleased to be out a bit in the fresh air. They called it 'lapsha' over there, noodles.

We traveled for six days and got right out to Rybinsk. There we got out and were given a set of clothes, camp clothes, dark blue, our own belt and a dark blue hat with a peak. They gave us dinner, and then took us to the barber, who shaved our heads. But when I was at the barber, the others went to where General Rapaport was giving a speech. He talked about our obligation to work and about discipline. That was Friday. They loaded us onto a ship. We sailed up the Sheksna. The Sheksna flows into the Volga. There were a few devout Jews among us on the ship. And they wanted a minyan, so they co-opted me. They weren't at all worried that we were going to a camp; they just prayed. Then they put us off at the camp, which was called Turgenevo.

There we got these little pink tokens and on that basis we got breakfast and dinner. Only twice a day there was food: before going to work and after coming back. And during the day only work. The next day early in the morning this 'nevalny' woke us up. 'Nevalny' is Russian for 'orderly', and we were called 'zakluchony', which means 'prisoner'. Everyone got a saw and axes. And they took us to the forest, where we had to fulfill a plan. I sawed; we were clearing forestland. We had roll calls as well. It's called 'povyerka' in Russian. Every gang foreman had 16 people. One was called Epstein. He offered us cigarettes; the first cigarette I'd ever smoked in my life. Some of them preferred to smoke than to eat bread; they'd exchange bread for cigarettes. There was a roll call before we went to work, a roll call in the forest, and a roll call after work. And then again in the zone, in the camp, another roll call, to check that no one had escaped.

In Turgenevo there were some who tried to form a minyan. So they got me into the minyan and gave me a prayer book, because I didn't have one. They took my prayer book off me in a search; there were ten searches, you see. They took my prayer book and my tefillin. But they left my tefillin batu, that's this bag for the tefillin, I still have it to this day [Tefillin batim is the cover of tefillin; 'batu' is the local pronunciation of the word]. And then, it was Yom Kippur, this one functionary Russian found my tefillin. And he ripped it out of my hand, took my prayer book off me. We didn't even get a chance to pray on Yom Kippur. 'You're not allowed to pray!' But one old man managed to keep his tallit. So he prayed, put it on sitting on his pallet on the top bunk. And my friend, who I was in Georgia with afterwards, and back then in the camps, saved his tefillin, because he hid it under his knee. I was in Turgenevo for a few months. They sent us out there on 20th July 1940.

Then, in the winter, they took each one of us with a different gang in a different direction. In the next Gulag 13 there were better conditions. The conditions in Turgenevo were harsh, you see, at first you weren't allowed to write letters, weren't allowed to have a pencil. You weren't allowed more than 50 rubles, or jewelry, or a watch, or any sharp instruments. If anyone had jewelry they handed it in, it was put into the safe and they got a receipt. I was the only one who had a watch, hidden on my elbow, wrapped in a kerchief and tobacco. But at first I had it inside my trousers. So they'd say 'Bertram - your trousers!' when they wanted to know what the time was.

The second camp was called Kanatna Droga. We went there in the winter, by sleigh - I even drove the sleigh. And there were 'boytsy' [this is what they called Russian soldiers] there. There were a few of us [Jews]. Stones were transported there; it was on the Volga. From one bank to the other on this cable car thing these little trucks went back and forth. They were called 'kubonetki' in Russian and were 0.6 cubic meters, these little trucks. The stone was transported to our bank. It was washed automatically and sorted. And our people carried these 'nosilki', 'carriers' all day long. Stones on these carriers. I felt as if it was 4,000 years ago in Egypt, where the Jews were slaves. And for the most part the majority of us were Jews, but there were Catholics too. There was this one priest, Father Jacek, without a cassock. There were Silesians too. For the most part they were older people; I was one of the youngest. Well, at Kanatna Droga I worked voluntarily as well, in my free time. Then that job ended and I said goodbye to them.

I was taken to yet another camp, Piatiy Uchastek. And we were there for another few months. We were driven there, because it was a different season. We were driven in lorries, but not petrol powered, but wood powered. Every few kilometers the driver would stop and throw the blocks of wood into this cylinder. And that's how we traveled. We didn't know where to until we came to Piatiy Uchastek, or 'the fifth section'. They were always chopping and changing the groups, a different team every verse end. Different people. A stranger among strangers, I was. I didn't know anyone. And work again. The conditions were harsher there. The best conditions were in Kanatna Droga.

There was this huge project: there were an awful lot of Russkies [derogatory term for Russians], who were building a hydroelectric power plant. We were reinforcing the sluicegate, all the time, near the Volga. And then one day, one night, 4th September 1941, we found out about the Sikorski amnesty. We didn't know about Majski then [the Sikorski-Majski Pact] 14. The next day we were called out to the registration committee in alphabetical order. And they asked me where I wanted to go. Did I want to go to Kokand [Uzbekistan] or to Tashkent? I wanted to go to Astrakhan, because there was Russian industry there. But a friend from Cracow told me that the Cracovians were going to Georgia, and that I should go there too.

So I went to Georgia: anywhere to be free, so to speak, and not in a camp. There was no question of the West, only what was then the Soviet Union. And everyone could go where he or she wanted, it only had to be at least 100 kilometers from the border, meaning from the front, and we weren't allowed to go to the central cities. They didn't want a large influx of people. They suggested Kutaisi [today Georgia], so that was what I chose.

So we went to Georgia, arrived in Tbilisi. Before the war it was called Tiflis, and afterwards Tbilisi. We get there and straight from the station went to the prayer house. It used to be called a prayer house. Synagogues are built differently, you see, and a prayer house is this tiny room, or in somebody's house. There it was a small room. There were Jews from Kiev there, who had escaped. And it turned out that when we got there it was Rosh Hashanah. Morning and evening we had to go to the prayer house. In the evening, when the hakham spoke, I didn't know what he was saying. I thought he was speaking Yiddish and that's why I couldn't understand him. It turned out he was speaking Georgian. He was appealing to all the Georgian Jews to look after all of us that had come out of the camps. And they invited us for dinner and let us sleep that first night. I got this host where I had dinner and I slept one night there.

There in Georgia this Georgian woman asked me: 'Is it true,' - because she had been reading the newspapers - 'is it true that they are killing Jews?' I replied that I didn't know anything. But two people from Lwow came to Georgia. One was called Zelmanowicz and the other Gutman. And they said that there, in the ghettos, there was starvation. I don't know how they got to us. But we went to this one prayer house every Saturday afternoon. And one of these Kiev Jews gave a 'droshe'. 'Droshe', in Ashkenazi 'drasha', in Sephardi, means 'speech'. And he gave this speech about the Torah what is said on a given day, what 'parsha' [parashah], or 'polsyk' [according to Mr. Bertram the word used in prewar Cracow for parashah]. And right at the end he told us about the tragedy, that over on the other side they were killing people by then. He already knew everything; perhaps he had read a Russian newspaper or a Georgian one. Perhaps he had found out from Georgian Jews. But we didn't really believe it; we didn't really take much notice, because we didn't know whom it affected. We just listened.

I had a few friends in Georgia. On the whole they were good people, though a bit selfish. I've got a photograph of them. The oldest one, in glasses, with the Lenin beard, was from Podgorze [then a town near Cracow, now a district of Cracow]. He was an artistic signwriter, could turn his hand to anything and did very well for himself. He promised me that I would be his partner. That was Abraham Lamesdorf. His wife had stayed behind; she died with their son, probably in Belzec 15. My other friend was called Dawid Kos Klajman. He had two names, I don't know why; I think he was some kind of salesman. He said he came from Brygl. Brygl, I think in Polish that must have been Brzesko. He never said it in Polish, all he said was Brygl. He had a secret from us: he had a lady friend, who fed him, and he was at her place all day long, after work, of course. We didn't keep tabs on whether he went to the synagogue on Saturday or not. But it was a small town; it was uncomfortable in that little town to be seeing a non-Jew. Especially because on Saturdays and holidays I went with the friend I talked about to the synagogue. There was no one else from among our people at the synagogue, only the two of us.

We went regularly, but we didn't have access to the 'liye' [according to Mr. Bertram the word used in prewar Cracow for 'aliyah' - going up the bimah to read the Torah]. We didn't have any money, and you had to pay an awful lot. And the hakham called people up. It went to the highest bidder. 'Assima naty, to...orrasi manaty, sammassi manaty... tiskula mitzvah'. That was what he said, in Georgian and Hebrew. 'Tiskula mitzvah' means 'you will be doing a good deed', or 'commandment'. And what I said at the beginning, that was the bidding. 100 rubles... 'mana' is rouble [in Georgian]. '100 rubles, 200 rubles, 300 rubles.' We couldn't afford such luxuries.

We sat at the side, and over there they were bidding for the reading. That's the way it is all over the world, except in Poland. Others of our people didn't go to the synagogue because they were busy with work. And one of them criticized me terribly when I asked him if he'd been to the synagogue, because I was surprised that he hadn't been. Well, he offended me terribly. He found out that I'd been to the synagogue, and told me that I was 'as stupid as a shoe off the left foot'. But the older one in glasses said to me: 'Don't worry, Bertram, the Lord won't forsake you.' This barrister, Goldberg, was in the apartment too, and he added: 'If the Lord God doesn't forsake you, then people will!' And I can't forget that. Very few people went to the synagogue there. Synagogue was luxury. They were busy working, to earn money to buy bread. But because we went to the synagogue, we had these hosts. And they would invite us to their homes every Saturday and every holiday. And we would eat Georgian kosher food; we waited for that meat all week, of course, because other than that, privately, I didn't eat it. For lunch we had gruel, flaked corn. And that was our lunch. I don't think I ate anything else. We didn't get a second course there. And as for breakfast, they did very well for themselves, only I was the worst off. I'm talking about our private lives now, not about the factory.

There was a time, you see, when I didn't even have enough money for breakfast. I went through a whole month like that, and they persuaded me to sell my Tissot [a watch-brand] that I'd been given by my father when I graduated from school. Well, I sold it. I wanted 5,000 rubles, but I only got 3,400 or 3,500. And then I had to give my two housemates some money to buy oil, for arranging the sale.

I was working in a clothing factory. 'Shveyna fabrika', or 'The Kiev Clothing Factory'. The director was called Macharadze, and the other one Karikashvili. A year I worked there; then I got seconded to the Labor Battalion [group of the prisoners from the Labor Camp, who worked in much harder conditions]. I was in that Labor Battalion six weeks; those were the harshest conditions. No prison on earth has conditions like that. Six weeks I slept on the bare ground; it wasn't a hut, just a tent with no roof. No roof, just branches. So I spent six weeks in my clothes, six weeks on the ground, six weeks without a bath, and on top of that: lice. I didn't know how long I'd stick it there, because the work was hard and they gave us very little to eat. I got weak, could hardly walk; like an old man. I stayed in Georgia from the time they liberated us from the camp on 4th September 1941 almost until the end of the war.

Post-war

The war ended on 9th May 1945, and I left Georgia on 22nd April 1945. I left, but at that time we still weren't allowed to leave! My neighbors left earlier than that; they kept it a secret from me, but they came back. They were turned back by this NKVD functionary, because he asked them, on a train during an inspection: 'Where are you going?', and they said: 'To Poland.' 'Go back, there is no Poland!' They came back, and then my neighbor got himself and me passes from the militia, to travel on family affairs, but not to Poland! We only got two rail tickets: on one we were to travel to Slavuta [Ukraine], and in Slavuta we were to throw that ticket away and go to Kamenets Podolski. We were traveling for three weeks, changing trains every other day, because there was no other way.

It was very hard to get on a train, and the conductor was on the running board, and people everywhere. How were we supposed to get on, with a rucksack, and him with a briefcase? Well, that neighbor of mine was cunning, the one in glasses, with a beard. 'Comrade, sir!' - he said and winked conspiratorially. So he [the conductor] got all excited that he was going to get some money. And when he'd let us into the wagon, he didn't give him any. And he would do the same thing with every conductor.

In Tbilisi my wallet was stolen. I had 90 rubles in it, my school ID, my secondment papers from the camp, and three or four letters or so from my parents, postcards. And at the militia station where I reported the theft, they put my witness and me in a cell: all night, with young Georgian criminals. And in the end the duty officer opened up and the chiefs came with a list and let us all out. They'd let my witness out earlier, at 8 o'clock in the morning. But I'd been kept in until noon.

Once I was free I picked my things up from the deposit. They gave me to understand that I should travel without a ticket if I didn't have any money. Outside the guy with the beard, Lamesdorf, and my other future partner were waiting for me. And we went on. So we were in Kamenets Podolski, and the border is in Rovno. There they told us that we had to hand our passports over. So we handed them over, and we then had to get a stamp on our passports and military service books. We went individually, not waiting for a transport. We got on a train in Rovno. All of a sudden there was an inspection; this NKVD functionary came round. He let the three of us through, and we were on our way to Poland. In Kovel, at 2 o'clock in the morning on 8th May 1945, there were shots. I asked what the shots were, and they said that the war was over. From there we went in the direction of Cracow. The one from Brzesko went straight to Cracow too, because there were lots of people coming to Cracow from small eastern towns.

We arrived in Cracow on 9th or 10th May. We reported to the Jewish Committee and there they registered us. And there, this couple, Aleksandrowicz was their name, a young married couple, asked me: 'Do you have a cousin named Olga?' So I said, 'Yes.' And she said that she used to go to school with her. And she told me that she had left Lwow and crossed the border somewhere with a guide. And I found out that she had managed to get to Los Angeles, via Yokohama, together with her husband, who was called Erteschick, from Cracow. They hadn't managed to get married here, but they got married there, in Los Angeles.

I registered with the Committee, and from time to time they gave us some money, some food: dried cod. There may have been dinners there too. They helped us as much as they could, because we weren't working and didn't have anything. Everyone who came back from Russia was poor. We reported to Albin Kenner, who was a friend of Lamesdorf's from cheder, but he had also been in the same camp as us. He was the chief administrator in the hostel, and told us that there was no room for us. There were only places for people from the German camps. So I went to another registration point, but for Catholics. And there they were surprised, and said that they could give me a ticket to a hut with no floor. 'Why don't you go to your own people?' So I went back to the other place, and Lamesdorf had somehow managed to persuade that Kenner to take us in, as a favor. We slept on straw mattresses on the floor, for two weeks, in this tiny little room on the ground floor. We were happy just to be lying on those straw mattresses.

Later on, in the early hours of the morning, I heard that my aunt had arrived. And my sister-in-law; I recognized her voice. Later on, I met up with them. My uncle, my aunt's husband, Aleksander Eintracht, was still on his way back; he had been in a different camp and came back much later. I went to the radio with my aunt and there we registered that we were seeking our family. That was where everyone went who was looking for family, Polish Radio. We put out an announcement that we were seeking our family. We gave first names and surnames, I my nearest and my aunt her husband's. But we never found them...

After that, two weeks later, we were offered a better place in the Jewish hospice. Downstairs used to be a firm, Michal Kahan and Company. He had materials downstairs, and upstairs I think there was a warehouse. It was in the same building where our School of Commerce had been. We sawed up shelves to have somewhere to sleep, because there weren't any mattresses. I took my neighbor, Lamesdorf, to see our old apartment from before the war. We looked at it; I only went into one room. A family called Werner was living there. He was the director of the Cyganeria cafe, where Liebeskind 16 from the ZOB 17 had thrown the grenade [see 'Cyganeria' Campaign (22 December 1942)] 18.

We went to the lawyer, Keiner, who later changed his name to Korczak. His son was called Janusz, just like the famous Korczak 19. That lawyer, Keiner, or Korczak, said that if the judge knew what was what, he would allocate me at least one room. There was a hearing. The judge was called Guzek. He said: 'If you had a mother I would allocate you one room, but since you're alone you'll manage.' And they carried on living in our apartment, because that Werner came to the hearing, to the second hearing, with the caretaker, a woman called Mikolajowa. She was the caretaker from before the war, an old woman by then. And she said that my father had sold the furniture for 5,000 zloty to some guy from Warsaw [this probably should prove, that there was no property in the apartment, which could be claimed back; but also that moving had been planned].

Apparently my parents had moved to Czerwony Pradnik [a district of Cracow] before they went into the ghetto; I didn't even know. I also found out from my aunt that my parents had lived on the ground floor in the same building in the ghetto as her. And they had gone in the first transport, on 2nd June 1942. Apparently, first of all, on a Saturday, they had gone to do some road works, and my father hadn't managed to get them a blue card, which could have helped them live longer [Editor's note: The card confirming employment and necessity for the Germans, and permission for staying in the ghetto, was of blue color and attached to the 'Kennkarte']. And people who didn't have a blue card were deported at once along with the whole transport via Plaszow camp 20, and at Plaszow into what were probably cattle wagons. My uncle told me that they spread lime there. And then, when they went to Belzec, there weren't gas chambers at that time, but just exhaust fumes from motor vehicles. They weren't all taken away at the same time; other relatives went in later transports. All my relatives were there, my uncles and my aunts. They went in later transports.

My aunt, Otylia, or Tyla, from Mannheim, she and her family must have gone to Belzec too. And my uncle, the one whose name was Eintracht, who after the war settled in Czestochowa, and the others, were lucky: they went in different transports, to other camps, and somehow managed to survive the Holocaust. Hania, my Mom's sister, died, unfortunately. During the war she was taking kosher meat into the ghetto, as an Aryan. She looked Aryan. At the time she was living in Sedziszow, and she probably died there with her children. Her husband was shot in Lwow. It was him I had met in Lwow; he was the bookkeeper in Redlich's restaurant there. The Germans shot him and the Russians deported me. It was he, Izydor, who had tried to persuade me to go back to Poland. But I had registered myself and he hadn't. And it was probably because he hadn't registered that the Germans shot him. A guy I knew in the camp, Pukiet, told me about that.

Bluma, my mother's sister, had two children, two sons. One was perhaps five when the war broke out. The other was born in 1939. The elder was called Beno, and the second Macius. During the war, it could have been 1942, the end of 1942, the children were taken to the woods in a cart. Bluma and her husband were in the camps; they survived the Holocaust. Afterwards they lived together and had a daughter, Danuta. They are dead now. They were the only ones of the Stiel family to survive from Poland. Bluma is buried in Radomsko, because the Jewish cemetery in Czestochowa has been closed for a long time. My uncle was buried before her in the Jewish cemetery in Radomsko. And I made sure that my aunt was buried in a Jewish cemetery, because she was in danger of Poles burying her in a Christian cemetery. I couldn't have let that happen.

Their daughter is handicapped, mentally unstable. She lives in Czestochowa. She doesn't listen to me when I give her advice. I help her out financially. She dresses nicely, even gets a little benefit. She has a son, too, but from a mixed marriage. They live apart, because her son doesn't want to have anything to do with his mother; he hates her. He was christened without her knowing. Her husband, persuaded by the neighbor, took him to church to have him Christianized. They said they were going to the dentist. But my cousin doesn't know herself whether she's a Jew or a Pole or a Christian. I wrote to her and told her that she is a real Jew, but she doesn't know the Jewish religion; as a child she went maybe once to a prayer house in Czestochowa with her parents. I don't know whether she remembers.

Otylia Ryngiel, Dad's sister, died too. In 1938 her husband had to leave Germany because of Hitlerism. He used to come to Poland via the border crossing in Zbaszyn, and then he would come to Cracow and go to some place in Podgorze district. Dad told me that he was worried that he would commit suicide, that he would jump into the Vistula. But he didn't jump. In 1939 my aunt sent him a telegram: 'Our panes smashed'. They had a beautiful shop, you see, a fashion house selling clothes. And Uncle Jakub didn't know what that meant. He thought that 'our panes' [in Polish 'szyby'] was some minister in Africa... And she moved out of their four-roomed apartment and sent all the furnishings from the four rooms here, to an apartment where some Poles lived. That's what my uncle said. And they both died, probably in Belzec. When I went out that day, back then on 5th September, to my friend's place to ask him if he wanted to escape with me, I met her. And she said goodbye to me and kissed me. I didn't know it was for the last time. You see, everyone was saying, lying, that the war was only going to last two weeks. A group of us from the Jewish community organization went to Belzec, in 1960 or 1961. There's a mass grave there. Those who wanted to cried, and then Fogiel recited the Kaddish.

We stayed in the building on Stradomska Street for a long time, until 1947, 14 of us, sleeping on bunks on mattresses. There was one woman, who slept on the floor under the window. She said she had been in hiding in the Missionaries' Church, just next door. But she left very soon. She was an older woman. Then Goldberg the barrister put this young woman from Gliwice in with us. She didn't have anywhere to sleep, and he let her stay. But there was this one older man there, a very devout man, who had worn a beard in Georgia. But when he came to Poland he shaved it off completely because he was afraid of anti-Semites. And he made a great fuss to the barrister: 'you can't do that, it's forbidden, our religion doesn't allow it, and it would be yayzokhore! [Polonized Yiddish]' In Yiddish 'yeyzey hara', 'temptation'[evil desire, yetzer hara in modern Hebrew]. But the barrister defended her and she slept there one night.

There were 14 of us there, and there were families in the neighboring rooms. There was a friend of mine from school, from another, higher grade, Gries, with his parents, who had managed to survive, in the Soviet Union perhaps. There was another family, called Fajg; he was a tailor. He and his wife lived next door. They already had a son, and their daughter was born there. They emigrated.

In January 1947 I moved into a little room on my own. There were a few houses like ours [shelters for Jews]. After the war whole families lived in them for quite some time, each family in a separate room. One night a family of Kiev Jews who had come from Georgia stayed there: two couples, older parents with a daughter, who had married a guy called Mozes from Lodz out there in Georgia. We went to their wedding. But all the families there were thinking about leaving and they emigrated. In the former Jewish Theater the Zionists were agitating, encouraging people to go to Palestine. And then there was a talk on the subject in another theater. This guy from Canada [a Polish Jew who survived the Holocaust in Canada] came and said that he was going to Palestine. They held these lectures and tried to persuade other people to go to Palestine. I went to two of those meetings. I thought about going. At the time the talk was of illegal emigration, just as emigration before the war was illegal.

When we arrived in Cracow in 1945, on Shavuot we went to Kupa Synagogue. There were entrances on two sides. On one side of it there was a market, and they would hang their rugs and other wares on the wall. And there was this one young chazzan, or cantor, but not a professional one. And he was leading the prayers. And during 'Shmoneesre', one of the lads from the market threw a stone on the roof. And after 'Shmoneesre' the chazzan took him into the synagogue. He didn't do anything to him, he was just in there a few minutes, and then he let him out. The prayers finished and we all left the synagogue on the other side. But the market traders had already got in position, all men, in two rows. And we went out down the middle, and were very lucky that they didn't beat us up or kill us. I don't know exactly what the casualties were. Someone just said to me that some woman called Bergier was killed and someone dragged her along a street. And then there was talk of the Kielce incidents, perhaps a year later [see Kielce Pogrom] 21.

When it started here, with that stone, the caretaker ordered us to keep the door of our house locked. Some people started getting worked up and thought that the only thing to do was to get out of here, emigrate to Palestine: because if people were coming back, out of German and Russian camps and then started throwing stones at them here too, then things were very bad. Some people coming back to their homes were threatened, and they had to go to Palestine because they didn't have anywhere to live. And then in Kielce I think 42 people were murdered because they wanted to live in their own homes. No one did anything to us. We lived together, kept ourselves to ourselves, stayed on the street where our house was. And we had one route: from there to the synagogue and back. That way we didn't come into contact with Christians. Lamesdorf went to his friends', Poles, because he knew them from before the war. They were very nice people.

The largest emigration wave was between 1945 and 1950. You either needed an invitation or you went illegally - to Israel, to Palestine. As for me, my uncle promised to get me out. Uncle Luzor kept in touch with the family in Poland and pressed them to get me to go out there. When I went to HIAS 22, and asked if there was any chance of going to Argentina, they said that they could pay for me as far as Gdansk or Gdynia. I could have paid that, too; it was the journey on from there that was the problem. Aunt Karola wrote to me saying that the journey cost 10,000 pesetas. I didn't know how much that was in dollars. I didn't go. Karola persuaded her sister to go, though, after the war. My uncle wrote to me saying that I should borrow the money for the journey from her. But I didn't want to ask her, that Mrs. Hudes. Her first husband had been a barrister; the second one was the director in a materials factory. She was pleased that I didn't want to ask her for a loan. She emigrated with her son, a dental technician whose name was from his Aryan papers - Adamowicz. Her second husband died. After that I lost touch with them. They emigrated towards the end of the 1940s.

Another one of my uncles promised that we would go together, but I wasn't to tell anyone. He was going with his sister-in-law, because his wife had been killed. And he went. His ex-fiancee told me that if I would work with her then I could go with her. I worked for her for a few months. And she went and I stayed. Before that, my uncle ordered me to split from my friend, who I'd been in the camps with, and in Georgia, and in Cracow. And that friend went too, and I was left alone, high and dry. So they all fleeced me.

Then when I tried to arrange to leave through official channels, the authorities refused me. I paid 5,000 zloty, and went [to Warsaw] for a passport, because I received a summons. So I went and stood in the queue at the Ministry of Public Administration in Warsaw. This tiny little window; there weren't any bars like there are in prison, you just stood in the corridor. Apparently ten people were refused that time, and I was one of them. You either had to have 'protection' or you had to bribe them. I didn't have any protection there. One lady told me that she'd met a tailor up there in Warsaw who made the superintendent's clothes. So she managed to get one through her connection to him. I didn't know how you did these things. They told me to go back home and go to work. So I went; it was a holiday, the end of Sukkot. During Sukkot I was still up in Warsaw, but I was in a hurry to get back to Cracow, because I hadn't taken enough money with me.

After the war I changed my [first] name; I don't remember which year that was: perhaps it was 1954, or earlier. I changed it for a position. I wanted to get a position. A policewoman asked me whether I wanted to change my name. So I said 'Yes, to Daniel'. But when I went to the registry office, she said: 'That's just as bad.' Friends were changing their [family] names. One of them was called Sternrei. So he changed it to Sterynski. Goldwaser changed his name to Garda. In the Jewish Community people weren't interested in whether you changed your name or not. I wasn't interested in who changed their name and who didn't. People who converted must have changed their names if they had Jewish ones. We had this teacher in the fourth or fifth grade, and he said: 'You can say you're a Catholic, but you mustn't say that you believe in Christ.' That's what he said to us. I don't know how many people in Cracow converted after the war.

There were a lot of people who had had Aryan papers during the occupation and that's how they survived. They got these papers from a priest; I don't know if they had to convert, or pray, or if they had to kiss the cross. Or if they had to convert, or if they got the papers just like that. I think they must have had to learn prayers and play the role of a Catholic. However, my wife and I met a woman who lives near here. She looks like ten Jewesses, Semitic. And she says that she hid in churches. But she would only travel in 'nur fuer Deutsche' [the signs on the streetcars actually read 'Fuer nicht Juden']. But that seemed unlikely to me. And that woman deceived me, offering me help with formal matters connected with compensation [financial compensation for being sent to the Soviet Union and for the forced work there during the war].

Initially after the war I had casual work; it was hard to find a steady job. Amongst other things I took orders for signs that my friend made, and I started training in a watchmaker's workshop. I also worked in the Cracow Vodka and Liqueur Factory. Then I did office work in a few design offices for the coke, construction and mineral industries. After that I found employment in the Wawel Transport Cooperative and for a few years I was in their department in Balice [a village near Cracow]. In subsequent years I was a bookkeeper in the Cepelia Artistic Crafts Foundation and in the company RSW Prasa Ksiazka Ruch. I've been retired since 1985.

After the war in Cracow, in the first few post-war years, marriages between Jews took place; there were weddings. There was this one marriage between these children from an orphanage. The bridegroom was a teacher, I think. And they were married, and then there was a reception in the Jewish Community building. The people there were mostly orphans, who later emigrated. It was Maciej Jakubowicz [president of the Cracow Jewish Community till 1979] who organized it so that they could go. There were about 40 of them, but some people say that there were 100. All the children from the Jewish orphanage went to Palestine.

After the war prayers were held in Kupa Synagogue at first. I went there perhaps once. After that we went to Tempel [Synagogue] all the time, 25 years to Tempel. And other people went to Remuh. There was this split: Tempel and Remuh. The community organization decided, you see, and the Jewish Social and Cultural Society [TSKZ] 23, and this one barrister, Maurycy Wiener. I believe it was he who decided which synagogue to have renovated, to be open. One of all those synagogues had to be chosen to be open. They chose Tempel and Remuh. And I went to Tempel. And once I went to Remuh, because I wanted to observe an anniversary, because I'd been directed there. So this Gries, from the board of the Jewish community organization, told me that if I went to Tempel, I shouldn't go to Remuh. And then another guy from Remuh co-opted me from Tempel, told me I should go there [to Remuh], because there were fewer and fewer people there. I didn't know what had happened for there to be fewer and fewer people. I thought that they were dying, but in fact they were emigrating.

Far more people went to Tempel than to Remuh. After the war I even saw my teacher Mr. Aleksandowicz there; he greeted everyone, including me, as one of his pupils. I liked going to Tempel, because it was close. The president of the Jewish community organization, Maciej Jakubowicz went there too, and lots of other people. That synagogue was renovated in 1946 or 1947. And I painted the Magen David, the Star of David, and the four letters, the name of God. A full renovation was carried out much later, between 1994 and 2000, thanks to an American foundation.

The first seder was held in 1946. At that time Maciej Jakubowicz was the chair of the community. But for ten years under First Secretary Boleslaw Bierut 24 seders weren't allowed. The chairman was afraid, and the community was afraid, because the country authorities didn't allow it. And then there was the time when all the chairmen of all the Jewish communities and presidents of JSCS had to sign a declaration saying that they were against the Israeli-Arab war. Anyone who didn't sign was arrested. Maciej Jakubowicz didn't sign and he was arrested and sent to Wroclaw, and was in prison there. And then when we did have a seder after that, the chairman wasn't there, because he had been arrested for not being against the war in Israel.

Just after the war, when I was learning watch mending, the shop where I was working was open on a Saturday. But I was excused and didn't go to work on Saturdays. I went to Tempel. They [the shop-owners] were Jews, so they let me. And they worked. They were all camp survivors. I knew two of them from school. I went with one of them to Mizrachi, and with the younger one to the School of Commerce. They left too; two of them with their families went to Israel, and the third, a bachelor, went to Belgium. The family was called Tennenbaum, one was Benek, the second Izek, and the third Moniek. Their mother survived a concentration camp. Their father had been a watchmaker before the war; he'd had a little shop in the entranceway to our School of Commerce. He didn't survive the war. And the guy who worked with them, called Dawid Rap, he emigrated to where his brother was; it could have been New York. I saw him off at the station.

The policy of the state after the war was such that if they greased somebody's palm or if they had contacts they could go to Israel. But if you didn't know the right people and didn't give a bribe, you couldn't go. They had a quota, a limit. So and so many people could go. And the people who went, even illegally, were in camps after the war [Displaced Persons camps]. They lived in Germany for two years, waiting for them to get houses ready in Israel, in Palestine. There was no repression for belonging to the Jewish community. Anyone who was Jewish, who had ID, could be a member. I didn't have any unpleasant experiences at work on that account, other than a few incidents.

Back then, I don't know if it was 1968, Gomulka was on his way out [see Gomulka Campaign] 25. He fired people on the quiet; there was this order that all Jews who were directors should be fired. And he had them branded Zionists. They didn't have anything at all to do with the synagogue, or with religion. They hadn't seen a synagogue in their lives. Gomulka gave a speech and made a show of not being anti-Semitic. He gave a shameful speech, and the whole world knew it. Everybody got fired and had to leave, because they couldn't get work. There were already others in their places. And because of Wladyslaw Gomulka the economy got a lot worse and there were riots. And the army came; there were tanks on the street. On the Square [the Main Square in Cracow] there wasn't a soul. I wanted to get to the streetcar. I got near to the crowd at the corner of the Square. The police didn't let anyone onto the Square. When I joined the crowd there was gas, tear gas. We had to cover our eyes and noses and get off the street. Yes, he made the situation worse. He took people who weren't experts to head important enterprises.

My partner Renata Zisman was born in Zywiec. She had one sister. She lived in Zywiec with her parents and her grandparents. Her father came from Poronin. There's even a card that he wrote to his wife-to-be, his fiancee, in German. They lived in Silesia, so they spoke German, like all Germans. It was a progressive family. They would go to the synagogue there when it was the feast of Pesach, or Yom Kippur. But other than that they didn't keep kosher. Her grandmother had kept kosher, but they didn't bother. Renata stuck together with her sister, because they were in five concentration camps together, to the very end.

Renata was 18 when the war started. She was seeing Jerzy Sussman, a friend from Zywiec. He came round to her house a lot. Renata's father didn't like his visiting her, but he came anyway. During the war Renata and her family were sent to the Cracow ghetto. When her parents were taken away to Belzec on 28th October 1942, Jerzy looked after Renata and her sister Elzbieta. From the ghetto the two girls were both sent to the camp in Plaszow. While she was in the camp [in Plaszow] Renata managed to cross the wires into the men's barrack. There, before witnesses, she and Jerzy Sussman were married. After that there was kogiel mogiel [made of egg and sugar, the symbolic wedding party, cause they didn't have anything else], but Renata didn't say who ate it. And that was the end of the whole ceremony. I don't know who married them.

Soon afterwards Renata and her sister were transferred to Auschwitz- Birkenau. After that Renata was in two more camps in Germany. She stayed together with her sister Elzbieta all the time; they were together in all the camps. Usually families were split up but they managed to stay together until the end. After the end of the war Renata first went back to Zywiec, because it was her hometown. Then she came to Cracow and lived here with her sister, in the home of some servant of her grandparents: temporarily, because she didn't have a roof over her head. Her sister, Elzbieta, went to music school, and had a very nice mezzo-soprano voice. I didn't know her, because she died very young; she was 39. She left two sons. She had a very nasty husband. She was very unhappy with him.

Later on Renata found her husband, who was in a group of returnees from the camp. They went back to Zywiec together. After selling the family home they returned to Cracow. Because they didn't have any documents confirming their marriage in Plaszow - no ketubbah had been drawn up - after the war they had to have their marriage confirmed by the courts. My wife [partner] taught piano at a music school. She taught for 40 years in the same school, and it was very hard to make a living from one school. There were several head teachers, and one was Jewish; Hoffman, his name was. Another one was called Tippe. My wife Renata was a member of the Jewish community organization and the JSCS. She also belonged to the association for survivors of Auschwitz-Birkenau. And she would often play [the piano] there for free. She got acknowledgements in 50 different newspapers. She went to the synagogue, but the women didn't go regularly. The women only used to go on holidays, or when there were prayers for the dead. My partner didn't know the Hebrew alphabet. The best proof of that was that when she sat in the synagogue she held her prayer book upside-down. And someone told her. Sometimes she'd come to the synagogue without informing me in advance. I didn't know whether she'd be coming or not.

Renata didn't want to be alone. She was a widow when I met her. Her first husband had died; he was 22 years older than her. We were together a long time, 20 years. We couldn't get married because I told Renata that there was no rabbi. At that time there really was no rabbi. And secondly - I don't know whether, if there had been a rabbi, he would have let me marry a widow. I'm not allowed to marry a divorcee; as to a widow I don't know. [Mr. Bertram is not sure whether he could marry a widow, but in fact - according to the law- he could.]

My wife liked her nephews very much, but they emigrated. One lives in Holmes, which is some 600 kilometers north of New York, I think. And the other one lived in New York and in California. He was there with his wife. And after eight years they had a little girl. After 14 years he came here and gave some lectures on American business. He didn't live in Cracow, but in Myslenice. And to this day he lives in Myslenice, but I think he commutes to Cracow. He's in real estate brokerage, with his half-brother Marek. Their father had two sons with Renata's sister and a third with his third wife. He had three wives. The first wife and their little daughter were murdered by the Germans. His second wife was Elzbieta Rand, Renata's sister.

Before 1989 I used to go abroad like all Poles. Because we had very low wages, in the 1970s and 1980s we used to travel to trade [to other countries of the former socialist bloc]. All the Poles used to do it, everyone who was young and healthy. We used to buy things here - we knew what to buy here, what to sell there, and what to buy there, to bring back here to commission shops. I used to go to Romania, and after that to Hungary. When I started traveling with Renata I stopped trading.

My wife went to Israel two or three times at the invitation of her uncle. It was very hard to get a plane ticket. And later, thanks to Renata, I went too, invited by her uncle. It was the 1980s when I went, because I remember communism was still in force. I spent twelve days there and came back. That was when my wife was still alive. She died in 1999. After the death of my partner I also saw Europe. I've been to places including Britain and Germany.

After the war, I was riding on the back running board of the streetcar when I heard a familiar voice from my childhood. I recognized it as my friend Reinstein, Szymek or something, his first name was, I can't remember exactly. And I turned round, and it really was my friend Reinstein. He said that he was now called Rogulski, and had come back with his wife. They had come from Paris. I don't know whether she was Polish. She spoke Polish, but she could speak very good French. Where he managed to survive I don't know. He was working here in some design office. He wasn't here for long. The kid, a son, was at boarding school. That was in the Gomulka era. The little boy was persecuted. And she, the mother, hauled her husband over the coals, the father of her son. She said she was leaving Poland. She said that in France, the richer a Jew, the more respect they have for him. And she was going back to France. An energetic woman, she was. So they went to France; I saw them off at the station. On the last day, when I was at their apartment, I saw that they had a cross concealed. A big cross, hidden behind this kind of wooden partition wall from a bed. I don't know if he converted.

Another friend of mine, Henryk Kleinberger, was in the camp at Turgenevo. After that I lost touch with him, because he was deported to another camp with another gang. And after the war, when I was back in Cracow, I didn't know where he was. I met him near Tempel. He had come back from Germany. After that he studied pharmacy, and when he graduated he did his compulsory military service, as a pharmacist. While he was in the army, they asked who wanted to go to Israel, or to Palestine. So he was among those who decided to go. He was in the army at Olsztyn. After that he came back to Cracow, was here for a short time, and then he started to prepare to leave for Israel. He went there and got married. I found out later from his wife, when I wrote him a letter, that he was dead; he'd had a stroke. He died young; he was 57, I think. And I met him in that camp, so far away, and he'd lived so near me before the war.

After the war I worked in various enterprises, and I was the only Jew so I had to get used to that company. Over about two years I traveled [as a sales representative] to 22 shops and 16 towns on business. I didn't have a private life at all, and I was always alone in hotels. I went on one of those trips with this woman Asbury. We were doing inventories. And once she offended me; she said to me 'You Jew!' I was offended; I didn't want to go to work. There was another woman there, who persuaded me to go. So I went to work as if nothing had happened. But after that they had this conciliatory committee, for her to apologize. That was a meeting in the workplace where she had to explain herself. Asbury claimed she had been out of her mind. I didn't know what right she had to be drinking alcohol before work; we started work before 7 or at 8. And she should have apologized to me. But the commission said that I had to kiss her.

The second was Mrs. Krawczuk, the wife of a judge. Well, her husband worked in the courts, so I don't know whether he was a judge or a prosecutor or the porter. I wasn't afraid of her, but she offended me. She said 'You Jew!' too. First she asked me about Gomulka, about Palestine, and about what Zionism was. I answered: patriotism, love for one's fatherland. And one time she said to me: 'You Jew!' So I had her up before the commission just the same, so that she would apologize to me. And in spite of requests I didn't withdraw my motion. When I was at the Workers' Publishing Co- operative Prasa Ksiazka Ruch there was this one Ukrainian woman there, Marysia Wlodarska. And at 3 sharp everyone left. I was getting my coat on too, taking it off the peg. And Marysia came in with her friend. She opened the door, and I was stuck between the door and the wall. 'That Icek's gone!' [Icek - a derogatory name for Jews, from a shortened Jewish name Yitzhak]. And I just stood there and didn't say anything. And then she closed the door and saw that 'Icek'. That was the anti-Semite she was.

Other than that all the other women were very good. There was one time I brought a packet of matzah to work. And I gave each woman one - they were all women there. Only one of them didn't want to accept it, because she had been brought up to believe that there was Christian blood in it [the blood libel myth]. And she wouldn't accept it. Otherwise she was very good to me, but she wouldn't take the matzah.

There were two rabbis in Cracow after the war. One was called Steinberg and the other Lewertow. Lewertow went to the US, and there, apparently, he was rescuing someone from being run over and was run over himself and died. They didn't stay long in Cracow, because rabbis didn't want to stay here. They thought they wouldn't be able to get kosher food here. The only kosher food was from the Jewish community organization, where you could eat lunch for free every day. But they thought it was their sacred duty to go to Palestine or to the States. They thought that there wouldn't be any Jews here any longer, that they wouldn't have anything to do here. Why would a rabbi want to stay around here with only non-Jews. So for a long time there was no rabbi at all. Even if anyone had wanted a wedding, a ritual one, they couldn't have, because there was no way. There were only civil weddings. Only later did Rabbi Joskowicz come, for a few years. [Pinchas Menachem Joskowicz, the chief rabbi rabbi of Poland from the late 1980s till 1999, officially lived in Warsaw, but spent most of his time in Israel.]

After him came Sasza Pecaric [the rabbi working at the Lauder Foundation center in Cracow till 2003]. And if anyone wanted to get married, he married him or her. He married perhaps two couples. As to the first one, she was English and he was an Austrian from Vienna. We went to the wedding service and the reception, which went on all night. And the wedding took place on Lag ba-Omer, which is the 33rd day counting from Pesach. I can't remember what year that was in, but I have a photograph. After the war marriages tended to be mixed. All the people who have been going to Remuh for some time now, those who stayed and didn't emigrate, all of them have Polish wives, except Reiner. Reiner's wife was Jewish. And I didn't have a Polish wife. But other than that they all had Polish wives.

My wife died on 30th July 1999. I had to organize her funeral. It was very hard for me, because the chairman said the funeral would be soon, and he set the date. I had too little time. Some people came back from vacation especially for the funeral. My wife had an awful lot of friends. And there was a speech at the grave. The chairman's wife, Ribenbauer, spoke. And as well as that there was an article in the press; it could have been Gazeta Wyborcza [a Polish national daily]. And there was one in a Warsaw Jewish paper as well. It was on 2nd or 3rd August 1999. I had a tombstone made, a beautiful one. And I listed all the camps: her name and surname, and her maiden name, and the date of her death. The Jewish community organization took care of funerals. There had to be a minyan, ten people, at least. And there was this one guy, Fogel and either he recited the Kaddish or 'Eyl mole rakhamim' [El mole rachamim - God full of mercy] at the cemetery, or Stein did [Wlodzimierz Stein, cantor in the Cracow Jewish Community]. Since Fogel's been gone [dead], Stein recites it. But it's getting harder and harder to get a minyan together in Cracow.

After the collapse of the system in 1989 I didn't work any more. I retired in 1985, in January. I was 65 then. I wasn't needed in my workplace any longer; the feeling was that young people should be taken on. I looked for a job in other places, but the only one I was offered was as a porter, so I turned it down. Not very much changed in my life in 1989. Only the fact that you started talking about the war, with both friends and people you didn't know. We reminisced about being expelled, about our time in the camps. We hadn't talked about that since the war, you didn't talk about who had survived and how. But after 1989 television crews started coming, and they began a series of interviews about experiences during the war. So we started reminiscing. A lot of Jews came to Cracow, but most of them were no one we knew. After the collapse of communism people who had formerly been conspiratorial about being Jewish started to reveal it and started coming to the synagogue, people who often had changed surnames, sometimes even people who had been baptized as Catholics.

During Jewish holidays I go to the synagogue, and on Friday evenings and Saturday mornings too. I have been a member of the Jewish community organization since 1945; I mean first I joined the Jewish Committee and then the community organization. I am one of its oldest members, because a lot of people have died, a lot of people have moved away. I also belong to the TSKZ, and recently we've had a Seniors' Club created. I take part in the meetings of the TSKZ Jewish Combatants' Association. Unfortunately not many people come to these meetings. There are a lot of older people, but then again the type of activities on offer don't appeal to everyone. We are informed about all the most important events, we organize trips together, we meet in rooms owned by the TSKZ and the Jewish Community.

These institutions also offer various types of assistance: material, medical, rehabilitation. During the week, for instance, I get free kosher dinners. A few times a year I go on 'camps' [organized by the Lauder Foundation] to Srodborow or to Ladek Zdroj, or to a sanatorium. I also meet other Cracow Jews on Sabbath and holidays at the synagogue. But not many people come to the synagogue [Remuh synagogue on Szeroka Street], and unfortunately we can't make up a minyan. The only ones who come are [Wlodzimierz] Stein, Tuszynski, Akerman and Liban. Liban is this kind of caretaker, shammash, who didn't start coming to the synagogue until 1989. Or maybe even later. Usually there are five of us, but [Henryk] Halkowski [trained as an architect, but by choice a journalist and translator, author of a collection of essays, 'The Jewish Life'] also comes in at the very end of the prayers. And when groups [of tourists] come to the synagogue, mostly from Israel, then there is a minyan. Jews from other countries come too, and then we usually speak in English in the synagogue.

Glossary

Magdalena Seborova
Brno
Czech Republic
Interviewers: Zuzana Pastorkova and Barbora Pokreis
Date of interview: May 2005

Magdalena Seborova lives alone in a cozy and tastefully furnished one-room apartment in Brno. Mrs. Magdalena is originally from Slovakia. She was born in Mocenok (Sala region) in 1940, therefore during World War II, and at a very young age ended up in the labor camp in Sered 1, and later in Terezin 2. Most of her family died during the Holocaust. She had very little contact with her mother, who for seven years after the war was being treated for tuberculosis in a sanatorium in the High Tatras. Mrs. Magdalena was twice married and divorced. In 1972 she moved to Brno to be with her second husband, where she lives to this day. In 1984 she went on a disability pension. Despite her health problems, she is very full of life and talkative. She gladly shared her memories and experiences with us, because according to her words: "I can't take everything to the grave." Today Mrs. Magdalena lives alone, yet she is very content with her new situation. After a distressful life she'd like to have a bit of peace at least in her retirement. She devotes herself to her hobbies, such as for example sewing and making macramé lace, besides this she also likes to travel. Neither is she indifferent to the fate of the Jewish community in Brno, which she joined in the year 2000.

Family background">Family background

I don't remember my grandparents from my father's side. I don't know my grandparents' first names, as I don't have any documents about them. Their surname was Klein. Grandpa died right after the war broke out, when I was two [in 1942]. He's buried in Surovce [Trnava region], in a Jewish cemetery of course. Maybe the cemetery is still there to this day. I used to go there with my father up to the time I started going to work. My father had 'For those of the family who died' put on his tombstone, symbolically, so that there would be a reminder of those that died during the Holocaust and don't have gravestones.

My grandparents were named the Kleins. I don't know when and where they were born. They lived in Surovce. Grandpa had fourteen children and two wives, but not at the same time. When one died, he married the second. I don't remember the names of Grandpa's wives either, due to the fact that I was too small. I'm assuming that his wives were also from Orthodox families. The Kleins were definitely Orthodox Jews, as in photos you can see that Grandma has a wig 3, and my father was also Orthodox. Every day he prayed with tefillin - prayer straps. Grandpa owned a general store, as it used to be in villages 60 years ago. My father didn't talk much about Grandpa; we tried to forget about that whole 'concentration camp journey.'

My grandparents on my mother's side were named Julius and Hedviga Weisz. I knew my grandfather, as he survived the Holocaust. He married my grandmother in Vienna; I think she was named Hedviga. My grandmother's maiden name was Quittner. He died in Bratislava in 1954, where he's also buried. I was 14 years old when he died. Grandpa was a great person, everyone liked him. He used to tell me that he had been a painter by trade. He didn't like it at all, and so he later studied to be a master distiller. He never actually worked at his trades, because he became the superintendent of a farm in Kokosova. My mother's grandparents on my grandfather's side were Mor Weisz and Netti Schwarz. And my grandmother's parents were Mor Quittner and Katalina Braun.

After their wedding, Grandpa and Grandma Weisz settled down in Vienna. My mother was also born there. My mother had one sister, Hedviga, who died in a concentration camp. Still during the time of Austro-Hungary they moved to Slovakia, that wasn't a problem. They settled on a farm in Kokosova. Kokosova was part of the municipality of Tesare. Like most women back then, my grandmother was a housewife. I've personally never been on that farm. My grandparents certainly belonged among the more well to do class of the population. During the First Republic 4, being a farm superintendent was like being a head doctor at a hospital. It was something at about the same level.

My grandfather [on my mother's side] also knew how to speak Gypsy [Roma]. When we lived in Mocenok, Gypsy women would often come begging at our door, and he'd normally be able to talk to them. He knew Hungarian and German, and my father even spoke Serbian and Croatian. During the time of Austro- Hungary it was necessary. I don't know which language my grandfather considered to be his native one, as we didn't discuss things at the level of the Slovak Matica [Editor's note: the Slovak Matica was created at its founding plenary assembly on 4th August 1863, in Turciansky Svaty Martin. The mission of the SM was to develop and strengthen Slovak patriotism and deepen the relationship between the Slovak state and its citizens. This sentence means that they didn't consider themselves to be Slovak patriots.] My father and grandfather spoke German with each other so that I wouldn't understand them, but his Slovak was absolutely without fault. It was perfect.

I don't remember my grandmother. She went to a concentration camp and didn't return. I don't know which camp Grandma died in, we never talked about it. I didn't start discussing this subject until after 1991, as at that time schools began to also be interested in the Holocaust. Mrs. Felixova [a friend of the interviewee and a member of the Brno Jewish community] goes around to schools and talks about the Holocaust. I wouldn't be able to do this, as my memories are sketchy. I'm glad to answer your questions, but I wouldn't be able to do talk about it on my own.

My mother's father probably wasn't Orthodox. I don't know about before the war, but after the concentration camp he definitely wasn't Orthodox. He didn't pray every day with a tefillin anymore, like my father. I don't know whether he'd done it before and then stopped, we didn't discuss this subject matter very much. I only know what I saw. I don't know how often Grandpa used to go to the prayer hall. It's impossible for me to remember prewar times, and after the war in Mocenok, they took the prayer hall away from us. My father and I used to go to Galanta to his sister's [Sidonia Hertzova], as there was a synagogue there. There's a good Jewish community in Galanta to this day. Grandpa never used to go with us. He died in 1954, and for two years before his death he was in an old-age home on Podjavorinska Street in Bratislava. I don't know whether there my grandfather used to go to the prayer hall so they'd have a minyan - ten people.

My father was named Maximilian Klein. He was born on 28th February 1900 in Surovce. He died in 1969. He was 40 when I was born. It was wartime, in hiding, a while here, a while there. We even hid in Austria. I don't know what sort of education my father had, back then one couldn't go to school much, as it was during World War I. I think that he joined the army at the age of 16. During the First Republic, while he was still single, he worked as a superintendent of a farm in Mocenok. After the wedding various persecutions of Jews started, and he had to leave his job 5.

My father used to say that he came from a family of fourteen children. As infant mortality was high in those days, and some of the children were bitten by a rabid dog, some died of croup, which was on the rampage in those days; eight of them lived to adulthood. Of those, six died in a concentration camp. Father's sister from Galanta moved to Israel in 1964. Within a half year she died in Israel, she couldn't handle the tough conditions.

I know that my aunt from Galanta was in hiding, she wasn't in a concentration camp. She was in hiding with someone in Plavecky Stvrtok. Her daughter [Anna Diamantova (nee Hertzova)] was somewhere else. She had red hair and green eyes; she didn't have typical Jewish features. So she worked somewhere as a salesgirl during the war. [Editor's note: during World War II she lived using false papers.] My aunt's husband was named Ignac Hertz. I remember we used to call him Naci Bacsi [Uncle Naci]. My aunt was older than my father by I don't know how many years. She and my father were half- brother and sister. They had different mothers. My aunt used to say that she'd studied to be a seamstress, but as far back as I remember she never went to work. After her wedding my aunt lived in Galanta. They lived in a bungalow. Uncle Ignac was in the tobacco business in 1945 and 1946.

During the time of the Slansky trials 6 they threw all my uncle's friends in jail, except for him. But it's not true that they were jailed for just cause. Slansky was also killed as an innocent man. Then he did some sort of accounting work until 1964. In 1964 they moved away and my aunt died within a half year. She was already old and couldn't take the harsh living conditions. My uncle went crazy. You can't move away at that age without it being risky. They had settled near Tel Aviv. Of course, a person imagines it differently when he goes to Israel. I remember, in 1958 I was 18, and at the Jewish community they were telling us how high the standard of living in Israel was, exactly the same as in Austria. And when I arrived there in 1988, as far as technology goes they had things that we didn't, but life was terribly hard there. For example one lady from Brno has a son there since 1999, and he hasn't been able to find work for two years now.

The Hertzes had only one daughter. She was named Anna. We write each other to this day, but only once a year. She was born in Galanta. She was 16 years older than I. She came to say goodbye to me when I might have been about 9. In 1949 she left for Israel. Back then, when the Israeli state was created, everyone from Bratislava went there. From Bratislava you went to Vienna and Genoa by train, and then from Genoa by boat. So the Polish and all whatnot, they all went through Bratislava. In Israel she got married and had a child. She made a living sewing.

My father's mother tongue is Slovak. At home we spoke mostly Slovak, but my father knew how to speak German well, in fact so well that - at that time I was already working in Bratislava - some older classmate of mine went to see my father so he'd help her with an essay in German. My stepmother [after the death of his wife Edita Klein, the interviewee's father got married again, to Alzbeta, nee Gottreichova] spoke only Hungarian, so because of her we had to speak Hungarian.

My mother was named Edith Kleinova, nee Weisz. She was born on 17th August 1911 in Vienna. I didn't get to know my mother very much; I was 12 years old when she died. My mother's Jewish name is Noemi. I'm named Ester. During the Yom Kippur prayer, we always used Ester bat Noemi, so Ester daughter of Noemi. I don't have it written down anywhere, but I remember it. My mother spoke Slovak, Hungarian and German. She didn't attend school, as she had a home tutor - Fräulein [German for 'governess']. I don't know if my mother had some sort of a trade. She didn't need it in a well-off family. Besides this, on the farm she learned how to work in the fields, with milk and so on. I know that after the war we had to make our own butter and also baked our own bread.

I can't say for certain whether my mother was a devout Jewess. I only remember her from the concentration camp and the sanatorium. But her postcards are evidence that she was. When she mentioned God, she never wrote God, but only G. [Editor's note: Orthodox Judaism forbids the utterance of the name of God in any fashion. One of God's Ten Commandments is: 'Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord in vain.']. For me that's evidence that she was probably devout. I don't even know what my mother's character was like, as during visits a person had to look at her like at a picture, because tuberculosis was infectious. So when we came, we could only see her from a certain distance, and she also tried to not breathe in my direction, so as not to infect me. And even if someone was I don't know how wicked, if they only saw me once every two months or even less, it couldn't show itself. From photographs I'd say that my mother dressed very elegantly, but after the war during her stay at the sanatorium, she wore only flannel pyjamas or sweatpants.

Growing up during the war">Growing up during the war

My parents were married on 10th January 1939. I was born on 16th February 1940, during World War II. My memories of this time period are sporadic. No one really talked about the war much in our family. I don't know how my parents met, as I never asked about it. They were married in a synagogue, but whether it was in Surovce, that I don't know. The wedding was Orthodox; you can see it from photographs. The wedding was with a veil and under a chuppah. After the wedding they stayed and lived in Surovce. They had a little house there, I saw it a few times and then it fell down on its own. At that time there was already great repression here. My father said that when I was born, that day was the first time they drove Jews out to clear snow from the railroad tracks. Up to then it was more or less all right. I don't know how much snow had fallen, maybe even two meters; apparently there was so much on the tracks that the locomotive couldn't get through it.

I wasn't my parents' only child. My brother was born in the concentration camp, but died in four days. It was in Sered. [Editor's note: there was a labor camp in Sered; Mrs. Seborova uses the term concentration camp to refer to it.] I remember it, it was in 1944. His name was Peter. We erected a symbolic tombstone in the Sered graveyard. All I remember from the Sered concentration camp are the roll calls, but I can't say for sure whether it was there or in Terezin. As I've already mentioned, my brother was born in Sered. They put him in my arms, he had infant jaundice. I remember that moment when he died. It was drastic. A person remembers such things, even when he was very small. My brother died, and my mother had that dead brother of mine with her all day and thought that because of that she'd save us, and that they wouldn't deport us. When they saw that he was dead, they loaded us on as well.

My father always told me that Czechs are decent people, because they brought us food and water when those trains were sidelined. We left Sered for Terezin. As I later found out, it was the last transport from Slovakia that aimed for Terezin. Terezin is about sixty kilometers from Prague. The trip to Prague takes about 6 hours by express train [currently a train trip from Sered to Prague takes about seven hours], but for us it took several days. The conditions in those cattle cars, freight wagons, were horrible, so some already died during the trip. They gave us some pail for feces, and that was it. I was with my parents until the end of the war, because at that time the selections weren't going on anymore. I don't think that my father was there, but I used to sleep with my mother on those plank-beds, that I remember.

Post-war growing up">Post-war growing up

I remember how the Russians liberated us, and the German guards disappeared overnight. In the morning they weren't there any longer. We knew that they weren't Germans. They had different clothing and a visible armband. They shone colored flashlights at us. I've verified it with older people on Terezin reunions, that I remember it properly. They liberated us and took us to Prague. There we lived in some hotel. I remember the procession. The victorious army in Prague, my father and I looked out a window on it. Benes 7 was there, too, waving at us from a car. I saw members of the SS, too, how they were carrying them out, and they had nicely smashed-in teeth, so the residents didn't treat them according to the Geneva Convention either. After the liberation in Terezin a whole lot of people died, even though nurses arrived. Typhus broke out there, and they weren't vaccinated.

We didn't have a lot of property, but they returned it to us. I don't know if someone was living there during the war, because I didn't have anything to do with these things. There were decent people to be found among them as well, they returned our radio and clothing that we had hidden away with them. But as I say, I wasn't there.

I didn't notice when Mother began to be ill. I know that already before the war she was ill, in Surovce. Tuberculosis shows after a certain time, and a person has constant fevers. She lay in bed and I sat by her bedside. One Russian came by, and took me, a five year old child, into his arms. I don't know when exactly it was during that summer that they liberated us. I remember that I was sitting in a nightshirt in our grandfather's house. My father's sister in Galanta also took care of me for a year. I lived with her until I started attending school. Then they put me in an orphanage. My father also had health problems. He also collected a disability pension. He had problems with his heart, and back then these diseases weren't as easily treated as now. And he also had to work. Right after the war we lived on whatever we could grow. We had rabbits, a cow, goats. In the garden we had corn, plums and potatoes, all kinds of vegetables. We could make preserves out of it, so that's what we ate. And when it ran out, we'd sell a piece of furniture or part of the garden. And were nicely cheated in the process.

After the war my mother was treated for seven years in a sanatorium, as she had a serious case of tuberculosis, of which she finally died in 1952. First she was being treated in Vysne Hagy, and then in other sanatoria. They were all located in the High Tatras. In 1951 collectivization 8 took place. We became beggars, they took our fields. We had no money. Now we visited Mom only once in I don't know how long a while, as the trip from Mocenok to the High Tatras was terrible. We needed money for the trip, which we however didn't have; neither did we have a car. It was a completely different life from how it is these days. I pick up and tomorrow I go to Terezin and on Monday to Luhacovice. My mother is buried in Kezmarok. It was terrible. The news gave my father a heart attack. I was 12 years old, and knew that she'd die. I knew it from where they had moved her, because the only people there were those who were ready to die. My father got a telegram, and looked and looked at it, suddenly he got a heart attack. I took care of my father, and my grandpa and uncle from Galanta went to bury her. The closest Jewish cemetery was in Kezmarok. I didn't take part in the funeral, because then children under the age of 15 weren't allowed in the sanatorium. I didn't go to my mother's grave until sometime in 1973 or 1974.

After my mother's death my father had one heart attack after another, he had a disability pension of about 450 crowns. In 1952 my mother died, and in 1954 my father remarried. His second wife and my stepmother was named Alzbeta Gottreichova. There was a lot of tension between us, so when I graduated from high school, my father found me a sublet in Bratislava, with the Feldmars. I found work on my own, so from 1957 they didn't hassle me any more. I have this feeling that my stepmother came from Lucenec, but I'm not sure. One of her brothers lived in Bratislava. My father met her in Galanta, at my aunt Sidonia Hertzova's place. We used to go to my aunt's place for the high holidays, like Passover and Chanukkah, and my later stepmother used to also spend the holidays there.

As I've already mentioned, Grandpa also returned from the concentration camp. In the beginning he lived with us in Mocenok, but then moved to an old-age home on Podhajska Street in Bratislava. I used to visit Grandpa there, I was even there once during holidays. I know that I used to live with a cook in Zidovska [Jewish] Street. I was with Grandpa for about a week, we walked around Bratislava and so on. I remember that my grandpa had an old-age pension of 175 crowns, you couldn't live much on that.

Grandpa died in 1954. I remember his funeral well. The funeral room wasn't any bigger than my kitchen. The deceased lay on a catafalque. At my father's funeral in 1969, the deceased was laid on a bier. There was a plank on the bier, and on top of it was the ritually wrapped corpse. Ritually wrapped means that he was wearing a kitel, which of course isn't visible, and finally was wrapped in a sheet. The sheet is tied under the chin, around the wrists on crossed arms, and right below the calf. It's tied three times. During the service there have to be ten men present, but there were definitely more. We women were completely outside, because we weren't allowed inside. The men then went up on a hill and buried him [the Orthodox cemetery in Bratislava is situated on a hill.]. When the pit was completely filled with dirt, then we could come up from below. [Editor's note: at an Orthodox Jewish funeral in Bratislava, women aren't present during the actual burial of the deceased.]

After the war, my father and I at first lived in Surovce. My mother entered a sanatorium for treatment. Me they then stuck in an orphanage - into an aguda [the orphanage belonged to the Orthodox Jewish organization Agudat Israel, see 9] in Bratislava. I also lived with my aunt in Galanta for a year. In time my father returned to Mocenok. My grandfather also lived with us there. I didn't go to live with them until they confiscated the orphanage, because almost all the children went to Israel, but not because of that, but at that time the Communists were confiscating everything.

I remember life in Surovce. Surovce is a very tiny village. Later my father and I used to go visit Grandpa's grave, where there were symbolically written the names of other children who died in the Holocaust. [Editor's note; The interviewee is referring to the names of her father's siblings, who died during the Holocaust and didn't have their own graves.] We lived in my grandpa's old house. It was a little house that was ready to fall down, there wasn't much there. I don't know anymore how many rooms it had. Besides us, there was also the family of some shoemaker living there. We used to go for water to a well, but we did this in Mocenok, too, despite the fact that we had a well in our courtyard, but the neighbors had a stable there, and so the water was impure. I know that we had electricity, because we listened to the radio. Only a remnant of our family returned to Mocenok. There were some terribly wicked people in Mocenok.

I myself didn't begin living in Mocenok until 1949, up to then I was in the orphanage. We had a three-room house with a kitchen and workshop. The house also had a larder. We had electricity, but not water. We had a well in the courtyard, but as I've mentioned, it was bad because of the neighbors. There was an artesian well not that far away, back then I was healthy, I carried forty pails of water and we'd do the laundry.

From 1946 I lived in an orphanage in Bratislava, as my father couldn't take care of such a small child on top of work, and my mother was ill. There I was taken care of. I felt good there. In the aguda it looked like in military barracks. When a person isn't spoiled and goes through a concentration camp, which he doesn't remember much, but despite that, when he saw those plank-beds in a museum... I remember getting a case of the mumps in the concentration camp, that swollen neck. And those plank-beds, those I remember. Well, and then in that aguda there were about thirty of us in one room. I don't know how many beds a given water basin was for, I think six steps away, for ritual washing. You'd pour it over your hands, because they say that the soul leaves the body, so a person has to wash like this in the morning. [Editor's note: upon waking a Jews says morning prayers, and thanks God that his soul has returned to his body. Jewish laws state that a person can make at most four steps after leaving his bed to a container with water for the morning cleansing. Water is poured first on the right and then on the left hand, three times, up to the wrist. If this is not done, no work is allowed to be performed.]

There was a large set of glass doors. Behind them was a dining hall where there was this big trough, I saw similar ones as late as the 1970s in a Sokol lodge 10. We washed in that trough, there was no hot water. On the floor below we also had showers. It was all only girls. One floor above were 15-year-old ones, back then they seemed old to me. They were learning to sew, but there wasn't anything to learn on, because we didn't even have proper food, so they made dresses from newspaper, to at least learn the patterns. Most of them were orphans and left in the aliyah to Israel.

Often children were also adopted from the aguda. A childless married couple would come and they'd line us up in a row and pick. Two girls even went to Iceland. Most of them went to Israel. Well, and because my parents were alive, in the end they didn't give me to anyone. I remember how they moved us out, already during Communist times, the few of us that were left at the end. Most of the children left, and suddenly there were only a few of us left in that three-story building. The building belonged to the Jewish community, but back then no one asked them whether or not they'd give it up or not. They made it into an apartment building. I remember that, because when I'd walk by - a few years later I had my own place one street over, and when I walked by, you could tell by the curtains whether it was an apartment or an office. When they confiscated that building, which was on Nesporova Street, we moved. We lived at Na Vrsku, not just girls any more, but also boys, all together. There were about eighteen of us.

Once a week we'd go to the theater and to Grossling to the covered swimming pool. We also used to go to the movies. It was definitely better there than in Mocenok. When a car drove by, you couldn't see from one side of the street to the other. Back then there wasn't pavement everywhere. If my mother would have been there, and not in the Tatras, she would only have suffered in that dusty environment and would have died within a half year. In the aguda we were cared for by qualified staff. We also had a cook. The staff was exclusively Jewish. Recently I went to have a look at the former orphanage. Originally there had been large rooms there. We had steel beds, on which in the evening we'd wind ribbons that we wore, and in the morning they were as if they'd been ironed. Currently there's an old-age home in the building. The rooms have been reconstructed. Out of those large rooms they made these cubicles. One washroom in the middle and two rooms, one on each side.

Our daily routine began with morning hygiene. We had to wash and pray. They watched over us, so that we wouldn't make a mistake in Hebrew. After the morning cleansing we had breakfast and then went to school. The school was across the street, there where Nesporova Street is, down a few steps and then there's Podjavorinska Street. That's where I went to school. After school we of course had to do homework. The school in Podjavorinska Street was a state school, and no one from the residence was in the same class with me. We were of various ages, we even had children of preschool age. One day a week they also took us to the theater. I don't remember how we observed holidays in the aguda, it's already 55 years ago.

In 1999 there was a reunion of children that survived the war. We were divided up according to nationality, so I was with the Slovaks. There was a bunch of us there, Mr. Salner, too. [Editor's note: Peter Salner is the current president of the Jewish religious community in Bratislava.] They had come from abroad as well. Everyone told a brief summary of his life. One man put up his hand, but he didn't speak Slovak any more, because he'd been adopted by Hungarian parents. That doesn't matter, I said, I can speak Hungarian, so I translated it for the others. And one lady from abroad, a certain Dr. Januliakova, proclaimed, 'Well, a Slovak even has to have a translator at home.' I wanted to say to her, 'You're the tourist here, this is my home.' But I kept quiet, because silence is golden.

After returning from Bratislava, Grandpa had a servant, we called her the cook. Then, when there was no longer any money to pay her, we called her that wife of Father's. Grandpa preferred to go to the old-age home in Bratislava. It was true poverty, we had nothing to eat, only what grew in the garden. Before we'd had fields, we also had flour in sacks at home. We got a commission on the peppers we raised. We handed in the peppers in sacks; I don't know how much the peppers could have weighed. We had fruit growing in the garden, which we made preserves from. We also put up with gourds and leczo [a dish made from peppers, tomatoes and onions]. We still baked bread at home. I don't know what year they started delivering bread to stores, it was available after Thursday. My stepmother didn't bake bread anymore.

In those days [the postwar period] Mocenok had mainly a Catholic population. In prewar times there had been a smaller Jewish community there, but I'm not sure if there had been a synagogue. In childhood I thought one building could have been it. It wasn't later that it dawned, when I was talking with a friend, who found out that she's one quarter Jewish and didn't even know it, that the town also had a Jewish school. Her father also attended the Jewish school, because he was told that they had better teachers there. In reality they put him there because he was half Jewish. My classmate also didn't find out about it until after graduating from high school. We only attended elementary school together. My classmate's family thus avoided the concentration camp. I even knew her father.

In my view, Jews in prewar Mocenok were Orthodox. I'd say that once upon a time there was no other kind. In Bratislava I'd seen a Neolog 11 synagogue, but in these villages they were definitely Orthodox. And when Galanta as Orthodox, and even Nitra was Orthodox, why would Mocenok be progressive? Before World War II there was a Jewish elementary school in Mocenok, but afterwards it didn't have to exist just for my benefit.

There wasn't electricity everywhere in the village, people didn't have the money. The houses were also built in a row, beside each other. Their doors faced a common courtyard. Those that didn't have electricity had petroleum lamps. We had electricity, even a radio. We heated, as was the custom then, with a tile stove. We didn't have an oven, because it took up too much room. Grandpa's house, which we had in Mocenok, had once been a pub, which is why it also had a toilet. It was only a privy, but very hygienically constructed. It wasn't an outhouse with a heart-shaped cutout like you see in old films. [The Slovak equivalent of the classic crescent moon cutout as a symbol of an outhouse in the West.] Someone in the family had owned the pub, but I don't know who anymore.

We had almost all kinds of household animals, because from 1951 onwards we had to hand in a certain amount of livestock 12, for example eight bulls. They had to be young, still uncastrated. Only draft animals were castrated. Uncastrated bulls were intended for meat. You had to hand over eight bulls a year, that was the law. When not enough were born, we had to buy calves and raise them. We also had pigs. With them it was easier, because pigs can give birth four times a year, while a cow only once every nine months. We also had two horses in the stable. In the beginning they were necessary, because buses weren't running yet, and they served as transportation. While I was still attending school in Bratislava, when I returned home a cart would be waiting for me at the train station. It wasn't until later that bus routes were established. In 1954, when I began going to school in Sala, buses were already running.

I often felt an anti-Jewish mood in Mocenok. It was really horrible. Those people were Neanderthals. When I wore pants, people would start throwing dirt at me. [In those days women in villages usually wore only skirts. Pants were considered to be exclusively men's clothing.] And then within a year everyone had them. I remember, back when my grandfather was still alive, we went to have a look at the fields. It was during summer vacation. One old granny came by and they started talking. She was looking at me, I was wearing shorts and this striped sailor top, and suddenly she asked, 'Mr. Weisz, why is your grandson wearing a ribbon?!' Well, I didn't understand it, it was a beautiful striped shirt and shorts, like a sailor. In Bratislava it was normal. And in Mocenok they saw it on me for the first time. The first year I started attending school in Mocenok, my father had to come for me each day, so that they wouldn't nearly kill me on the way home from school, it was unbelievable.

During the war people had taken Jewish property, and were afraid that they'd have to return it to Jews that had returned from the concentration camps. Many Jews told me about it, my aunt from Galanta [Sidonia Hertzova] also told me about one incident. After the war she went to ask for her cupboard back, and people said to her, indignantly, 'But they said that they'd murder you all in concentration camps! Why, more of you have returned than left!' These people had a guilty conscience, and we were the only Jews in Mocenok.

I remember that at one time religion was compulsory, up to I don't know which year, when school reforms took place. On my report card in the 'religion' column I had 'unclassified.' At one time I also attended Catholic religion classes, but I've got to say that the deacon, or whatever he was, was really disgusting. He spoke in a very anti-Jewish way, how we'd crucified Christ and so on. During that time, when religion class was being held, I walked around the courtyard even on the coldest days, rather than listen to that. During Passover that teacher sent a message to my father that he liked matzot, and for him to send some. At that time I proclaimed, 'Only over my dead body!' But I've got to say, after that came this one young chaplain. He was decent. I faithfully attended his classes during the entire year. After the school reforms 13 religion was no longer compulsory, and was taught only after lunch, so I didn't attend it. Our fellow citizens regularly broke the windows of our house, that was routine.

In the 1950s this one family moved in with us. They were very decent people. Their father was a policeman. He didn't want to sign some piece of crap of Husak's 14, so they threw him out of the police station. They put him up with us. From then on we didn't have any more broken windows, because people didn't know which windows were theirs and which were ours. They had four children. They were named the Bendiks. To this day I consider their youngest son to be my brother; their mother always said that she liked me the best. Of course, after all, I didn't want new shoes from her. The other children were quite aggressive. They knew how to wring what they wanted from their parents. They had a very small income. Their son and I write each other letters to this day. They weren't natives of Mocenok, because their father was a policeman, they'd been transferred there from someplace else.

After the war my father remained an Orthodox Jew. In everyday life it manifested itself in that he prayed with those straps - tefillin. He always wore a hat. In Mocenok we couldn't be kosher, but when he moved to Bratislava, he again kept kosher. We spent holidays at my aunt's in Galanta, as there was a synagogue there, which they eventually tore down sometime in the 1970s. Now Galanta residents have only a prayer hall. Recently I read in Delet that Galanta is still the best kehila [Jewish community] in Slovakia. [Editor's note: the monthly magazine Delet is the only print periodical in Slovakia devoted to Jewish issues. It is published with a print run of 3000, 40% of its readers are members of the Jewish community, and 60% are other Slovak citizens.] I still remember the furniture in the synagogue. Up above was a grating made of bamboo or wood. The men were down below.

During my youth all the men in Galanta wore a kitel and a large tallit. Today they don't have ones like that even in Bratislava, they only wear small ones now. During the holidays, when we'd be at their place, Uncle Ignac [Hertz] led the services. I went to the synagogue with my father. Back then women didn't attend synagogue, only during the high holidays. I didn't like any of the holidays, not even one. I had a hard life, the only one among five thousand primitives in Mocenok. We had broken windows just because they were bored. During my childhood we visited my aunt in Galanta fairly often. She had a nice villa with a garden. Back then my father attended the synagogue regularly. My aunt eventually moved to Israel, in 1964.

During Yom Kippur my father fasted all day, and was only in the synagogue. During Passover we ate matzot and prepared seder. My father usually led the service, but my stepmother also knew how to do it, because she had observed holidays with her first husband as well. It didn't look like my father had to guide her. At our place the service was done only in Hebrew. Most of our prayer books were written in Hebrew. There were also some dual-language ones, but only in black-letter script, it's only now that it's all being modernized. Here in Brno, Rabbi Koller prays in Hebrew, but then translates the text into Czech. I attended religion in Bratislava, there we had compulsory religion classes. By the end of those three years we were already reading, writing but also speaking with each other. During the First Republic many people knew Hebrew, and when they arrived in Israel they already knew how to speak. On the other hand, I've also come across a case where a lady lived in Israel for many years, and didn't learn Hebrew.

I only remember celebrating Purim from the residence, because I played Ester in one play we put on there. We put on plays for ourselves, just for fun. We had no audience, as most of the children didn't have anyone. I had my father, but traveling from Mocenok by bus and train, that wasn't all that simple. And the others didn't have anyone at all. I also remember Chanukkah. In Mocenok we had a village house with wooden blinds on the windows and doors. You couldn't see out into the street. The candelabra is supposed to be put on a windowsill, the rabbi told me that by the door as well, but I've never seen that, only when he set it out at the community. [The interviewee is referring to the current Jewish community in Brno.] We had quite a few of those candelabras, we used to put them on this wooden lath. My father lit the candles.

Sabbath was observed every week. My stepmother always dressed up, everyone was nicely dressed. We had a cooked supper. Otherwise at suppertime we had the same thing as for breakfast - coffee with milk, and bread. But for this holiday we really did cook, even with those modest means. We also performed the Havdalah, but we didn't have one of those nice colored candles, only a white one. My father poured some slivovitz [plum brandy] over something, lit it on fire, and we enjoyed the aroma of that 'spice box.' Then we went to have a look at those three stars. We didn't have a Jewish calendar. At our house we did everything, but I can't say that I had some sort of love for it, because on the other hand my fellow citizens humiliated me. I took it as some sort of punishment.

My father didn't have any strong political opinions. And what kind could he have had? He was a farmer, and after 1945 on a disability pension. He had a frightfully small pension. Before that he'd been an employee - a superintendent on a farm, so he paid health insurance and various deductions, so they gave him something, but very little. You couldn't live on it. My father still listened to Radio Free Europe 15 and thought that things would improve. He didn't get anything from that 255 16 either. My father wasn't a member of any political party. No farmer, what's more one that had had everything stolen, was a party member. Those were terrible conditions. Someone on a disability pension wasn't of interest to anyone. During Communism they took everything away from us. We had a small farmhouse to which belonged a granary and stable. They let us keep the house and stable, we kept goats in it. We couldn't get into the granary, but lots of rats could. The whole house was swarming with them. I was tough, and when the rats were leaving the granary, we went to kill them ourselves. We killed dozens and dozens of them.

The residents of Mocenok were mainly of the Catholic faith, we were the only Jewish family in town. Beside our house there was this house with eleven chimneys, meaning that eleven families lived there. One of them was a Gypsy family. They didn't all live under one roof [meaning they didn't live all together]. The house was divided into eleven sections. Each one had one room, a kitchen and a stable. The Gypsies didn't have a stable. Eleven families in one house. Almost all of Mocenok lived like this. In some places there were only three families and in some, more. We lived with the aforementioned Bendiks. We had excellent relations with them, but we didn't have conflicts with the other neighbors either. Our house was located on the main street. There was a bus stop close by.

I don't remember whether my father had some sort of close friend. I was attending school in Sala, and I don't know how early in the morning I had to get up. We used to go to sleep with the chickens [as soon as it got dark]. There was no television back then. He was with my stepmother, whom I didn't get along with. My poor father was a choleric, one heart attack after another. Those are people who mustn't get upset. Why didn't I like my stepmother? No one liked her. An egocentric personality. When she was off at some spa, my friend Karolina Bednikova and I snuck into her room. My stepmother had honey cakes that she'd baked there, which she used to eat on the sly. Out of spite we also drank some of her liqueur and ate some almonds. She couldn't tell on us. So that sort of person.

We had pink covers on our pillows. We used to call it angin. In the morning I looked in the mirror and I was all covered in feathers. So I looked at the pillows, and they weren't ours. They were white. Ours were all pink. I said, 'But that's not ours.' Well, and she says, 'I'm cleaning here.' I said, 'My head as well?' So whatever was good... and she always said, 'Ez az enyem, ez a tietek.' [That's mine, that's yours.'] No one could like her. She was horrible. She was a seamstress and I didn't have anything to wear. Today I sew for myself, so it's not a great art. She was terribly self-centered, selfish. Her family would come over, wolf down everything we had, and didn't give us anything. I worked myself to the bone out in the garden, and she'd say, 'Meg ott van egy korte.' ['There's still one more pear there.'] So, who could like her?! As soon as I could, I got out of there, and we didn't have anything to do with each other any more. My grandfather [Julius Weisz] didn't like her either. He even went to an old- age home because of her, even though the house was his. He chose to go to an old-age home rather than put up with constant aggravation.

During holidays and summer vacation I used to go stay with my aunt in Galanta [Sidonia Hertzova]. During winter or summer vacation I occasionally also went to be with my aunt in Trnava. She was named Jolana Fischmannova. She was my mother's cousin. At one time they had owned a store in Trnava - a hardware store, but they sold everything there. From nails to fridges. Above the entrance there was a sign that said Fischmann; today there's a shoe store there. Their store was on the main street. It was a large prewar three-story building, it even had central heating. My aunt had two daughters, we used to go to the swimming pool together when I was there during the summer. I was older than they were, so they also took me to some restaurant with a dance floor, and my uncle would dance with me. That was nice. My younger cousin was named Viera, today she's got a large family. The older one is Marta.

The entire family from Trnava emigrated in 1964. The whole family left. Back then my younger cousin had about a half hear left before high school graduation, but they expelled her. Not because of her studies, but they had horrible neighbors, who were most likely informing on them. They used to come search their house and asked where they had gotten the money for their vacuum cleaner and so on. They wanted to move them out to the Czech border region. They also often made life unpleasant for them because of their Jewish origin, but also because they were capitalists, because a three- story house... The whole thing was theirs, and they stuck two families in there, and wanted to move them to that Czech border region. They applied for permission to go to Israel, and it was issued right away. In their passports they had written, only to Israel, but not back.

In Israel my aunt began sewing. The times have changed, no one needs that any more. Now they've got secondhand stores there, a dress for one shekel, and a beautiful one at that. My aunt's husband was named Janko Fischmann. In that year, 1964, when he arrived there, his former employees were already waiting for him, with a job in their own company. The did some sort of accounting. Gradually they somehow managed to get to the point where they were standing on their own two feet. At that time the Germans had also already begun to pay out compensation, which helped them as well. My aunt and my younger cousin [Viera] live in Haifa. My older cousin [Marta] eventually moved to Germany. My younger cousin has many children, and the older one is by herself.

For the first three years I attended school in Bratislava on Podjavorinska Street. I don't remember my teachers from Bratislava. During that time I didn't have any sort of close girlfriend. On 1st September 1949 I began attending school in Mocenok. I started in Grade 4. In 1954 I began attending high school in Sala. The entire eleven years I was the only Jewish girl in class. Actually, not the entire eleven, because in Bratislava the Schönhausers attended with me. One of the brothers left for Switzerland in 1968, and the second lives in Bratislava to this day. I didn't like it there [at high school in Sala]. We didn't have any money. My father used to get 450 crowns disability pension. I had to graduate in a dress of my mother, which she had worn still back in the time of the First Republic. But my mother was smaller than I was, even when I was 12. You can imagine it. At banquets only the teachers danced with me, because my classmates snubbed me. In 1958 the building of cooperatives began, and all of Slovakia was emptied out. Most people sold their houses and bought an apartment in Bratislava, so that the anonymity of the city would protect them a bit. Oh, those Slovak cads!

During my childhood we didn't subscribe to any newspapers, as we didn't even have money for bread. Only in school did I have to buy Kulturny zivot or something. [Editor's note: The weekly magazine Kulturny zivot was published from 1948 to 1968. It was an organ of the Slovak Writers' Union.] Our Slovak teacher, who's long since died, poor thing, said that whoever doesn't buy it, won't get a better grade than a C. That was in high school. There weren't any knuckleheads like that in elementary school. I was hard for me to ask my father for money, when he didn't have any. When there was a [school] trip, I'd rather tell them at home that the school was being painted and that we didn't have to go to school. I had different responsibilities from others of my age. At home we had various books, mostly of a historical nature. They were written in black letter [also known as Gothic script]. Once my father was also explaining something about anti-Semitism from them, but I don't remember very well any more. He read me passages from those books, as I didn't know how to read them. When I came to Bratislava from Mocenok, we had a lot of those books. I don't know where they ended up.

I didn't talk about our financial situation at school. The best thing was that I liked that Slovak teacher. Up until she died I used to call her once a week and helped her as much as I could. Which is why it was terrible for me to find out that teachers had a 15 percent commission from the sale of those magazines. Back then it didn't at all occur to me. My girlfriend, who lives in Sala to this day, told me that many times the books arrived at the school library, and some of them never made it there [i.e. the teachers took them home]. She knew about it, because she got to know her and helped her back then. It was a terrible disappointment.

I dare say that the teachers at high school liked me, but I them as well. It was mutual. I especially liked Professor Valkovic. He was very good at lecturing, back then he was also the principal. Otherwise, as a person he was a swine. He taught psychology and logic. We had these subjects once a week. I didn't have to prepare for them at all, not even crack a book, as I remembered every word from class. I was the only one that he didn't harass. From the school hallway you could see out onto a church. He got the school administration to watch who was going to the Virgin Mary [meaning who was going to church]. One of my girlfriends didn't get into university because of him, and only for those reasons [Editor's note: The Communists suppressed all religions and faiths. Members of all churches were discriminated against. ]. A few years later I found out that the mothers of some students had caught him and given him a beating. At night they threw a blanket over his head, and gave him a good thrashing, because he went out of his way to make trouble for children in terms of their political profile, prevented them from going to school and so on. Towards me he behaved very well. I excelled in his subject. The math teacher liked me as well, but I wasn't very good at math. Our math teacher was named Melichar, and our Slovak teacher Slobodova. There was, as there is today, a music school in Sala. That was her building. When she retired, she sold it and moved away to some apartment in Trnava.

At school I didn't feel any anti-Semitism from the teachers, only from my classmates. They knew that I was Jewish, as in Slovakia a person who's named Kleinova can only be Jewish, nothing else. My classmates later regretted their behavior, right at our first reunion. They danced with me. Not this last time anymore, but the time before we danced all night. I hadn't been there for 20 years. I never spoke openly about our school days with them, I suspected why they'd ignored me. I didn't have to ask.

In elementary school girls were friends with me. In high school there wasn't time any more, as we traveled. An hour in the morning, and back again after lunch. In Mocenok I hung out with the girls. In the beginning, when we still had a farm - horses, and there was snow in the winter, we'd hitch them onto a sleigh and take the poor ones for a ride. But a year later they took them from us, it could have been in 1950, 1951, at that time collectivization was going on. We had a nicely fixed up courtyard, not like other people, who had a literal pigsty. There were flowers planted everywhere, and we kept chickens behind a picket fence. We also had fruit trees planted in the courtyard, so you could play there as well. In the summer we had heaps of fruit, for children it was paradise.

I had one very close friend during my school years. As a single girl she was named Eva Lahitova, and after marriage Dikanova. Now, when I saw her after 20 years, I thought that I was looking at her mother. She probably did, too, but I see myself in the mirror each day, so I don't notice it. We write each other to this day, but what she writes me doesn't interest me that much any more. Once I came to see her, and I thought my eyes would pop out of my head. There, there was a picture of the Virgin Mary and Jesus, with one of those bleeding hearts. I said, 'But Eva, you were a Communist! I liked you better when you were an atheist.' When she writes me, she doesn't write me about what she's doing, but writes me some passages from the Bible, so I hardly read it. When we were young we spent a lot of time together. I'd buy tickets to the theater and we'd go. During school years we also used to go camping together. During Communist times Eva was a Party member. She had to be, she was the principal of a nursery school. We never talked about Judaism together, nor about things that happened during the war. Never.

When I was young I didn't do sports actively. I'd call it more recreational physical education, but hardly sports. In Bratislava, on Hlboka Street, I visited a Sokol clubhouse, but only when I lived in that Kozej Street. Then, when we got an apartment in Raci [a part of Bratislava], I had to stop, as I had it an hour further to work, and I didn't get home until after midnight. I also participated in a Spartakiada 17. Recreational physical education looked something like this. We'd begin exercising around 8, until 10. We either exercised with some equipment, or did some exercises in the gym. Women and men exercised separately. When I went to the Spartakiada in Prague, the post office bought me sweatpants. [Editor's note: at that time the interviewee worked at the post office in Bratislava.] Now, recently, I was throwing them away, it seemed a shame to do it to me. I at least saved the zipper from them. It was group exercise, and there were also university students among us, who had to exercise to get credits. They were always amazed, and would say, 'You don't have to, and you're doing it voluntarily?! Boy, are you ever stupid.' But we loved doing it. The first time, I was at a regional Spartakiada in Nitra in 1956. And in 1960 I also participated in a national one in Prague. They didn't choose from among us, everyone who applied went. We stayed in some school. We slept on folding cots. After my wedding I slowly stopped exercising, I didn't have the time.

Adulthood in Czechoslovakia">Adulthood in Czechoslovakia

After I finished high school, I moved to Bratislava. I lived with one Orthodox lady. She was named Feldmarova. Today her son gives people tours of Chatam Sofer's 18 tomb. When I rented, I lived on Kozej Street. At first I worked as a sales clerk in an electrical appliance store. It was very hard work, as back then everything was made out of iron, not out of plastic like today. I found my next job in an interesting way. I had one classmate who was a year older than me. She used to visit my father because of German compositions that he used to help her with. She worked at the post office. She wanted to go to university. They would only let her go from her work when she would have found a replacement for herself. Well, so she brought me in. I suited me as well, as I needed a sedentary job. I worked there as a phone and telegraph operator. Back then it was growing, for example for May Day [1st May, Labor Day] one company would congratulate another. The Bratislava exchange normally handled about 9,000 telegrams a day. Today it's all automated. Well, and during May Day, there might have been about 30,000 of them. The phone handset weighed about a half kilo. What's more, on the days when Jozef and Maria had name days, everyone from management had to help us. It was no joke.

Within the scope of the post office, I also worked for the Post and Press Association. To be able to work there, I had to take a half-year course in Myjava. After finishing the course my work was accounting related to newspaper and magazine subscriptions, and of course also billing. There were many delivery women under me. This was better work than being a phone operator. No one lasted very long in that job. It was hard on the nerves, to the point that sometimes we even trembled. There was a huge amount of bossing about, you weren't even allowed to cough. When we were calling someone, we weren't allowed to say 'Hello,' as it lengthened the conversation, and thus the post office was losing money. They monitored us. There was this one room in the building where they could listen in on any operator. When they recorded a mistake of hers on tape, she was immediately docked a percentage of her salary. You could only say 'Hello' in a local call, so when the call was to somewhere in Bratislava.

As a phone and telegraph operator, I initially worked in the main post office building in Bratislava. In those days the post press service was located in Bratislava's Old Town. Several years ago it moved, to where the Bratislava train station is today - the New Town. When the company was still located in the Old Town, I used to go visit my colleagues. When I came from Brno, I always slept in the Palace Hotel. Today this hotel is no longer there, in its place there's a bank. In the morning, when they dropped me off, I took my bag and went to see them. I'd always bring them coffee or ice cream, we'd talk, and then I'd go for a walk around the city. Well, and during one of my visits, I once again set out for my former workplace, but they were no longer there. The gatekeeper told me where they'd moved, but I didn't go there to see them, I don't even know where it is.

At work I came across expressions of anti-Semitism, mainly in the telegraph department, and even the president of the ROH 19 was a former captain of the Hlinka Guard 20. I might have been about 19 years old then, but I was outspoken and with at least forty young people I organized a petition to have him removed. Even despite our efforts, he was always unequivocally elected. They didn't even look at the ballots. He must have been a swine, if he was a captain, and not a rank-and-file member. As president of the ROH he was also responsible for the company savings plan. This meant that they deducted some amount from our salary and put it in our savings account. In 1961, when I was getting married, I wanted them to give me my savings book. There could have been about 800 crowns there. He had the savings books in his possession, and it took several days until he gave it to me. They didn't give me bonuses just because I was named Magdalena Kleinova. They'd take them from me and give them to someone else. I was always the best worker, because I had to work hard to make enough money. I was alone, while the others lived with their parents. It wasn't a nice life. Not at all. Only now do I have a good life, because I'm financially independent thanks to the various funds that we have. [Editor's note: The interviewee is referring to compensation for deportation and imprisonment during World War II.]

After my second marriage we moved to Brno, where I worked for twelve years in Lachema, and from there I went on a disability pension. Lachema is a factory that makes pure and laboratory chemicals. I didn't work in a lab, but in an office, as a department head. It was a higher position than that of the invoice clerk in Bratislava, but it paid less.

I had a good workplace in Koospol. If I wouldn't have gotten married, I'd have stayed there until retirement. It seemed like in a store with high fashion to me, because foreign clients would show up there as well, that is, not directly to see me, but overall the standard was higher. I worked on the 11th floor on Gottwaldovo Namesti [Gottwald Square], everything else took place on the ground floor. Several times a day I had to go down and collect from the other employees what they had prepared for invoicing, what they'd sold. I didn't experience anti-Semitism in Koospol, there were only a few of us. Not in Lachema either. My work consisted of me sending out orders that hospitals or schools had placed and our factory had manufactured. I wasn't as content in this position. I worked in an impossible building, there wasn't even a toilet there. I had to put on my coat and cross over to a different one. We even had mice there. Well, but I lasted twelve years there. What could I have done? On the other hand, I didn't have it far from home, two or three tram stops.

I liked working in Koospol best. To this day I keep in touch with some Lachema employees as well. As a ROH payee, they invite us once a year, we go for dinner, or they invited us on a vacation. It's very good, these things are subsidized by the ROH. [Editor's note: after the 1989 revolution, the Communist ROH organization was disbanded, and its function was taken over by regular trade unions. Some people, however, still use the old term ROH] Their president, who's been there for a terribly long time now, is a very cultivated person, and always organizes something. There are chateaus that used to belong to the Luxembourgs in the Brno region, we also went on trips there. There isn't anything inside them, but the buildings are nice.

Lachema had about 1,200 employees, the vast majority of which were women. On International Women's Day some gymnasium was rented out, where there were tables. The few men that were there organized it all for us. We all got a gift. I don't know what they paid for it, but once they gave us something that they wouldn't even wear in Africa. The gifts were in these little boxes, about the size of matchboxes. Someone brought them to our table. The woman that opened hers first exclaimed, 'Yuck, pink beads!'

In 1984 I went on a disability pension. I could have gone even earlier, but I didn't want to, as I wanted to have worked 26 years. I suffered from a congenital hip joint defect. Both of my hip joints are steel, one of them has even been operated twice. My condition grew worse from day to day, so they had to replace one of them. The second I waited for. So I walked around on a crutch. My apartment at the time was ideal for me, it had only five steps. They operated me for the first time in 1985, but by then I was already on disability. It was already hard for me to get onto a streetcar, neither could I sleep. It hurt at night, too. After retiring I spent my free time doing handiwork. Even before that I'd learned to make macramé lace. The macramé lace method is very old, it goes back to the days of Rudolph II [Rudolph II, of the Habsburg line (1552 - 1612): in 1572 he was crowned King of Hungary in Bratislava, in St. Martin's Cathedral. In 1575 he became the Roman and Czech king, a year later the Holy Roman Emperor]. I learned it in one women's group. I arrived there with string and all necessary ingredients. I also learned to make porcelain dolls, and I sew bags. I spend all day sewing.

I didn't observe holidays in Bratislava. I was glad to not have to. Back then we didn't have Saturdays off, and besides that we had only two weeks of vacation. I was very careful with my days off, and didn't want to take time off and go sit in a synagogue for Yom Kippur. My father's and my opinion differed in this. Even before we didn't agree much, but he was supporting me and I had to listen. My father didn't agree with me working on Saturday either.

After graduating from high school, when I started working in Bratislava, I also moved there. Later my father also moved to be with me. Initially I lived at Kozej 18, in a sublet. Then the house in Mocenok was sold, and we bought one in Bratislava. It was also located on Kozej Street. At first I lived there alone, because the house in Mocenok wasn't sold all at once, but bit by bit. In the meantime I got married, and then my father arrived. By then there was already not enough room, the house didn't even have a washroom, so we decided to move. We managed to exchange that one room for an apartment on Zrinskeho Street. My father became a member of the Bratislava Jewish community. When he died in 1969, I arranged his funeral there. I was with him, because he was dying in some little chateau in Ruzinov. I was with him from morning, just at night I'd go home to sleep. Once I came at 5am, and they told me that he's died at 7 in the evening. They used to take the dead to the hospital at Na Kramare. Well, and so I went to Na Kramare. There was this little room there, where there were medics and one doctor who you could tell was a Jew. I asked him if I could speak with him outside. He agreed. 'Excuse me, my father died' and I went to reach for my purse, to give him a hundred crowns. He caught my hand and didn't let me open it. He said that the Jewish community had already taken care of it.

My mother-in-law died about a year after my father, but by then I was in Brno. They buried her in Bratislava. I didn't take part, as there were major feuds regarding gold amongst her relatives - nieces and grandchildren. I didn't want to get mixed up in it. My hair stood on end when I listened to them. I got on relatively well with one of her nieces. I was working in Koospol, and she in some company nearby. We used to visit each other. There were a lot of companies in the neighborhood. We got along well until I left for Brno. Since then I haven't seen her. I don't even know where she lives anymore.

Married life">Married life

I was married twice. My first husband was a Jew, but not the second one. The first was named Pavol Fuska. I'd known him since I was small. He was a native of Bratislava. He lived near me. My first husband changed his name, I don't know if it was his idea, but he took a name that someone in the family had used as a partisan cover name. I think it was from his uncle. He took the name at the age of 15. After getting married I was automatically Fuskova. I think he was originally named Feldmar. At the post office, where I worked, as if on purpose they wrote Fuchsova anyways. [Editor's note: in Slovakia most Jews had German-sounding names.]

My first husband's family wasn't religious. They were secular. His mother was secular, as well as his second father. He was a sympathetic person. It was a case of a widow marrying a widower. We didn't observe Sabbath at home. I'd go to the synagogue, but not because of religion, but because I knew that my former landlady, Mrs. Feldmarova, would be there, so I'd go say hello to her. Otherwise I didn't go to visit them at home, we weren't again as close as all that.

My first husband was a Slovak, but at home they spoke only German. My husband had one half-brother, because as I've mentioned, a widow married a widower. He didn't have a full brother, his father had also died in a concentration camp. My husband was born in 1938, he was two and a half years older than I. After getting married we lived in the house on Kozej Street. It was only one little garret. We shared a toilet with the other tenants. There weren't individual bathrooms.

My first husband worked at first as a telephone repairman and then as a master at a telephone exchange trade school. Besides working he also finished technical college. Then their master didn't want him, because he was the only one that had a college degree. When the School of Chemistry in Krasnany opened, they stuck him there. He was missing some qualifications for that position, and so he had to finish teachers' college. It took four years. It took place in two-week stretches in Trnava. Well, when he finished it, he began criticizing me, 'You idiot' [meaning he had college degrees and looked down on his wife]. He reproached me in such an unpleasant fashion that I asked for a divorce. This was in 1970. At that time I was working in Koospol, which had a dormitory for singles, so I moved there.

What did my husband read? Trash. Detective stories. We didn't subscribe to any newspapers, as I'd had enough of them when I'd worked in that post press service. There I was able to read everything for free. In 1968 21 there was already some sort of freedom of the press, I grew disgusted with it all because one day they'd write something and the next they'd take it back. I don't even read the TV program we buy. Even this bores me most of the time. Now, radio and TV, that I listen to and watch, but newspapers don't interest me at all. Even now, when I buy some, I always know that it was exaggerated and that it's actually different. It's misleading.

After the divorce I moved to a singles' dormitory. Later I met my second husband, Pavol Sebor. We got married, and didn't even have anyplace to live yet. We lived apart, he in Brno, I in Bratislava. They then built a co-op bachelor apartment, so I moved to Brno. Eventually we managed to exchange the bachelor apartment for a larger apartment. Sebor began drinking, more and more. Well, it was no fun anymore, and I wrote my aunt in Haifa [Jolana Fischmann]. She invited me to come visit them in Israel, and so I went there. That's how my second marriage ended. And today I'm already happily divorced for eleven years. I live alone in my own apartment. Neither the first nor the second [husband] annoys me any more. The second was worse, but I was with him longer as well. He asked for the divorce, not me. He found someone younger.

My second husband had a PhD in natural sciences, in inorganic chemistry. He spoke five languages. We had a civil wedding. He wasn't a Jew. They were a decent family. They didn't know at all that I was Jewish. His parents lived all the way over by Pilsen, so we rarely saw them. Sebor and I agreed that we won't even tell anyone about it. Once we were watching something on TV, I don't even remember what anymore, but they were saying something against Jews. The old man [the interviewee is referring to her husband's father] began getting upset at the program, that they're making Jews out to be idiots, why after all, they're intelligent people. Really.

My husband's family were atheists. My father-in-law was 14 years old in 1918. After the fall of the monarchy [Austro-Hungarian Monarchy], when the bells rang, half of Bohemia left the Catholic Church, and those that felt patriotic became atheists by conviction. My second husband was five years older than I. I don't know where he was born, as his father was a high- ranking army officer, and they had moved frequently. His mother tongue was Czech. I couldn't keep in touch with his family after the divorce. We buried it long ago [i.e. broke off contact long ago].

After moving to Brno we lived in that co-op garret in Kralove Pole [a part of Brno]. When we saved up some money, we moved to a state-owned apartment. We exchanged our bachelor apartment with one older man. The new apartment had two rooms, but wasn't any bigger than my current one-room apartment. The kitchen was half the size of the one I have now, the front hall wasn't as big either. When I was married, we all had low salaries, and so we couldn't live high on the hog. We used to only go to Balaton [Lake Balaton in Hungary], because it was cheap there. Today Hungarians say that it's expensive, and prefer to go abroad. In Brno I began attending a women's association. I wasn't a member, I just used to go there. That's where I learned to make macramé lace.

Moving to Israel">Moving to Israel

After my second marriage fell apart, I immigrated to Israel in September of 1988. In April 1990 I returned. In Israel everything was nice, but I didn't have prospects of surviving it. I lived on the fourth floor, without an elevator. There were only a few buildings there, and nearby the town of Nahariyya. Every little while some car would come by and kick out some dog. Later someone came and poisoned the dogs. In the meantime one Ukrainian woman and I tried to feed them. We didn't have much food ourselves, but we tried. So that's Asia. If you're not there from childhood, it's hard to get used to it. A person can't start living there at the age of 48. In the beginning I got along in Hungarian and Russian, and Hebrew courses were mandatory at the time. There were many empty apartments in Israel. But truly empty, you could see it by the blinds. When I lived in the housing development, the blinds didn't move all year.

After World War II I didn't think I'd ever move abroad. Those that applied for emigration were well equipped. I didn't have a reason to go. They were mainly people that had some sort of employment, or skills, and though they'd be successful abroad. My aunt from Trnava [Jolana Fischmannova], whom I knew the best because I used to visit them during vacation, left as well. That was in 1964.

I didn't expect that the situation in Israel would be such that I wouldn't last there. My aunt wrote me to come, but never wrote me what it was like there. I worked 16 hours a day as a janitor at construction sites. Those that had been living there a long time didn't even get apartments, while we as repatriates got them right away. There was a great deal of tension between the various groups of the population. They didn't like it, of course. I wouldn't have liked it either.

I was terribly tired, terribly. I decided to return home. They helped me with it, I wouldn't have managed it alone. Someone said they were going to Tel Aviv, so I went with him, to get a passport. I played dumb, that the border police had taken my passport when I was leaving for Israel. The way they did it in Russia. Finally they issued me a passport good for one year. I told them that I was going to Budapest to get my teeth fixed. All Israelis who could did it, because even a plane trip, hotel and a Hungarian dentist all together were cheaper than a dentist in Israel. I knew this and made use of it. And so I came back.

When I'd been in Israel for two years, they stopped my disability pension in Czechoslovakia. After I returned they resumed it. It wasn't complicated to get it back. The district doctor sent me to a commission, where I answered some questions. I got a stamp and in two months a check came. They didn't know that I'd been in Israel, only that I'd been abroad, if they'd known that I'd been in Israel, I wouldn't have gotten anything. After I returned home, I at first lived with my second husband. Later he asked for a divorce. I bought my current apartment, I wasn't divorced yet when I moved out. I had two houses in Sered from my mother's side returned to me. I managed to sell one of them.

Reflections">Reflections

I had the worst opinion of Communism, but I lived according to the times: 'Hold your tongue and keep in line.' I also remember the Slansky trial 22, back then I was about eleven or twelve years old. My father even believed it, but I never believed anything or anyone. He always thought that things here would improve, and I didn't. When I was leaving for Israel in 1988, my cousin told me that Communism would fall. He was the son of one of my father's brothers who hadn't survived. He and his mother had survived, and immediately immigrated to Israel. He used to claim - 'Communism will fall.' In 1988 I arrived in Israel, and the very first day they introduced us. When he said that sentence, I thought to myself: 'Sure, it'll fall 300 years after I die.' And within a year it really did fall.

In 1980 my husband and I were on vacation in France, in Cannes. But not in a normal way, that we just got into our Trabant and went. My husband was working as an interpreter for a youth soccer team from that factory he worked in at the time. He got to know some Frenchmen that he was corresponding with. I didn't get to know them until a year later. First we invited them. They were here for two weeks. Back then we still lived in the bachelor apartment. We had to rent a one-room apartment where they slept, otherwise we hung about all day. One week we were in Lipa in my husband's villa after his parents, because at that time his parents were already dead. The villa was about 38 kilometers from Prague. It was also close to Karlovy Vary 23, Marianske Lazne 24 and Karlstein. We took them all over Czech, and then we went to visit them.

In France there was no problem with communication. My husband spoke French well, and I was good at making gestures. They dragged us around everywhere with them, but to places that I wasn't at all interested in. For a while we were also at the seaside, but then they announced, 'We're going for lunch.' And after lunch we didn't return there. There were such distances there, and so many cars, that you had to wait for the lights to change four times at an intersection. It was horrible, three hours, four hours in a car, and only in the city. They sat and talked and I didn't understand them. They came for us and took us fishing, well, fish don't interest me much. What was I supposed to do on that boat? I was glad when we were sitting in the Trabant and driving to Brno.

My impression of the Prague Spring was that I thought that things were going to be better. Well, and when the Russians came, my personal situation didn't change much. Just that in those years I got a better job than at that post office. I followed the wars in Israel on the news, but back then there was Communism. What was in the news was so embarrassing. At the time I was already working in the post press service, so I had newspapers for free, and I thought that it was terrible. My whole family was there.

I got into the Jewish community in Brno very easily, but for a long time I didn't want to join, because I didn't like the people there. And I don't like them to this day. It wasn't until the year 2000 that I joined. In 1991 the Terezin Initiative 25 was founded, and then Slovaks began going there as well. I don't hold any position in the Terezin Initiative. I'm only a regular member, nothing more. People from the Jewish community in Brno also go on Terezin Initiative trips, Mrs. Felixova has called me a few times, but on the whole it bored me.

I go to the Jewish community mainly during holidays. I used to go there while I was able. I was also at the opening of the synagogue in Liberec. No one applied, except for me, so I went there with the leadership. I was also at the celebration when they were registering Trebic in some cultural fund [UNESCO]. I don't observe any Jewish traditions at home. For example just now I was at seder, which we paid for and it was pretty good there, there were great people there. But before that we had Purim and even before that Chanukkah, which I paid for there, and I stayed only a while and went home. Rabbi Koller [Moishe Chaim Koller, current Brno rabbi] has been there for a year and a half, and makes a big to-do of it all.

What do I think about the division of the republic [the division of the Czechoslovak Federal Republic in 1993]?! There's always been more swine than troughs. I'm not a minister, or an ambassador, but those that wanted it, they're the ones that divided the republic. Normal people didn't want it, because after these 70 years we're so mixed around that everyone's got children here and parents there. I definitely did better to stay in Brno, as health insurance is better here. I'm a sick person, I'm an invalid, for me it's important. I can't say who I feel closer to, Czechs or Slovaks. We Jews prefer a larger crowd, so we can get lost in it and not stick out.

My compensation was arranged by the Terezin Initiative. I was granted compensation by the Czech-German Future Fund 26, but also the Claims Conference, and I also get something from the Czech government.

Glossary">Glossary

Melitta Seiler
Brasov
Romania
Interviewer: Andreea Laptes
Date of interview: August 2003

Melitta Seiler is a 74-year-old woman, who lives alone in a one-bedroom apartment in a building that also houses a Christian church. Her apartment, although small, is clean, and on the table you can see one of the macrames she has done herself, and of which she is very proud. Despite the fact that she has suffered a heart attack in 2002 and that she has to take care of her health, she is still a very active woman. She is still a coquette, takes care of her looks, dyes her hair blond regularly and keeps in touch with her friends from the community and with her son, Edward Friedel's family. Her granddaughters are the greatest joy of her life.

My family history
Growing up
During the War
After the War
Glossary

My family history

My paternal grandparents were Polish and lived in Zablotov [today Ukraine], but I never met them. My grandfather was drafted during World War I, and my father, Iosif Seiler, told me he died some time at the end of the war, it must have been in 1917 or 1918. I remember I once saw a photo of him dressed up in the Polish soldier uniform, but it was lost when we were deported. My grandmother was named Melitta Seiler and she died very soon after her husband's death; I was named after her. My father never knew for sure, but rumor had it that she killed herself because she couldn't take my grandfather's death. The Jewish community in Zablotov was rather religious, according to my father, and he was just a child at the time, and her death was not a topic to be discussed with the children.

They had two children, my father, Iosif Seiler, who was born in 1901, and another son, born in 1903; I think his name was Avram or Abraham. After their mother's death, their grandmother raised them. My father was 14 years old by then. I don't know if she had any help in raising them or not, maybe she wasn't very old, in those times people got married young. They fled to Vienna to escape World War I; their grandmother was afraid of the Russian Cossacks 1. I think his grandmother returned with his younger brother to Zablotov, and he remained in Vienna for a while, to learn a job. The grandmother died in Zablotov, I think.

My father's brother lived in Zablotov, he was married and he had three children: two daughters and one son. I don't know what he did for a living, but I think their financial state was rather modest, because they married young. One daughter was called Esther, but I don't remember the names of the others. Two or three years before World War II started, his wife, I don't remember her name, came to Cernauti with two children: one girl was sick, and my father helped her to get into a good hospital under my sister's name. After that they had to go back to Zablotov. My father kept in touch as much as he could with his brother's family. They were all murdered, right at the beginning of the war.

I remember very little about my maternal grandfather, Michael Sternschein. My mother told me that her father lived somewhere near Cernauti, and that he was rather well off. My grandmother - I don't remember her first name - lived in another village, and she was poor, the only child of a poor family, but she was very beautiful. My grandfather fell in love with her, and he kept going on horseback to her village, just to see her, during his courtship. After they married, she gave him beautiful children as well. My grandfather loved his family, and he adored my mother, because she was the youngest of all his children, eight years younger than his youngest son! She was just a child when all the others were already married. My mother told me that he used to get up early, go to the market and buy her fruits; he used to put them by her nightstand, so that she would find them when she woke up. He died in 1931, when I was still a child. I remember my mother said that he died the same year my sister, Erika Esther Ellenburgen, was born. He must have been in his sixties, because he was about 42 years old when my mother was born. He died of pneumonia, he insisted on taking a bath one chilly February morning, fell ill and died soon after that. I know from my mother that he was rather religious, he observed Sabbath very strictly, he didn't work; of course he went to the synagogue on all the high holidays, and all the food in his house was kosher. His father or his grandfather, I don't know exactly, had been a ruv [rabbi]. I don't know what he did for a living.

My grandparents were not dressed traditionally: my grandmother didn't wear a wig, and my grandfather didn't wear payes. They had their own house, but after my grandfather died, my grandmother came to live with my mother, Sara Hudi Seiler. Grandmother was already ill with sclerosis. One time she was in the courtyard, and my sister and I were playing. And she said, 'Melitta, bring me a glass of water!' And when I came back with the glass, she said to me, 'What do you want to give me, poison?' After that, Uncle Max, Max Sternschein, my mother's elder brother, took my grandmother to live with him. His children were already grown up, and he had servants; it was easier for him than it was for my mother. My grandmother died shortly after that, in her sixties, when I was three or four years old. I remember, I was in the room with my mother, and when grandmother died, my mother came to me, took off a string of red beads she was wearing and put them around my neck. She was already in mourning.

My maternal grandparents had six children: the eldest was Toni [Antonia] Bernhart, nee Sternschein, who married a Jew named Bernhart. I don't know when Toni was born, but she was older than my mother, she had been like a mother to her. She died in Transnistria 2 in the 1940s. She had two daughters, Sally and Neti Bernhart, who live in the USA now, but I don't know if they are married. Then there was Grete Knack, nee Sternschein, who married a German Jew; he was a gold merchant and he was rather well off. They lived in Germany. They had no children. There were also three brothers: Moritz Sternschein, who was married. He had one son and two daughters, but he and his family died in Transnistria in 1944. Bernhart Sternschein was also married, and he had two daughters, Marlene and Antonia. And there was Max Sternschein, who was a photographer in Cernauti. He had one son, Vili Sternschein, and one daughter, Ani. She married and fled to Bessarabia 3. She was murdered there with her husband, but I don't know his name.

My father, Iosif Seiler, was born in Nepolokovtsy [Chernivtsi province, Ukraine], in a village near Cernauti, where his mother came to visit some of her relatives, in 1901. His mother tongue was German, and he studied in a school for chef d'hors d'oeuvre [school for preparing appetizers] in Vienna. He stayed there two or three years, and then he went back to Zablotov, but he no longer fit in that small town, so he came to work in Cernauti. He worked in a restaurant, but he didn't cook, he just knew a lot of recipes for fancy appetizers, salads, cold buffets with fish and so on, and supervised everything. And I don't know how, but he knew my mother's sister, Toni. And thus he was introduced to my mother, Sara Hudi Sternschein. She was born in Cernauti in 1905, and her mother tongue was also German. My father liked her very much, she was young, very elegant; she had been to Germany twice to her sister Grete's. The first time she went she was 16, and she stayed for one year. Grete helped her with an eye surgery my mother needed: she had her strabismus corrected at a famous clinic in Dresden. My father was a very handsome man, with black curly hair and dark blue eyes, and dimples. But unfortunately he suffered from paradentosis and lost his teeth when he was still young.

My father needed a passport to stay in Cernauti, and that cost a lot of money, so eventually he had to go back to Zablotov. But my mother's family made her head swim with what a good man he was, that he was an orphan but very hard working, and so on, so my mother eventually gave in and accepted to marry him. My maternal grandmother baked leika - it is some kind of brownish sponge cake with honey that Jews in Bukovina made for every wedding or high holiday. My grandfather took my mother and they went to Zablotov, where the engagement took place. My mother had some jewels with her, jewels she had from her sister Grete. She gave these jewels to my father to sell, so that he would have money to pay for his passport. But she told him that there would be no marriage until he did his military service, which he had to do in 1926, I think. Of course my mother changed her mind several times in this period, but they eventually got married in Cernauti when he came back from the army.

They got married in the synagogue, and then there was an elegant party; my father was dressed up in a tuxedo, and my mother had a very elegant silk dress and a veil, and a wonderful wedding bouquet made up of white roses and white lilac. However, my father never had Romanian citizenship, but he was allowed to stay in Cernauti because my mother was a Romanian citizen. He had to pay a tax every year for his passport, and he did so until World War II broke out.

Growing up

I was born in Cernauti in 1929, and my sister, Erika, in 1931. When I was born, my father hoped it would be a boy, but I came instead. And when Erika was born, he was sure it would be a boy that time, he even prepared his tuxedo! But again it was a girl. For all that, he loved us very much, and we loved him, he was a very good man.

We lived in a rented apartment that was in a two-storied house, and we had running water and electricity. Cernauti had electricity and running water, only in some villages they might have been missing. My grandmother used to have an oil lamp when I was very little, I remember that. Anyway, the house also had a small garden, so my sister and I could play outside as well. The apartment had a hallway, two rooms, a balcony, a kitchen, a pantry and a toilet. We had the box for Keren Kayemet 4 in the house. We had books in the house, some religious ones and many novels because that's what my mother used to read. I don't remember authors, but I know she read good books, classics mainly, all in German; she didn't read cheap novels. She went to the public library in Cernauti regularly, she was very fond of books. My father didn't have so much time for reading, because he was working late. My mother always had two or three servants, at least before my sister was born, after that there was only a woman who came to clean twice a week. They were all Ruthenian Russians. I remember the woman came to do the laundry; she boiled it and then steamed it. Back then we used a pressing iron that was filled with embers, which made the iron hot. The laundry was always starched, and I know the woman went out on the balcony and then back inside, to air the embers and keep them burning.

There were several families living in that house, and I think only one was Jewish. I remember one family, the Bendelas: they were Romanian, and they spoke German beautifully. They lived upstairs, and their son used to tie a candy or a piece of chocolate on a string and lower it down to us, the kids. The owner of the house, an elderly woman, I don't remember if she was Jewish or not, lived downstairs, with her three sons. One of them was a lawyer, who liked my mother very much and used to court her. My mother also had a friend from her youth, but they visited rarely. There was another Jewish neighbor, he lived next to our house, he was a lawyer, and he always wore one of those bowler hats. He liked my mother very much, and us children as well. Whenever he saw me on the balcony on his way to the office, he used to call out in German, as a joke, with a funny accent, 'Melitta, was mache die Mame zu Hause?' instead of saying, Melitta, was macht die Mama zu Hause? [Melitta, what is mother doing?], although he spoke German perfectly. My father might have had acquaintances, but not real friends, he didn't have time for that. We kept in touch with my mother's relatives, especially Uncle Max, who had his own house behind the National Theater. He invited us over often.

Erika and I were allowed to play in the garden when we were a bit older, but my mother never let us wander the streets alone. My sister was always curious and independent; I remember she used to go out into the street, and one time a coach almost ran her over. I was more obedient and closer to my mother.

My mother was a good neighbor, but she didn't have time for visiting: she was busy with us, children, or with her needlework. She listened to the radio - we had no TV back then - or she used to take us out for a walk: usually in Volksgarten, the public park in Cernauti, which was very large, it even had tennis courts, or sometimes in the public park of the metropolitan seat in Cernauti. Our poor father, when he was free on Saturdays or Sundays, took us kids out to Volksgarten as well. I sat on one of his knees, my sister Erika on the other, and we used to comb him, fix his hair, we did all sorts of things to him and his clothes. But he let us have fun; he was a very kind and loving man. And there was no exception, every evening when he came home from work, he came to our room, where we were fast asleep most of the times. He always put something sweet, like candies or chocolate, on our nightstands. First thing in the morning, when we woke up, we would feel up the nightstand, with our eyes still closed, we knew there had to be something! The first question when we woke up was, 'Tata, was hast du uns gebracht?', that is, 'Father, what have you brought us?' He was indeed very kind.

The financial situation of the family was rather good until World War II broke out. My father worked very hard at a restaurant called Beer, after his owner. He worked very late, to pay for our clothes, school and vacations.

My father never went on a vacation with my mother or with us, as far as I remember, but he sent my mother and us somewhere near Cernauti for at least six weeks every summer. We went to Putna monastery [nunnery, located in Suceava county, 62 km north west of Suceava, built in the 15th century]. I remember playing there, and climbing the mountain from where Stefan the Great sent out his arrow to find the right spot for building his monastery. [Editor's note: Stefan the Great, ruler of Moldavia in the late 15th century, famous for his patriotism and wars against the Ottoman Empire.] We also went to some place, I don't remember the name, near Ceremus [river near Cernauti, today in Ukraine]. It was nothing fashionable, but it was very nice: we stayed in a rented house, and my mother didn't have to cook; my father sent us packages with fine delicacies. And when we came back, he always had a present for my mother. I remember one time he gave her a beautiful watch.

Every spring, before Pesach, or fall, before the holidays, my mother had something elegant ordered at the tailor's for her and for us. She had good taste, and she was a very elegant woman, very up-to-date with the fashion. When she went for a walk, she always wore gloves and a hat. Back then, there was a dress in fashion for young women and children, which came from Vienna I think, a Tyrolean model: the dirndl; it had a pleated skirt and pleated sleeves. It was worn with a small apron. My mother used to make one for us every summer, and she had one as well. When we went out, nobody thought she was our mother, everybody thought she was the nanny or an elder sister.

I used to accompany my mother when she went to the market. She always went on Monday, because Monday was the milchik [Yiddish for dairy products] day. The market place was very picturesque; the peasant women were dressed in their national costumes. I remember the women from Bukovina, from the outskirts of Cernauti, who wore their beautiful hota, their national costume. My mother bought a large piece of butter, wrapped in a bur leaf, and cheese in the shape of a pellet, because it had been kept in gauze. My mother bought poultry on Wednesday, and she took it to the hakham; back then we had no refrigerators, so it had to be well cleaned and well cooked. [In smaller places the hakham assumed several functions in the Jewish community, he acted as shochet, mohel, shammash, etc.] The hakham cut the bird, salted it, put it in water. Only after that it was ready to be cooked. And on Thursday, mother took us to the fish market. It was very impressive for us, because the fish was brought alive. They were swimming in some large tubs filled with water, and mum chose one, and said, 'I want this one!' Then the merchant got the fish out, hit it, and gave it to my mother, who took it home, and made the fish kosher. I don't remember exactly what she was doing, but I know she cleaned it, salted it and washed it several times. Running a household was more difficult back then, there was a lot to do.

My family didn't have a favorite shop; there was one in our street we bought small things from; but I remember, when we needed oil or sugar, father ordered it at the shop and it was delivered to us at home.

My mother was rather religious, she cooked kosher food and baked challah on Fridays; she observed Sabbath, she didn't light the fire on Sabbath, somebody else came to do it. My father was a good Jew as well, but he only went to the synagogue on the high holidays. He was working most of the times. But he provided for his family, and he took care that we had nice presents, my mother and us, the children. On Chanukkah, we always received presents, like this dirndl dress we liked so much. On Pesach, the cleaning was done the day before, there was the searching for chametz, and there was special tableware we kept in a trunk in the attic. My mother used to throw out or give away all food, like flour, which she hadn't bought recently. She cooked on a kitchen range that was built into a wall and on Pesach she cleaned it, rubbed it, and put hot embers all over it, so that it was kosher. My mother always bought one hundred eggs: the hard-boiled eggs were minced together with small cut onion, oil and pepper. This appetizer was served with matzah. There were guests over at our house, or we were invited to my uncles, but I don't remember my father leading the seder. It was too long ago.

We went to the big temple on special occasions, like the high holidays or a wedding, and it was always full, you had to buy seats for this beforehand from the Jewish community: women sat on one side, and men on the other. My parents were always careful to buy seats before any high holiday. But there were several synagogues in Cernauti, apart from the big temple, and on Saturdays my mother took us girls to the one closest to our home. There was no difference made between Neolog 5 or Orthodox Jews, I first heard about it when I came to Brasov.

There were several sweets made on Purim: we cooked the traditional leika. We also did fluden, I think here in Transylvania it is called kimbla. This fluden was somewhat similar to strudel; it was made up of dough that was spread very, very thin on tablecloths in the house, thin as cigarette paper, and left to dry. Then there was a filling of ground nut kernels, mixed with sugar and honey. This filling was wrapped in the dough like a strudel, put in the griddle and cut into pieces before putting it in the oven. It can be served with jam as well, my mother did that when I got married, it was delicious! But it's very hard to make, I never made it. Of course we baked shelakhmones, and we gave them to neighbors; they came to us as well with gifts, even if they weren't Jewish, many Christians knew our holidays and respected them. We usually received eggs from them when it was the Orthodox Easter. I remember vaguely, that on Purim, it was customary for masked people to come to visit. Generally they were well received, people weren't afraid of letting strangers into their house back then. Mother used to tell me that the masks made fun of the hosts, cracked some jokes or were ironic, and the host had to guess who was behind the mask, if it was someone known. I don't remember them coming into our house, it may have happened when my mother wasn't married yet. But there was a lot of joy and celebrating in our house. We kids didn't dress up though, but I remember that there were Purim balls in town, and people were allowed to wear masks in the street.

My mother also baked kirhala, that is some sort of cookie: it was a dough with many eggs, I think, and it was cut into pieces before putting it in the oven. There was sugar sprinkled over them, and when it was done, the sides of the cookie would rise, so the cookie looked like a small ship. They melted in one's mouth, they were delicious.

On Jewish New Year's Eve there were always big preparations, everybody went to the big synagogue, and then we were invited to a party to one aunt or uncle, and there was a lot of food and drinking. Both my parents fasted on Yom Kippur, and so did I when I turned 13. But at that time, we were already in Transnistria, so food was scarce anyway. On Sukkot we went to the synagogue and celebrated, people danced with the Torah in the synagogue's courtyard, but we didn't build a sukkah ourselves. [People dance with the Torah on Simchat Torah, which is the last day of Sukkot.]

The town I grew up in, Cernauti, was large, cultural, very cosmopolitan. There were six or seven cinemas, the National Theater, the Jewish Theater, and other wonderful buildings, like Dom Polski, that is the Polish House; one could even find symphonic music. The Jewish community in Cernauti was very large and powerful; however, I don't know exact numbers. There was the synagogue, very beautiful; I remember I was there for the last time when my cousin, Ani, Uncle Max's daughter, married there before World War II started. The rabbi, I don't know his name, wasn't very old, and he was the same who had married my mother. After the synagogue was razed to the ground during the persecution, before the war, the rabbi was murdered. There were mikves in Cernauti, but we didn't go.

There were several hakhamim in Cernauti, and no Jew ate poultry or veal if it hadn't been butchered by the hakham. There were also many functionaries: hakhamim, shochetim, rabbis. [Editor's note: in smaller Jewish communities the hakham could assume various functions, among them, that of a shochet, however in this case the interviewee probably missed to say shochet.] There were no Jewish neighborhoods in Cernauti, Jews lived scattered across the town. Jews had all sorts of jobs: tailors, watch menders, shoemakers, shopkeepers, doctors and lawyers, they could be anything before 1939, when the persecution under the Goga-Cuza government 6 began. And there was something else: Jewish restaurants, some of them with kosher food. My father worked for a quality restaurant, very central and fancy, where he made up the recipes for cold buffets, and important people came in to have an appetizer. The owner of the place was a Jew named Beer. And there was also a well-known Jewish restaurant, the Friedmann's. I still remember where it was. If I got off the train in Cernauti now, I could still find it, it was 'auf der Russischen Gasse', on the Russian street. It was a lacto-vegetarian restaurant, and everybody in Cernauti, Jewish or not, came to Friedmann's, he had wonderful delicacies with dairy products. It was a fashionable meeting place for ladies, who came there, ate and chatted for two or three hours. My mother also took us there a few times, and we always had maize cake, which was very popular. It was a dish made of corn flour, with a cream cheese filling, and sour cream on the side; it was awesome, I can tell you! There were also other recipes, and all kosher, nothing with meat was served.

We used to go and watch parades, I remember 10th May, the Heroes' Day 7, when King Carol II 8 came to Cernauti with his son, Michael 9. We were pupils in the third grade, I think, and my mother dressed up and came with us; we stayed in the front, and we saw the royal coach and all the royal retinue pass by. King Carol wore a feathered helmet, and Michael wore a beautiful uniform as well as his father.

I didn't have a Fraulein [governess] when I was little; my mother took care of me, with the help of the servants. Then I went to the state elementary school for the first four grades. I did the first grade of high school in the Holy Virgin high school, a nuns' high school. Each high school had a different uniform back then, and each pupil had a number. Half of our class was made up of Jews, and the other half of Romanians and Poles. We had religion classes, and we, Jewish girls, had a teacher of Jewish religion, and anti-Semitism was never an issue back then. All students paid a tax; and they all studied the same subjects in Romanian, except for religion, of course. I remember in high school I had thick, beautiful, chestnut-red hair, and I wore it in two plaits. During the breaks the boys were chasing me and pulling my plaits, saying, 'Melitta, du hast einen Wald im Kopf!', that is, 'Melitta, you have a forest in your head!'

I was good at mathematics, but I especially liked literature and history; I read a lot about famous painters and writers, I enjoyed it. I had friends in school, but not outside of it because my mother didn't let me wander in the town all alone. I don't remember names, it was a long time ago, but my friends were Jewish and Romanian alike.

I never went to cheder. Father told me later that he intended to send us both to an old Jew to learn, but the war broke out and he couldn't do that anymore. I finished my first year of high school in June 1940, and immediately after that the Russians came. We had to repeat the year, they brought new teachers from Russia and every school had to study in Russian. They also imposed mixed classes, boys and girls together. At first we laughed, made fun of the teachers, we didn't know Russian and the teachers didn't know German, so they couldn't understand us. But I never got into serious trouble with my teachers. We went on for a year and I could already speak Russian in 1941.

Father also bought a cottage piano for us girls, and once or twice a week we took piano lessons for two or three years, before the war started. We would go to an elderly Polish lady to learn, and could practice at home, because we had the cottage piano at home.

I went to the Jewish theater only once, when I was little. It was a big event, a very famous artist from the Yiddish theater was going to perform and sing as well, Sidi Tal. My mother took us girls to see her. She also took us to the cinema; we never missed a movie with Shirley Temple. After the Russians came, it was compulsory to go with the school to see Russian plays, Lev Tolstoy especially. I enjoyed them, too.

During the War

In the summer of 1941 the Romanian regime was reestablished, and Antonescu 10 came to power. The times were very troubled, and I remember in November we were told to pack a few things in a bundle and to be ready to go: we were supposed to be already dressed when the Romanian gendarmes would knock on our doors to take us away. The gendarmes came, and we were taken to some part of Cernauti, I don't know exactly to which, that was declared a ghetto. We were crowded, I don't know how many in one room, and we had to stay there for some days; after that, gendarmes with bayonets came and took us to the train station: they forced us to get on cattle wagons, we were so many in one wagon that one could hardly breathe. And this convoy went from Cernauti to Atachi, which was the northernmost point of Bessarabia, right near the bank of the Dnestr. It was a frightful journey and when the train stopped, they wouldn't let us get off right away, but when we did, we had to step in mud, thick mud that went up to our knees, because it was after a flood. Near the railroad there was a hillock, and they forced us to climb it, men, women and children and old people altogether, with everything we had brought. It was terrible, sick or old people fell in the thick mud, others pulled them out. Everybody had to make it to the top with their belongings. When we were on top, they ordered us to leave everything we had packed there, and then they chased us down the hillock again.

Then everybody had to follow a huge convoy that went to the bank of the Dnestr. There were thousands and thousands of people on the bank of the river, because several convoys had arrived, not just ours. It was night, it was dark, and the roaring of the Dnestr was frightening. Families were separated, voices cried out, yelled, called each other. The screams and the cries were terrible in that dark cold November night. Everybody had to cross the Dnestr on those ferries that carry carts and horses; only this time there were people instead. It went very slowly, and my family was there all night until my father gave something he had saved, I don't know what, to somebody and we were finally on the ferry. You could hear shots being fired in the night, the screams of people being thrown in the river; it was terrible.

When we reached the other bank of Dnestr, we were already in Transnistria. We were in a suburb of Mohilev-Podolsk 11; it was a place with small shattered houses, and all looked and smelled like water closets. There were so many people trying to find a spot to rest! We were exhausted, and we just sat quietly near a wall until morning. In the morning the gendarmes told us, 'Everybody must be ready to leave!' A woman, who had probably come there some days before, told us, 'Good people, if you can, hide and don't go with this convoy!' There was a young couple of Jews, a bit younger than my parents and with no children, who had come with us, in the same wagon. When they heard the woman, they immediately set out to leave the building; my sister ran after them, and I after my sister. When we reached the main street, I turned around and saw that my parents weren't behind me, so I went back. I found them in the convoy, surrounded by gendarmes who screamed at people to move.

There were thousands and thousands of people in that convoy, the entire main street was full of people. My mother started to cry, my father cried out, 'Where's my daughter?!'; but my sister had disappeared with that Jewish family. The sentinels guarded the convoy, they were mostly Romanian, but I remember there was a German one as well. And my mother started to cry and plead, in German and Romanian, that she had lost a child, that all she wanted was to find her baby. Nobody looked at her, but she didn't stop crying. At one point, a young sentinel, a Romanian soldier, stopped, looked at us and said: 'Come with me!' We got out of the convoy, and set out for the small street where I last saw the couple of Jews with my sister. We didn't go very far, there were too many people, but we saw the woman coming towards us with my sister Erika. The soldier saw we found the girl, but he was a good soul, he said, as if he hadn't seen anything, 'Go find the girl, and when you do, come back.' That was our great luck, and that is why we survived, because we could stay in the city of Mohilev-Podolsk.

The convoy left the city, and we stayed behind, with some other people who knew it was better to stay. Mohilev-Podolsk was not a concentration camp surrounded by barbed wire, it was a ghetto. In the whole city there were no more Ukrainian Jews, they had all been slaughtered in Odessa and other places [during the Romanian occupation of Odessa] 12. The few Jews living there had been brought from over the Dnestr. After the convoy left and my parents weren't afraid to come out, my father started to look for a place to live. We found a Ukrainian woman who took us in; she was very poor, and full of lice, she was scratching herself all the time. My clean, beautiful mother was appalled, you can imagine. We stayed there only for a little while, and then we found another place. It was also in the ghetto, in the suburb, but the house belonged to some Ukrainians who were well off, they had a garden, and cows. My parents spoke with the owners, and they took us in. They had a little house near the stables, with a small kitchen, and one room, built on the bare ground. However, it was clean, and that's where we stayed.

My parents paid the rent with a few jewels my mother had been able to save: she had sown them in a small pocket in her suspenders. When they took us out of the train, they had no time to do any bodily search. It's said that the Ukrainians were anti-Semites, but it is not a rule, these people were kind for taking us in; moreover, they didn't ask for a high rent, they didn't insult us, and they gave us some milk or a tomato during summer, because we were starving. The hoziaika, that is the owner [in Ukrainian], had two daughters: they were a little bit older than us, but we made friends, they didn't treat us badly; we even played together sometimes.

We lived only on maize flour, and my mother made a gir, some sort of soup, just boiled water sprinkled with maize flour. [Editor's note: The basic meaning of the Akkadian word 'gir' is a grain of carob seed.] Very rarely we could make maize mush, and my sister, who was always spoiled and fastidious about food, was always the first at the table, to make sure that nobody got a bigger piece. We sometimes had army bread, which gave my sister and I jaundice. Not to mention the subnutrition that gave my sister and I furunculous: we were full of puss, and my poor father washed us and dressed our wounds.

We lived there for three years, from 1941 to 1944, and the times were hard. German troops passed our small house several times, but we knew they were coming. I don't know how, but the news about them always spread fast; we were so afraid, we would hide in the small kitchen, and we didn't even breathe hard, for fear the Germans might hear us. I remember, during the winter, my sister and I went to the gate of the house - the house these Ukrainians had seemed a palace to us, although it was just a normal house - we saw carts, full of corpses piled up like boards, they were that thin; I don't know where they took them.

All around Mohilev there were concentration camps, surrounded by barbed wire. My future husband, doctor Jacques Friedel, was in one of them, and so was my mother's elder brother, Moritz Sternschein. He had been to Germany, where he married a German Jewish woman, and they fled Germany and came back to Cernauti when Hitler came to power. But he was deported to one of these camps with his wife and his three children. My uncle and his wife died before the liberation, and when the front came, their children were brought to Mohilev. My parents found them, but they didn't survive, they were all sick, with their bellies swollen. People died during summer because of typhoid fever, and during winter because of the cold and typhus. They wore only rags, they were underfed, you could see them ransacking garbage for a potato peel. The living conditions were disastrous; there were worms and lice everywhere. We never had lice, all that time, and that thanks to my mother: she was a clean, educated woman, and in the small house where we lived, she put a chair in front of the bed, so whoever would come in, would sit on the chair and not on the bed. She also brushed our hair with a small- toothed comb; we, girls, had beautiful hair and my mother didn't cut it. As far as I know there were no mass executions in Mohilev.

Time passed, and we were liberated by the Russian front in April 1944. The Russians installed an anti-aircraft cannon right behind the stable, in the courtyard where we lived. The sound of it was terrible! My father was drafted by force in the Russian army because he didn't hide like others did, and he went with the front to Stalingrad, as he later told us. So after Mohilev was liberated, and the news spread that Cernauti was liberated as well, my mother found herself alone, with two girls and without my father. We had to go back to Cernauti on foot, only when we reached a railway station could we travel by train for a few miles. The Russian convoys didn't care very much, they let us travel in goods trains. We walked and traveled for two weeks, I think, and when we got back home, all three of us had our hair full of lice. We found our apartment; it was completely empty, except for an iron bed, where we all slept. We didn't know, but that apartment was used by some Russians, and one night we just woke up with some of them in the room. We were so afraid that they would rape us; I was already 15 years old, and a beautiful girl, my mother was also a beautiful woman, my sister was rather skinny, but still, we were three defenseless women. We were terrified, but they were good-hearted people, they left us alone.

After the War

Life was very hard during those two years, from 1944 to 1946. We girls went to school and we studied in Russian. My uncle Max Sternschein, who wasn't deported, helped us with what he could. Some permits for Jews to stay in Cernauti were issued by the Romanian authorities, for huge sums of money, and I think my uncle raised that money somehow. And he was lucky, because some Jews were deported later, even if they had paid a large sum of money to stay behind. When the Russians came, in 1940, Ani had just finished high school, she had passed her graduation exam. And Russians imposed that everybody who had graduated from high school was to go to Bessarabia to teach there. Uncle Max was desperate, but he couldn't do anything. So he married Ani in a hurry with a medicine student, one of her pretenders, so that she wouldn't be all alone and with no protection there. But the German front came, and they were massacred there, they weren't heard of again. He was still hoping to hear from Ani, his daughter. Uncle Max sent people to look for them, my mother kept asking everybody who went to or was coming from Bessarabia, and the answer was always the same: no Jews were left alive. Uncle Max had a very hard time accepting this, he adored his daughter.

Mainly we would live on what my mother took from some people. For example, somebody gave her a dress they didn't use anymore, and she went to the market and sold it for a few rubles, and that was our money for bread. Uncle Bernhart, who had been deported, came back with his wife and child; they had another daughter in Cernauti, after they returned, and soon after that they left for Israel. But we couldn't go anywhere; we were waiting for my father. My father managed to send us a package with clothes, and in 1946 he came home.

In the same year we left for Brasov, there was some sort of decree that Jews could go to Romania if they had Romanian citizenship; I remember I turned 17 the day we set foot in this town. We didn't choose the town, we were sent here. We had already experienced the Russians back in Cernauti, we knew what they were capable of, so we didn't hesitate about moving to Romania. We had two examples: the first time they came, in 1940, there were some rich people in Cernauti, some of them Jews, some of them Romanians. They were taken to Siberia [to the so-called Gulag camps] 13, and they were never heard of again. Then, when we came back from Transnistria, in 1944, the NKVD 14 roamed the streets and made raids in houses during the night, taking people to forced labor to the Donets mines. [Editor's note: Donets, or Donbass, as it is also called, is the site of a major coalfield and an industrial region in Eastern Ukraine in the plain of the Rivers Donets and lower Dnieper.] It made no difference to them if you told them that you were a Jew and that you had just come back from deportation; they didn't care.

One night, they came to our house, but as we lived on the first floor, we heard them ringing the bells of the neighbors first. My mother knew who it was, so she immediately ran bare-foot and in her nightgown to the cellar. She hid and I had to open he door. And I was wearing a black silk dressing gown, a gift from my aunt, Grete, and I probably looked like a young woman, so the NKVD wanted to take me away. I told him I was still a pupil; he didn't believe me, but I showed him my notebook and he finally let me go. That fright I will never forget! There were people who were actually jumping off their balconies when the NKVD came to their door, they would do anything not to be taken to Donets, so we had a pretty good idea about who the Russians were. The first chance we got to leave Cernauti, we did.

Life was very hard here in Brasov, because we had to live in a house with some Romanians, and we were so crowded, we had to live several families in one room. We had to share the room with one more family, and we slept on the floor at first, then we managed to build a cot and we slept there. After a year or two the family that lived with us left. My parents continued to stay there, but we girls eventually left: I got married, and Erika went to university in Bucharest, were she studied languages, Russian and English. My parents were never really over the trauma of being deported. All they thought about was our welfare, and not theirs: they wanted us to have good food, clothes, but my father never thought of buying an apartment, although it would have been possible back then, with a loan. Father worked as the manager of a food laboratory, and mother was a housewife.

We wanted to emigrate to Israel, we were a young family; my father filed for it, but he didn't get the approval, and I don't know if he tried again. I don't know the reasons for the rejection. Uncle Bernhart left with his family from Bucharest to Israel in 1947, but I don't know how they did it. Uncle Max left for Buenos Aires with his wife Suzie and his son Vili; they managed to do so because Suzie had some relatives there, and they helped her. Uncle Max died some time in the late 1950s I think. About Vili I only know that he married a Jewish woman who was from Romania as well, and that he became a diamond polisher.

Erika and I finished school here in Brasov. I finished the ten grades of high school in evening classes, and after that, at 19, I got a job. Although we were rather poor, my mother didn't want us to neglect our education. In the first two or three years after arriving in Brasov, we had private lessons of German literature and grammar with a teacher. After that we studied English with a teacher, Mrs. Rathaus. It was rather expensive, but I took those classes for about eight years, I only interrupted them when I was about to give birth to my son.

After she graduated, Erika became a Russian teacher here, in Brasov, and married a Jew, Alfred [Freddie] Ellenburgen in 1959. They had a good marriage, and they have a son, Marcel. Marcel married a Romanian, Iulia, and they live in Israel now, where he has two little boys.

I worked for three years in the bookkeeping department of T.A.P.L., which was the state organization that managed restaurants and the food industry. In the meantime, I took some accounting courses, and Mr. Rathaus, my teacher's husband, who was a pharmacist, helped me get a position as an accountant at Centrofarm. [Centrofarm was a state pharmaceutical company, which operated all over the country.] I worked there for three years, until 1955. I had no problems because of being Jewish in neither of these work places.

I was lucky that I made good friends with the young people from the Jewish community here. They were Pista Guth, Brauning, Loti Gros, and some other high school colleagues of theirs. They liked my sister and me a lot, so they introduced us in their circles and in Gordonia 15, a Zionist organization. They were very friendly, invited us to small five o'clock tea parties and so on. At Gordonia there was a young doctor, Bernhart, who liked me a lot, courted me, and he introduced me to a friend of his, doctor Orosz. He was a Hungarian, not a Jew, but he had many Jewish friends. Doctor Orosz courted me as well, we went out for walks, and during one of these walks we met doctor Jacques Friedel, my future husband. Jacques was born in Campulung Moldovenesc, but he studied medicine in Cluj-Napoca, and he was assigned to Brasov.

We got married in October 1953, in Brasov, in the Neolog synagogue here. It was a beautiful wedding, with a chuppah, the two hakhams from Brasov attended, I had many guests, friends and colleagues from work, three maids of honor, a choir, and the organ played. I remember a jeweler, Weinberger, who came to sing in my honor, he had a beautiful voice. I had a gorgeous dress, and a Biedermeier bouquet, made up of 35 rose buds. The coronet was also made up of small flowers. The party was in a restaurant, there was a band, and only kosher food, of course; my mother cooked, and she even made that famous fluden from Bukovina.

My son, Edward Friedel, was born in 1955. My husband, my son and I lived here, where I live today, in one room, which we received when Edward was one year old. Some time after that, my marriage with my husband fell apart, so we divorced in 1966, I took my maiden name again and I started working at the University of Brasov, the Faculty of Forestry, where I worked as a clerk. I worked there for 28 years, until I retired.

I was never a member of the Communist Party, nobody from the family was. We kept our mouth shut, but we didn't agree, of course, with what was going on. We had to participate in all the manifestations on 23rd August 16 or 1st May, especially because I worked in a university and the accent on propaganda was stronger here. We even had to sow the slogans on the placards, like 'Long live communism' 'Long live Ceausescu 17!'

My son had no problems in school because he was Jewish, we could go to the synagogue and we observed the high holidays at home. But we didn't follow the kashrut; it was too hard. Both my husband and I were religious, I lit candles every Friday and said the blessings, I cleaned the house on Pesach. However, we didn't dress up Edward for Purim. Edward also took some classes of Talmud Torah with somebody from the community, I don't remember with whom. He didn't study with his father, but he had to know a few things for his bar mitzvah.

My son, Edward, was a sincere enemy of the communist regime since he was in high school, and I told him to be careful about what he said or did, because he could get into serious trouble. But he still insisted that he wanted to go to Israel. And, since he was in my care, I told him that he would have to graduate from university first, and after that, if he still wanted to emigrate, I wouldn't stand in his way. He did as I told him, including the military service. I was the one who insisted on that as well, I thought it would make him more of a man, because in his childhood he was rather spoiled, but it was a mistake on my behalf. His father, as a doctor, could have given him some papers saying that he was sick and he would have dodged the military service, but I threatened to denounce him - my ex- husband - if he did so. So after Edward graduated from high school, he was a pontoneer and a sentinel at a prison in Braila. He told me that there were a lot of fights, with knives even, among some militaries. But he managed, and after that he went to the Faculty of Wood Industry here, in Brasov.

All this time, Edward lived with me. But our living conditions were terrible because we didn't have a private toilet or a hallway; so I decided to do something about it, got the necessary approvals and started to build a toilet and a hallway. I sent Edward to live with his father all this time; the mess was so big I couldn't even cook properly. In that time, Edward got involved with a girl, she was a colleague of his from university. Her family was rather well-off, and they ended up living together in her apartment. After Edward graduated, he wanted to marry her. I didn't exactly approve, because she was as vain as she was beautiful, but I was old fashioned: they lived together, they have to get married, I thought. So they did, and they stayed together for two or three years. Meanwhile, she got a job in the dean's office at the university, where she met a lot of foreign students. She ended up with a Greek one, nine years younger than she was, and the marriage ended. Edward was very affected by all this; he had a nervous breakdown. He was in such a bad shape, I had to commit him to a hospital for two weeks, and feed him very well - which back then was a real problem - to heal him. [Editor's note: food was scarce during the last years of the communist regime; bread, milk, meat were given on food stamps.] He also stayed at Paraul Rece [resort and sanatorium in Transylvania] for two weeks, and after that he was okay again.

In 1986, he came to my office, and he said, 'Mama, sit down. I decided to emigrate to Israel, and please remember what you promised!' So as hard as it was to let my only child go away, I did. His father didn't approve at all, but Edward's mind was all made up, and within six months, I think, he was gone. I didn't want to join him, I had my friends here, my life, and he was just getting started.

He settled in Beer Sheva, and in the same year, he met Alice. She was a Sephardi Jew; she worked in a bank. Edward's savings were 50 dollars, and he went to the bank to see how he could invest the money, and that's how they met. They married the following year, in 1987. I thought it was too soon, but he was really lucky this time. Alice is a beautiful, special and generous woman, and a devoted mother to their children: they have two daughters, Orly was born in 1988, and Sigal born in 1989. I told him that, no matter how good their life was, he should think of himself as a billionaire, for having such healthy and beautiful children, and such a good wife. Edward works as a wood engineer at a good company, although he had to find a new job recently because the company he worked for fired people and he was among them. But he quickly found another job, an even better one.

I was happy to hear about the birth of the State of Israel, in spite of all the obstacles and hostile policies towards Jews I'd seen during those years. I've been to Israel several times, even before 1989. In 1975 I went to visit some friends of mine. There was one family, doctor Stern and his wife, Jews from Brasov, who had left for Israel some time ago, in 1954, I think. But first I went to Netanya, to visit the Kirschners, Karol and Chaia. I made friends with them in a very original manner. I was in the bus, on my way to Poiana Brasov [Poiana Brasov is Romania's premier ski resort located 12 km far from Brasov], and I heard a couple speak in English. I talked to them, and I found out that they were Jews who lived in Israel. They originally came from the Czech Republic, but they fled the country to escape Hitler when they were still very young. They were young, in their twenties, when that happened, and they ended up in India, were they both fought in the 9th Hebrew legion, led by Moshe Dayan 18. They liked me very much, they took me out, and when they left, they invited me to Israel. So I went to visit them for two weeks. After that I visited doctor Stern, who was in Beer Sheva. I was very impressed with everything I saw in the Israeli museum. All my friends spoiled me, and I was very touched that people weren't afraid of speaking their mind, of meeting in the street, of the living conditions. I went to Israel in 1983 as well, back to the Sterns. Then I went to visit Edward and Alice, who were living in her apartment back then; one time was in 1997 and the other last year. They have moved into a beautiful villa.

I used to listen to Radio Free Europe 19 at home after I got divorced, so from 1968 on, because I had more free time; I set the radio by the stove and at a low level, and I listened and knitted at the same time, especially during the night; my favorite was Niculai Munteanu. [He was a well-known Romanian editor who worked for Radio Free Europe in its headquarters in Munich, and did broadcasts about Romanian politics.] That's where I heard the news about the wars in Israel. [Editor's note: the Six-Day-War 20 and the Yom Kippur War 21]

My father died in 1989, it was during the revolution [the Romanian Revolution of 1989] 22, and my mother died six weeks after him, in 1990. They were both buried in the Jewish cemetery. Because of the troubled times, I couldn't bring a rabbi or a chazzan for my father's funeral, there was just a minyan and somebody recited the Kaddish, but when mother died, I phoned Bucharest and they sent a chazzan to recite the prayer. I keep the Yahrzeit, I don't know the date after the Jewish calendar, but I light a candle on their birthdays and on the days they died. I was in mourning for 14 months after my parents, one year for each of them; even my underwear was black - that was the custom in Bukovina. I sat shivah for eight days after they died, I kneeled in a corner on the bare ground and cried, and after eight days I called my sister and we went round the house. Erika didn't sit shivah and she didn't go in mourning either.

I was happy when the Revolution of 1989 broke out, I hoped for better times, but my father was dying, my mother as well, so it was a black period for me. I saw all the events on TV, because I didn't go outside: I could hear shots and I was afraid.

I'm not sure things got better, but they have certainly changed. Of course, it's a relief to be allowed to say what you think, not to stay in a queue for three eggs for five hours and then not get them, and I was lucky with a certain law, which acknowledges that we were deported and gives us some advantages: 12 free train tickets, free radio-TV subscription, free bus tickets, and some free medicine, plus a small pension. But the dirt in the streets, the lack of civilization I see, and the anti-Semitism are all more often seen.

I receive a pension from the Germans, not very big, but it helps. I was involved in the Jewish community, I liked to pay visits to the community's office, or take some cookies there, at least until last year, when I had a severe heart attack and almost died. But I'm happy to be alive; I have a beautiful family. I did a lot of needlework in the last years, I have made beautiful gobelin tapestries. I also went to concerts or hiking, but now I have to take better care of my health.

Glossary

Olga Banyai
(nee Mermelstein)
Budapest
Hungary
Interviewer: Anna Legman
Date of Interview: June 2004

Mrs. Olga Banyai lives in an apartment overlooking the street on one of the floors of an old, VI.District apartment building. A couple years ago she had a serious brain hemorrhage, so she couldn't remember certain events, years and dates, and her memories were sometimes confused. Despite this, she recalled many stories and memories from her childhood and her ancestors. Because of the state of her health, today she can rarely get out of her apartment, but her family, her son and daughter, and grandchildren are at her side, mutually supporting each other.

Family background
Growing up
During the war
Post-war
Glossary

Family background

My great-great-grandfather on the maternal side was Mozes Herskovits. He was a Romanian. My father and mother were distant cousins, my maternal and paternal grandmothers were siblings. My great-great-grandmother was Lotti Reich, she was born in 1827, probably in Orgovany. But aside from this, the entire family lived in Romania, in Transylvania, spread all over: in Sziget [Maramarossziget], Palotamezo [Palotamezo was no longer included in the 1910 Hungarian census], Kolozsvar, Csenger. [Of this list, Csenger, a large town near the Romanian border was never a part of Romania.] My great-great- grandfather was a merchant, landowner and became poor because he vouched for somebody - signed some bill in someone's stead - and lost all his land. Then the children started popping up, he had four children. They lived in Bikszad. Bikszad was the nest. [Bikszad - a small town with a 160 room spa; became Romanian after Trianon.] One of my great-great-grandfather's grandchildren was my grandmother Julia, and another was my other grandmother, Netti.

My grandmother's father was a famous rabbi, they lived well-off in Csenger. They had - I believe - six children: four girls and two boys. But more of my ancestors were born in Bikszad, and were Hungarians. They were very cultured. My grandmothers were raised like that, I don't know exactly what school they finished, but they always said how cultured the boys were and the girls, too. But that was the [family] branch where the girls were schooled also. That's why my grandmothers were cultured.

My grandmothers' brother was Samuel Stern, who lived here in Damjanich street [Budapest]. He was my mother's Uncle, then there was Mozes in Erdely [Transylvania - in Hungarian]. There was also a rich landlord in Ersekujvar [Ersekujvar - city of 16,300 inhabitants in 1910, was annexed by Czechoslovakia after Trianon, now in Slovakia]. There were a few landlords among the relatives, I had a landlord great-grandfather, and there was a landlord great uncle, my mother's uncle. I believe, he didn't have a family, or children, but he was a very rich gentleman. They called him the landlord. We wrote about possibly getting some kind of compensation, and they wrote back that we can't, because he wasn't directly related, but was my mother's uncle.

Samuel Stern avoided the war, he was a teacher, his wife was a teacher, he had one son. He was a lawyer-attorney. They were very sweet folk. Their son was called, dr. Pal Somjen. He was a very nice, enchanting person, well- loved. It was always very good to go here with the children to Damjanich street. It was truly one of those places where they greet you with open arms. We met them quite often, we had a close relationship. Today the family has all died off. The daughter died, she was my age, but died of cancer at the age of forty-six. The last to die was Samuel's wife, Annus [from Anna]. Annus was a girl from Devecser, her parents were also killed. She was an only daughter. Her father was a doctor. She lived with her son- in-law, because her daughter died earlier than she did. One of the hands of the son-in-law's new wife was paralysed. She cooked with one arm, shopped and dressed, as well. The family was well-off, teachers and instructors were well-paid at that time. And there was Pali [diminutive of Pal - (Paul)] the lawyer, but he's no longer living. Eight, nine years ago, he died of cancer.

Mozes Stern, I don't know what he did. I only know that he had a very pretty daughter named Olga. There's an Olga in all branches of my family. I don't know what the daughter did, I never met her, I just heard about her from one of my cousins, and he showed me pictures of her. I know she lived in Erdely, probably in Kolozsvar. The family was spread all around Erdely.

As for my maternal grandfather, the Herskovitses weren't rich, nor poor, but even if they were poor, they wouldn't show it. If clothes were stained, they were cleaned and ironed, and everybody saw what orderly people they were. You never saw them dirty, or in rags! If someone is poor, it doesn't mean they have to let themselves go.

My maternal grandfather was Jakab Herskovits. He died about the same time his youngest daughter (my aunt) was born, in 1895. Since he was born in Csenger in 1860, he was about thirty-five years old. His heart gave out on him. For the sake of something different, he was a tavern owner. But in the family they always just talked about how, 'Imagine Grandma, blind with all those children!' All I know of Grandpa, was that once a year, when the new year came [Yahrzeit], he lit candles. I don't know more about him.

My maternal grandmother was a very clever lady. They were rich. In those days, the wealthy people didn't make their women work. They never talked about what happened, when Grandpa died. Obviously, they split the property up among the children. People then weren't so unsatisfied as they are today. They weren't so demanding. Then my maternal grandmother, poor woman, was taken to Auschwitz at the age of eighty-three.

My mother is Eszter Herskovits, born in Bikszad in 1894. My mother didn't have an education. Grandma was left alone with a lot of children, and went blind with the last one. I don't know how she raised the children, only that they all turned out to be people. Two became cantor teachers. Samuel Herskovits was from Vecses. Dezso Herskovits was from Dombovar, he had ten children.

Samuel was the oldest sibling. He lived in Vecses, had a family, five children. He had a son named Laci Halmos - he magyarized his name - who was a bank director at the Ertekforgalmi [Securities Trade] Bank. He was called up for work service [Forced labor]1 and died.

My mother's next sibling, Dezso, was a soldier in the First World War [Military in the Austro-Hungarian Empire]2. He had ten children. When his wife died, he was left with the ten children. He split the children up among relatives. He couldn't have worked [and raised the children] anyway. The ten children got used to independence. Many came up to Pest, and here in Pest they survived. Those who didn't come to Pest, all died in forced labor. Two of his children went into hiding, Klari in Pesterzsebet, Olga in Budapest. Both of Olga's children died in the war, they starved. After the war, she had two more children, who emigrated to Israel. Her son was killed in Israel on his twenty-first birthday, it was deemed a hero's death. Klari had a clothing shop downtown, but she always felt like an outsider in the family.

Dezso's son Jeno also hid out somewhere. After the war, things went well for him, he still had his business in Pest [Budapest], a women's clothing shop, they lived from that. He had two children. He had a car. He was going somewhere with his twelve-year old son and they hit a truck, and his son's carotid artery was cut. He died instantly. The little daughter survived. Jeno couldn't stand the pain of it, he died soon after.

Then there was my mother's next sibling, Pali. He didn't have children. And somehow, in the forced labor, he survived the war. Then he emigrated to New York. He had heart problems, they amputated his leg, he died from that.

There was Miksa, he had a son. A very pretty only child. He came over, so I could write to my siblings - because they were already in America - to help him get out [flee Hungary], because he didn't have anyone in America [to officially invite or sponsor him for a visa]. His father was in the hospital with cancer, and at that time he always asked when is his son going, already. I got a letter from my younger brother, that he'd arrange it, and he could go soon. But he wrote something, like he couldn't arrange it overnight. We should arrange everything here, he'll figure a way to get the son out sooner. I went in to see Miksa in the hospital, it was after an operation, and I knew it was metastatic, they couldn't save him. I read to him that his son could go to America, that they arranged everything, it's all fine. I lied to him, it was a complete lie. The poor guy, I really loved my cousin. [sic - It seems, that Miksa wasn't her mother's brother, but another relative.]

I don't know too much about my mother's other siblings, there was Aunt Hanna, Sara and Fani, all three died in Auschwitz.

My father's family was more 'pulled apart' than 'held together'. He wasn't in contact with his immediate family. As close as the Herskovits family was, the Mermelstein's were that distant.

My paternal grandfather was called Mano Mermelstein. I visited them once, they lived in Szolnok. They had two small houses, his daughter Zseni lived in one, my grandfather lived in the other. Zseni had a family already, three little girls, Manci [from Maria], Etus [from Etel - (Ethel)] and Ella. Her husband was a travelling salesman. Zseni died young from consumption, her oldest child was probably eight years old at the time. I knew their father, he travelled to Subcarpathia. He was left alone with the children. He was a traveller, a lot of Jews went house to house all over, with all kinds of things, with saccharine, I don't know, some little things. He was that kind of salesman on a small scale, not big. They weren't big businesses. Manci is still living. That's all I know about my father's side, whatever Manci told me.

My grandfather was a comb-maker. He made the combs, and sold them, too. He was able to support the family with his comb profession. They went from city to city. They sold things in the bigger cities: Munkacs, Ungvar, Beregszasz, Nagyszolos [Subcarpathia]3. They took my grandmother with them. They had a lot of children there, too. There was Marton - that was my father. There was Zseni, Olga, Tamara, Dora and Libi. I already told you about Zseni. Libi perished in the war, in Auschwitz. She had an eight-year old daughter. Olga left for Palestine already before the war, she's got a daughter and a grandson who live in America. I don't know anything about Tamara. Dora, who lived here in Pest, was deported but survived. Her husband and five-year old daughter were taken into the ghetto, in Wesselenyi street, into the temple ghetto [Budapest ghetto]. Her husband starved to death there, the little girl survived. A cousin of hers brought her out of the ghetto, when we were liberated. They took her away, soaked the clothes off of her because she had lice, she had sores and everything. They shaved her head, you know they could hardly get all the lice off of her. She stayed with them for a couple months, until her mother came back. Her mother survived. She was a very clever little girl. When her father was already weak, and they rationed out the bread slices, the little girl gave her own bread to her father.

Grandpa died, I believe, a couple years before the war, not in the war. My maternal grandma, Netti Stern died young, she was exhausted from all the travel. Her sister, Julia Stern, my maternal grandmother was taken to Auschwitz at age 83. It was probably better for those who died earlier.

My father, Marton Mermelstein was born in Tiszaujlak in 1897.

Grandpa, Mano wasn't religious. But my father was religious, he was the only religious person in the family. There were five siblings, but only he was religious. He studied [the Talmud and the Torah]. He always studied. His siblings didn't like him, because he always studied. His siblings had to work, my father had to study. He was the only son. That's how he later became a travelling salesman.

The Mermelstein's didn't suffer, they weren't killed in heaps, like the Herskovitses. Always the good ones - there's a saying: 'Always the good ones go away.' In my family, the good ones went away. The Herskovitses were all kind people. Generous, they gave to the poor. The whole family was so charitable. They even shared what little they had. They were all killed.

Growing up

I'm eighty-one years old, and I had a brain hemorrhage. My brain - I've got a paper about it - is officially faulty. I've got a Jewish name. My name is Braha, blessing. I'm the blessing. Mrs. Janos Banyai, Olga Mermelstein. I was born May 10, 1923 in Bikszad in Szatmar County. When I was an infant, they took me to Subcarpathia, to Huszt. [At her birth, Huszt (now Khust) was a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In 1910, the nearly 10,000 residents were 51 percent Ruthenian, 34 percent Hungarian and 15 percent German. Of those, 23 percent were part of the Jewish community. After Trianon it went to Czechoslovakia. In 1938, it was reannexed by Hungary, and in 1945 it became part of the Soviet Union. Now it belongs to the Ukraine.]

It was a very pretty small town, with quite a lot of Jews living there, but few returned after the war. People there somehow mingled together, it didn't count then who was Jewish, who was Christian. We got along well with the Christians, we were friends. They came over, we went over [to their houses]. We played dolls together. There wasn't any problem under the sun with the fact that we were Jews. There were Ruthenians, very decent people. We got along better with them, but my mother missed the Hungarian language. Huszt was a Jewish city - we learned Yiddish in school, all of us. We were somehow separate from the big family. From almost everyone. My parents were distant cousins. Our grandmothers were sisters. My mother went to visit at my father's house, and they fell in love with each other. My grandmother was very much against it, but then a wedding came out of it anyway. It wasn't a bad marriage, just the problem was that my father was religious, there were religious problems. My father was more religious than my mother. My mother was already a more modern thinker at that time. That was the problem, but there weren't any arguments. Once in a while, they'd quarrel. My father said, that's because my mother wasn't religious enough.

My father wasn't a soldier in the First World War. They dripped something in his ear [to avoid conscription], and he carried that with him his whole life, he had a bad ear. They ruined his ear so he wouldn't be a soldier. A Hungarian soldier. There he wouldn't have gotten kosher food, and he insisted upon it [eating kosher].

My parents were tent marketeers. Once a week there was a big market - Huszt was a small town, at that time about 25,000 residents. They put out a table, full of all kinds of things, and they came and bought candies, and whatever else they sold. I don't know, ...they sold fruits, whatever there was at the time. Then my father gave that up, and became a salesman. Then they called them travellers, he became a traveller. He went to the Czech cities with this type of window blinds, that's what he sold. And we could live from that. He sent fifty-five crowns [Czech currency] every week. My father wasn't home too much, he was always travelling. I saw him four times, when I was little, when I was six years old, when I ten years old, that was a harder period at home. When I was fourteen years old, I saw him for the last time. He was always on the road.

The last fifteen years he lived in one place, in Prague, he worked for a famous rabbi. I don't know what exactly he did. I only know that he lived there, that was his permanent address. We never went to see him. We weren't that well-off that we could travel. I did travel, and that's how I met my Transylvanian relatives during the war, because I had to get my citizenship [KEOKH - National Central Alien Control Office].

Relatives of mine lived in Szinervaralja, Remetemezo, Bikszad, Somkutpataka, Szatmarnemeti and Kolozsvar. It was a large family. [All of these cities named belonged to Romania after Trianon. Kolozsvar alone was in Romania before the treaty.] They were scattered all over, and then my mother said to go visit them. Aside from this, we also travelled when we were sick. There wasn't a hospital in our town, if I was sick, for example when they took out my appendix, then I travelled to Beregszasz [Berehove] and back.

My mother always wore an apron at home, and always had small change in the apron. If a beggar came, she always gave. We had our own beggars. I'm sure they had more money than we did. She gave anyway, she helped, and taught us by doing that. I was like that, too. I helped, and helped, and I don't regret it. I had lots of friends. They really loved me, I loved them, too. There was no difference, if they were Jewish or Christian. Or Gypsy either. The Gypsies [Roma] have really difficult, very disadvantaged lives.

We were Hungarian citizens until 1918, we always felt we were Hungarians. The villages, cities which I just listed, that was Hungary. I really loved Erdely, too. My mother told me so much about it, it was good to listen to her. The family was big, and everybody had some story.

Jakab Mermelstien is my older brother. And now for sixty years, he's 'Jack'. He was born in 1921 in Somkut, in Szatmar county. My parents were living there at the time. They wandered around quite a lot.

My younger brother, Ignac Mermelstein was born in Huszt in 1926. The mother tongues of all three of us are Hungarian and Yiddish, and naturally we also knew Ruthenian. We spoke Hungarian in Romania. Not many spoke Hungarian in Huszt, so we had to learn the Ruthenian language, too. All three of us went to a Ruthenian school. [Ruthenians: the name for an East Slavic people living in what was once Galicia and Subcarpathia, as well as Bukovina and who speak a Ukrainian dialect.]

I knew Hungarian, also, I learned a little German, Yiddish and German are very similar. I was happy with that for a couple years, and I developed further with English. I had to learn a little English, because if I went to [visit] my little brother's family in America, so I would have had to speak only English. They said that I spoke quite well, but now I don't know any English anymore.

My brothers went to a Jewish school. Jewish school lasted for half a day, either morning or afternoon. It was obligatory in our family, my father insisted on it. [probably a cheder]. Among my ancestors, there were cantors, teachers. The Jewish school was there in Huszt, the two boys went there. My father learned it, and he wanted the boys to learn Hebrew, too. They learned how to pray. I even know how to pray, I just don't understand a word of it.

My older brother finished grammar school, that was popular then. He didn't learn anything else. He was very talented, but since he was Jewish, they were careful not to support Jews. As a Jewish child, his drawings were out in the hall [on display], he was so talented. And he was very clever, he knew a lot about everything. At the age of fifteen, he took over the work from mother - he'd never studied how to sew - he sewed trousers beautifully, men's trousers. And then, at the age of fifteen, he became the family provider. We respected him and loved him, because he was so diligent. He saw that my mother was struggling with the three children, and we lived really far from the city, six kilometers away. You had to go by foot, and clothes had to be carried there, and the tailored work had to be brought back, and then my older brother took it over. My mother struggled a lot, but she didn't complain ever.

My older brother became a tailor. But a life artist, too. He could do something with anything. He made candy brittle in his childhood. He was still in grammar school, and he made candy brittle from sugar. He roasted it, then wrapped it and sold it. He had pocket money, and even my mother got some of it. When he was already older, then he made bead strings, and colored watch chains. It was the fashion then, the peasants wore them. He always figured something out. He was very talented.

The family was religious. Mainly, my father. He was somewhere between the Neolog 4and the Orthodox5. He went to the bath [mikveh] and to temple everyday, and only after that would he unpack his wares. He was very sensitive to cleanliness. He never went into the street without a hat. He had a regular coat, normal shirt [not characteristically Hassidic clothing] and he had a little beard like this.

The rest of us weren't really temple-goers. My mother went once or twice a year, for the high holidays. The boys also went. Girls didn't have to go to temple. We did have to study religion. And Hebrew, too. All through grammar school we studied religion. I learned to read it, I just don't know what it means anymore.

I remember childhood celebrations. We were poor, but on Fridays we always held a regular holiday dinner. On Friday, you had to properly cook. We made brioche, fresh bread, meat soup. That was the usual thing, we always did this. My mom had a feeling for it, she didn't work on Saturday, didn't warm anything on Saturday, she cooked the kinds of things that you didn't have to warm up. In my childhood, we cooked dried plums and dried apples, and every week there had to be brioche. We had to wake up early Saturday morning. We could hardly wait to get to eat the brioche. Here in my household, it wasn't possible [to keep kosher]. My husband, Janos Banyai was Dunantul [from the 'beyond-the-Danube' region], from Nagykanizsa. His parents kept the Sabbath, the kids didn't much anymore.

On Saturday the boys went to temple, my mother went to the neighbors to talk a bit. She'd take me, too. Later, I went to one of my girlfriends, and when the boys came home, then it was lunch. At the Jewish homes, chulent was the main lunch at noon on Saturday. But we didn't like chulent. My mother rarely made it. She made plenty of salads, tarhonya [a pasta] with beef or chicken, meat soup. She made apple compote, lit candles, and if my father was home, then there were very serious lunches and dinners, my father always prayed at them. It was so cosy and peaceful. It's completely different when the head of the family is home.

At Passover, we ate and there's a tradition in the seder that you're not allowed to eat bread. So before that you had to clean out everything, and everything in the world had to be moved. Clean beautifully, and change the dishes. We did this, and it was a good piece of work, a little different than the everyday [cleaning]. Once on seder night, my father gave me a piece of matzot to put away, as a reward. You get a gift for it. I hid it, but the rest... I don't know anymore what I got. But I was very proud, that I got to hide the piece of matzot. You had to keep it for a while.

Then there were the high holidays, when my mother also went to temple. The women wore white dresses. There was Purim, then there was the Day of Atonement [Yom Kippur], there was Sukkot, the tent holiday, these we all kept, and my mother always went to temple then. Then came the mourning day for the dead, we lit candles or a little lamp, my mother kept it for me so I wouldn't accidentally forget to remember her loved ones.

I was sick a lot. Not seriously sick, a little cold, a little fever, this, that, it was enough that I just didn't feel good. Since I was the only girl, I had to clean and watch my little brother. When I was sick, then my brothers did the cleaning. We lived in a dirt-floor house in Huszt. Every week I had to do a big cleaning. My mother took the work, the finished work, and brought things to cook. I stayed at home to clean. Every year we had to white-wash it inside and out. Every week we had to putty up [the cracks]. My mother was maniacally clean. I had to wash, too, I had to do a weekly washing. For the big washing, Mariska came, my mother's friend, and she did it.

I always had to take care of my little brother. Because my mother worked, and when she left home, went into the city, I had to look after my little brother. It was a very big burden on me. My older brother was in school, I was together with my little brother. The area around our house was a very dangerous place, there was a canal in front of the house. And that went to the Tisza River [the second largest river in Hungary]. We really had to be careful that children didn't fall in. My whole childhood was spent looking after my little brother. I hated my little brother because I was tied down and I really liked to play. And now we're best friends.

Once when I was little, my father laughed at me. When my little brother was born, I was three years old. My mother nursed the child, and I wanted to be nursed, too. Until then there had been two of us, and then the third child came. I was jealous of my brother. My mother nursed him, and I wanted to be nursed, too. I sat down on the ground and cried. My father was home, and he laughed at me. I grabbed a shoe and threw it at my father. He laughed at me. He was rarely at home, and he only beat me once, when I was six years old. I was his favorite. He didn't see me much, but I was his only daughter. So much love flowed toward me. He didn't like the boys, he was very strict with them, because he wanted them to study [religion], too. But the boys weren't very interested in religion, though they went to the Jewish school.

My father always sent some kind of gewgaw, something to wear, beads, jewelry, sometimes he sent oranges. So he always sent packages. Plus he sent home the fifty-five crowns and fifty filler. The postman brought that to me, I went to the post office every week.

I really loved to play. I had girlfriends. I really loved to play dolls, and to build houses out of mud, and furniture and everything. My mother, as a seamstress, had these little pieces of cloth, I took them, and had a good time playing with the peasant kids. At that time, they sewed dolls for children themselves. If you were clever, you sewed a doll for your girlfriend. Plus we made furniture and a dollhouse. It was great to be little then, despite the fact that you had to sweep, too. Everything was good then. It's the same now, if people would be a little more modest, they'd live a lot more happily.

I did very nice needlework. Once I didn't dare go home, because I got a five [the worst grade then] in needlework. At that time, a one was the best grade. I was crying when I told how I got a five in needlework. My mother bathed me, and tucked me in, nothing happened. I didn't know that it wasn't my fault, that I failed because she didn't give me money for needlework. But after that, I always had needlework.

I fell down a lot in my childhood. We had to go on stone streets, and tights were popular then. My tights always ripped, when I went to school. I went home, fell down again, my mother came home late, she'd done the shopping during the day, that night she washed them and patched them.[probably darned them, that is, 'patched' the hole in the cotton 'floret stockings' with a multi-string thread in a singular pattern.] The next day, I put them on again. Later I patched them, too. When I patched them, my mother, who wasn't big on praise, complimented me. 'That's my little girl', and I was very proud of that. It can be good to be poor too, if that's how it turns out. I didn't want anything else, we had everything. Our parents did all they could to dress us decently and send us to school.

I remember from those times that once my mother went to visit relatives in Erdely, and she took a sack of pastries. Her mother was alive then, and my aunt, too. My mother told us how happy they were. A sack of pastries were even cheaper then, in the 1930s. There in Subcarpathia, we didn't have anybody, we were wanderers.

We didn't really get to see my paternal grandparents, because we didn't have money for travel. Once we went, all three of us kids, to a wedding, and it was really good, because there was a big garden. And there was an oven, and since I was the guest, I got to sleep on the top of the oven. It was very interesting. I got clothes then, that was a rare thing, to get clothes for a wedding. And I was very happy. It was my aunt Libi's wedding. She ended up in Auschwitz, too. They lived in Munkacs [Mukaceve], they took them away from there. It was a proper wedding, she had on a pretty white dress. When I went out the gate of the temple, then they threw confetti. I loved it so much, I was about five or six. There was good food then, so we partied well. But my mother always said: you have to behave! Well we had to, you couldn't horse around there.

I always loved to work, and I always had work. I took on everything. My first job was at age fourteen, when I finished grammar school. When I finished, I went to a family and had to watch two twins. Their mother had lung problems. They were about eleven years old, I was fourteen. I had to watch them, it was just like when an older sister watches the younger ones. They gave me something to eat, they gave me clean clothes, they had no problems with me. I didn't have to clean, because I was a child myself. Though I was already cleaning at home, I started early, I didn't play much, I had to work a lot at home.

Then when I was already bigger, I started working on Fo street in a hat shop, in a first-class place. They were very satisfied with me. I was so happy. That was a good place. And I set aside my fillers [pennies], and went to study in the trade school. I learned millinery [hat making]. My mother asked me, what do you want to be? A seamstress or something else? I said, something else, and it sounded so good then. Women's milliner. And I became something else, though I surely would have been a good seamstress. Because I already had the background. I saw it at home.

I knew the Hungarian language, because my mother was a native speaker, but I couldn't write it, I just learned to speak it from my mother. Then they enrolled me in the Ruthenian school, and I finished eight classes in Ruthenian. Later in the trade school, we learned Hungarian. You had to study in Hungarian, you had to learn Hungarian, and that's when I learned Hungarian. Things went well, I didn't have a problem. At that time, if there was work, then there wasn't a problem.

Thank god, we didn't have conflicts in Huszt. Because for us it didn't matter who was Jewish and who wasn't. We were so lucky, my mother got along with everybody. They came, 'please sew these trousers. My child's pants have holes in the knees, please fix them.' Friday night, there was always brioche at our house. That's when the children got crescent brioche. My mother fixed the pants for the children, and well, they didn't even pay. And that's how it went.

I didn't feel that some stranger would hurt us, nobody, never. Nobody ever said, 'smelly Jew' to me. My poor mother, but she helped in those little ways a lot. For the peasants, and the poor.

What was hard, was that we were Hungarians. There were ladies, proper ladies, Christians, who would have liked to talk to my mother, but they couldn't speak Hungarian, just Ruthenian. The majority were Ruthenian. My mother didn't know Ruthenian. Or rather, she spoke Ruthenian very badly. That was difficult. Nothing else.

There were a lot of Jews in Huszt. The Jews in general were merchants, they did business. The ladies almost never worked. My mother worked, because my father was sick for a while, and she had to learn to sew, so we could live from something. The wealthier Jews acted so strangely with the poor. They felt different than them. And that's somehow why they didn't like them. I didn't like, for example, the 'Lipotvaros' ones, either. [A stereotype of wealthy Jews; Gyula Zeke wrote, Lipotvaros in the 1870's 'attracted the modern, big city functionaries, and this district (of Budapest) was home to the big capital institutions and Jewish upper middle classes'.]

There were three Mermelstein families in Huszt. I heard there were some in Munkacs and in Beregszasz, too. In one of the kibbutzes, there's a roll of names of those killed in the time of loss, and my father's name is on it. And there are a lot of Mermelsteins on the list. That's how I know they were in Munkacs, too. These were generally rich people. Lumber merchants, all kinds of merchants. Then you bought land, it was their business, spice shops, delicatessens. One of my classmates was even called Mermelstein, I was poor, she was rich. When I was studying at the trade school, she came in with a blue fox on her neck ['blue fox' - a high-quality gray arctic fox stole with bluish highlights, a truly expensive piece in Europe at the time] - because as I said, the hat shop was in a elegant quarter - and she said, 'Good Day' to me! [the most formal greeting for strangers] I didn't return her greeting. Why should she greet me with 'Good Day' when we went to school together for eight years? But I saw her, when she was very unfortunate.

During the war

When the Hungarians came in to Huszt [First Vienna Decision]6, the Jewish laws [anti-Jewish Laws]7 came. My mother was a big Hungarian. It was a Thursday. The Hungarians are coming, the Hungarians are coming! - said my mother. She was so happy that the Hungarians were coming, she'll have someone to talk to. There were a lot of Hungarians in Erdely. Much fewer in Huszt. She made the pickle on Thursday afternoon, then went down to city hall to welcome them. Well, she couldn't have been happy for long.

Then came the crying, when almost all three of the children had to leave at once! And it's good that we left, because we survived. If we'd stayed, then we surely wouldn't have survived. We had no work, nor anything to eat. The Hungarians came, they wanted to see the papers, that we were Hungarians. I left to visit the relatives, so we'd have the papers. I got the papers together. But meanwhile, I was there for a couple weeks with the relatives. They all jumped on me, that here's Olgica, Eszti's little girl, they'd never seen me before. Although I was born in Bikszad. I was Transylvanian, too.

I got the citizenship together, and it was quiet for a while. [But] When the time came, 1944, they killed the whole family together with their citizenship. They killed my father in 1941, they took him away in Prague, and we didn't know anything about him. Later, we found out he'd been taken to Theresienstadt 8. I just saw the museum, I was in Israel. They made a museum on a kibbutz, for just those who'd been taken to Theresienstadt, and there's a memorial plaque there for my father. My little brother found it.

And so my mother stayed there with three children. True, we were already pretty grown up [The three siblings were born in 1921, 1923 and 1926]. My little brother, Ignac was in grammar school when the Jewish laws came. They kicked him out of school, and he wasn't allowed to study. I wasn't allowed to work. My older brother, Jakab (he later became Jack) they called him up for 'work service' [forced labor] in Koszeg. They took away my mother's work, too. She worked in a dress shop as a home-worker seamstress. Those she worked for, they were also Jewish small businessmen, they had a business, but that also closed.

There were some who hung themselves. There was a very sweet spice merchant neighbor, who was already elderly, and when they said they were taking people in, without a word, he hung himself. He was a very smart man. Mister Zoli Szabo, he was called, I greatly respect him that he hung himself. It's better than the gas. He took the pleasure away from the Germans [sic - Nazis]. He was a very good neighbor. There were a lot of poor people living around there, and he gave them goods without getting paid, he wrote it up in a little notebook. And he'd say to the person, they can pay him next week or the week after, and he trusted them. That's how he stayed in business. Poor people always paid their debts. That was the old man whom I bought candy from when I was little, and he wrapped it in newspaper. He was a really decent man.

I was nineteen years old, when I had to get away from Huszt. Until the age of nineteen, I worked for a Jewish man who was a milliner. They shut down the business, sent three assistants away, and kept me. He took me to his apartment, hid me away in a dark room, and there, in that haze we worked for him. I don't know exactly... I recall it was about a year, but it could have been less. The point is that I was happy to be able to work.

Then times got really hard. Uncle Dezso came for the summer to my mother's, and my mother was there, too. Uncle Dezso sent a message, 'My Olgica, go up to Pest [Budapest], my daughter is there, she's very smart and very diligent, she'll help you find a position.' I came up to Pest. I brought my little brother with me, who was sixteen. We took a monthly room on Dob street, and stayed there for a month. Then we found a better one on Kossuth Lajos street, next to the old Uttoro Department Store. I couldn't stand my little brother. He always jumped up on moving trams. I sent him to Uncle Dezso, who was a cantor teacher in Dombovar. He accepted my brother right alongside his own ten children. There you could still study, nobody asked if you were Jewish or Christian. My uncle signed my brother up to be an electrician [trade school] And then for work they went to a Schwabian [ethnic German Hungarians]. They pretty soon... it came up what religion are you. My brother said, he didn't speak Hungarian so well, because they spoke Yiddish at home, that he's Jewish. Then the assistant kicked him, why did he say he was Jewish. They didn't kick him out because, in fact he was a hard-working kid, they let him work. My little brother learned to be an electrician there. At that time, they didn't give my mother work anymore, and my older brother was in work service.

On Uncle Dezso's advice, I looked up Olga, and told her, 'Hello, I'm Aunt Eszti's daughter.' Aunt Eszti was her aunt. 'I already heard about you, come on, my Olgica', she always called me that. 'I'll run a hot bath for you, but you are a big girl!' But she wasn't like that with just me, but with everybody. And when the war broke out, they took her husband away to forced labor with my later husband. Her husband and my husband were brothers, and they married two cousins, because Olga and I were cousins.

When I looked Olga up, my future husband was living there - Olga's brother- in-law. That's how we met. He was so happy when he first saw me. He could love you excessively. He loved me so much that he always wanted to be with me, and wanted to hear my voice. Now also, until his death, everything was very nice and very good.

In 1942 in Pest, I was already a milliner. Like everyone, I was looking for work. I had a pair of rags, that I tried to keep decent. I didn't do a lot of shopping. I had an oil-burner, that I made myself morning tea on, and there was a telephone. I didn't really use it. I wasn't a little girl anymore, I was already nineteen. They paid badly, I could barely pay rent. I wasn't in that first hat shop for long, just a short time. Then I found a position somewhere else, on the Vamhaz ringroad. There I had good work. I had to work a lot, but I made good money. The owners were husband and wife, the man was Jewish and the woman was German. I worked there until they called me in [to forced labor].

My younger brother lived with Uncle Dezso, but supported himself. Slowly, they too became poor. Those couple of years were very difficult. All at once they just shut every door in front of you. You couldn't work, you couldn't buy bread, buy milk, anything.

My mother wrote: If you can, go out to Teleki and buy some trousers for your older brother, and find something for his feet, too. I went out to Teleki - it was a kind of flea market - and bought him trousers. She also wrote: 'Don't let there be trouble with your brother, because in the work service you're only allowed to get one letter, and the others they don't hand over, so if you have something to tell him, or you can send him something, then write to me at home, and I'll pass it on to your brother. I had gotten a little money together in Pest. I was very lucky, I always had work. I earned twenty-eight pengo [Hungarian currency before the Forint] a week. I arranged it, and sent it.

Don't send me anything, mother wrote, because I've got everything. From what does she have everything? They kicked her out of her job, because she was Jewish. I couldn't imagine where she could have had everything from. And plus in the summer - this was in 1942 - my little brother, Ignac went home, and it turned out where from she has everything. She was at the neighbors', with her skirts rolled up, on her knees scrubbing. She became a maid.

My little brother saw that, he was a sensitive child anyway, and he cried so much because she was scrubbing floors. I said, what do you have to cry about? Be happy she's got work, and something to eat. Then he got himself past it, but it really broke his heart. Then mother disappeared. They took her to Auschwitz. She ended up in the crematorium, I know that, because I was in Auschwitz, and I met a classmate of mine, and she said she saw her with her own mother, and knew that where they were lining up to go was to the crematorium. That was the end.

Uncle Dezso's children, Miksa, Miksa Herskovits, then Jeno Herskovits, Lali and Jolan came up to Pest. They came when they guessed something: Those who don't come up, will die.

Olga, to whom I came, was left alone with her children, her husband ended up in the work service. She was ten years older than me, I was the little Olgi. She was a seamstress, a very good seamstress. She studied under Klara Rotschild [fashion designer, opened a salon in 1934, worked as a state employee after 1945, and was the artistic director of the Clara Salon]. She was an excellent seamstress, if she sewed herself a dress, she sewed one for me. We got along so well, and wore the same dresses. She had two little daughters, one was four years old in 1944, the other was two. Both of them perished. They hid in Pest. A bomb hit the house next door to the one in which they were hiding, and then they went into the house. They were there for a couple hours, then started out into the street. A Christian woman called out to Olga, said there's an alarm on, why is she walking in the street. She took them in. The woman's husband was very angry that she adopted them. We haven't got anything to eat, why did you bring this woman and her two kids here? She can't feed her kids! And she couldn't, and the girl starved to death. Gabi. The other girl, Zsuzsa died in the hospital, she had some sickness.

After the war, she and her husband moved to Mezohegyes, the man was a head accountant there, but in 1956 9 they kicked him out of his job. They picked themselves up, and left for Israel. After the war, they had two children, they were successful, clever, educated. One was six years old, the other eleven years old when they left for Israel. The boy died a hero's death on his twenty-first birthday. Olga was the big woman of the kibbutz, they always had lots of guests, because they really liked her, and she worked to the end of her life. She couldn't stay at home. Olgi sewed there in Israel, too. Sanyi worked poor guy, outside in the orange plant.

Here in Pest, they took people away later by a couple weeks. Altogether, they gathered up the Jews and took them away probably within a month.[Plight of Budapest Jews]10 It went very quickly. They had just kicked me out of my job. An Arrow Cross[soldier]11 came, and said I had a quarter of an hour to gather my most important belongings, and come with him. What for, where to? You'll see. I packed up, and he took me to Csepel [island in the Danube]. I worked in the Csepel brick factory for a while. There I met a girl, who became my best girlfriend, to the end of her life she was a very good friend of mine. We went through everything together. She was dr. Stefania Mandy, art historian [Stefania Mandy: poet, art historian, translator]. Stefka was already twenty-five years old, she was an art historian, she had already taught. Before they conscripted her for work service, she was already a real person. And a good friend can give you life, too. Not just me, a couple of us stayed alive only because we succeeded in gathering a couple people around us, with whom we didn't talk about, 'My, how hungry I am, a little poppyseed pastry would be great.' Stefania Mandy held lectures for us, she knew a lot, that we didn't. We were twenty years old, or still eighteen, youngsters. And that was what saved our lives.

They took us from Csepel to Budakalasz by boat. We were there for five days under the open sky. It rained the whole time. Earlier they'd taken our rings, watches. I was engaged already, the ring, the chain, they took it all. I was left with only the clothes I had on. Then they took us into a room. They said, if somebody has to go to the toilet, go then. We went in line to the toilet, and one of the girls hid fifty pengo in the toilet. Then they got us together and took us into another room. Constables12, 'feathered' constables ['kakastollas csendorok', named for the rooster feather on their helmet] came, and started to beat us. We were all girls. And they only beat us, because nobody talked, because the girl who hid the money wasn't among us.

Then they put us on a certain Auschwitz-bound boxcar. We were on a train for five days. There was no toilet, not to mention a place to sleep. We were locked up for days, no food, no water, nothing. In the morning, they gave us some kind of slop. There were some who went crazy there in the boxcar with the child in their arms, some who died, young. Then we arrived. There, the selection began. One right, one left. Whomever they found able- bodied, they took away to work. They cut our hair off, shaved us bald, took off our one article of clothing and gave us some rag. They gave me a black lace dress, and when it got really hot, the lace stuck to my neck, my body. I could laugh that I was 'all in lace' [the impression of the lace marked her skin].

We were very thirsty. We'd gotten off the boxcars, they'd bathed us, cut off our hair, gave us a lace dress, and we were still thirsty. Once they brought a bucket of water, everyone climbed into that bucket. I got a swallow of water too. I'll never forget it as long as I live, how delicious that water was, never! I never ate and drank things that tasted so good, that probably saved my life. I almost died of thirst, not just me, others too. We considered it a separate punishment.

We starved a lot, they beat us. They once hit me in the head so hard from behind with a big club, that my girlfriends just stared to see I was still alive. We were very hungry, I had bent over for a potato skin and that's why they beat my head in. I was okay, that was a personal bit of luck. Then I just watched from in line: they took pregnant mothers away, they never brought them back. They experimented with children. I went before Mengele four times. And all four times I stayed alive. There was a truck. Whomever didn't please him, whomever he thought wasn't able to work, they immediately put on the truck. And by the third selection, I was really thin.

I always collected them - didn't matter if they beat my head in - the potato peels. It was muddy, but I ate it. I had a little package set aside, I was really scared before every selection, I ate them quick. Poor Stefka, she spoke up for all of us, when they dished out the food. Once there was cabbage soup or potato soup, but there were no potatoes in it. Stefka, she said: 'There aren't any potatoes!' She got slapped so hard! We were really sorry for her. Next day, we stood in line again with our little mess-tins. The food server asks: are there enough potatoes? Steffi said, 'Enough'. She would have given her another slap.

Sometimes, at dawn they dragged us out in our one thin dress. They yelled and beat us. We drank puddles, I scratched the frozen garbage pile with a stick to make it easier to pick things up with my hands. He [the guard] gave me such a sudden beating. He said, 'Throw the stick away, do it with your hands!' I threw it away. A lot of people went crazy, and afterwards everybody stayed a little crazy. Me, too.

We got together to listen to Stefania Mandy. I liked her a lot, and I was very proud that I was close to her. She was very smart, a mature person. Klari Hoffman taught us French. So we had a little culture, and that helped a lot. French was so alien to me. I already knew Yiddish, Hungarian and German. But French was somehow very difficult. I never got anywhere with the French language. I wasn't really interested afterwards.

Many times I excused those who sat alone. People went crazy there, too. There were two sisters, one went insane. She looked at her sister helplessly, she couldn't do a thing. They were two girls from Mako. There were young parents who buried their children. I didn't consider myself unfortunate. We made a lot of plans. Who would eat what, who would cook what... One would like to eat this, the other would eat that. It was horrible when we talked about food.

Twelve of us slept in one bunk. If one wanted to turn over, all twelve had to turn over, like herrings, that's the way they put us. The toilet was far, and separate. We went to the toilet quite a lot, because we were very cold at night. The nights were very cold. I saw the crematorium, the smoke, and I always kept looking for my mother. We were very much mama's girls, truth be told. I always searched for my mother, after the war, even on the street, I always looked for a lady in a scarf.

Then they took us from Auschwitz to work in Liebau [This was a sub-camp of the Gross-Rosen concentration camp in the south Silesian town of Liebau (today Lubowka, Poland).] I was in Auschwitz for a couple months. We signed up for work and we got into a really good place, a factory. We were happy that we could work. The first time they gave us food, we got a real goulash. It was such great happiness - that after months we could finally eat something - it's impossible to explain. We said to each other, 'My God, how lucky we are, how great it will be here for us'. There was warm water, a bit rusty, but it was something. We got through about a half year there. How louse-infested we were, and hungry, and ragged! The more there were of us, the easier it was to bear the hunger, and beatings, and that driving pace - we had to work really hard. We bore it all. A lot of them fell out, a lot died. But among us [friends], hardly any died.

We worked in a weapons crate factory. We had to drill those... clips or whatever, with heavy drills. It was so heavy, that it caused an abscess on my neck. There was a sickroom, they put me there. Good God what happens, Mengele came there after us. I said, 'Well, he found me.' I was sure he was going to take me away. He didn't take me away. And that was some kind of holy miracle. I'm sure that was sent by God, because that just doesn't happen. That somebody is lying there sick, and he leaves them there. True it was close to the liberation, but that something like that happened? There aren't many of those kind of miracles.

The liberation was really good. I noticed it. I said, 'Quick, quick come here!' How many were there in the room then? About thirty of us. And everybody wanted to get in front of the other. They saw the French soldiers throw up their hats. There were French prisoners of war there, too. They came in. By that time, the Germans had all run away, not one was left. We greeted them so joyfully! You just can't describe it. I dreamed the liberation. I dreamed that it was spring, and the lilacs were flowering. And Jean, one of the soldiers, and more of them, are running around with lilacs, happily passing them out to everyone. And that's the way it was. The lilacs bloom in May. My dream came true. I think about that very many times. We were there for three more weeks. We had to clean ourselves up, find clothes, there weren't any anywhere. We searched for food. We almost died doing that. I stuffed myself with molasses - a kind of yellow sugar, half-done sugar. You eat more because you feel like, 'More, more!', and you stuff yourself. I ate it and I was so sick. Oh, not just me, the others, too.

Then soon I got better. Then we ate with discretion, a little less of it. I couldn't tell you what we ate. We didn't really pay so much attention to eating then - rather that we organize a way to get back home - that we sleep in humane conditions at all. We looked for an empty apartment. We found an empty German apartment. It was a nice, middle-class apartment, and they had canvas curtains on the windows. We took down a curtain, Kati could sew, and I could somewhat also. And we sewed dresses out of the curtain. We threw away those rags, which we had on. A woman came and asked what we're doing. We said we're sewing dresses. How could we take down the curtains, what will the owner say if they come home? We said, we only took one of the pair, if they're hurt about their curtain, we're a lot more hurt about our loss and sorrow. She grabbed a vase and threw it to the ground. We said, 'For you the [loss of the] curtain hurts, for us our loved ones and our youth hurts. Look at us, how we look. We don't have clothes, nothing.' Then the woman got scared and left. Then a Russian car came. The Russians arrived and gave us food. We trudged along. They escorted us. That's how we came home.

They escorted Stefka away. First her, she was the one who directed the group, and she was the one who got the big beatings many times instead of us, in Auschwitz. We were so sorry for her, she stood up so often for others. They'd killed her father, there was a lot of lamentation, her mother stayed alive. There was one other in our group, Kati Winkler, they also escorted her home, she lived on Suto street. And both of her parents stayed alive. They were at home in the ghetto. The other Kati's father and step-mother were killed, her mother had died before the war. They'd killed one of her brothers, and the poor thing lost her other brother too, he died of an illness. And everyone else's loved ones were also all killed, the other's were orphans just like me.

Post-war

We met occasionally after the war, and that was really good. Annually, and as the years went by, they passed away. One after the other, they died. They died young, quite young. Us three, Kati, Stefka and I lived a long time. Stefka was eighty-three years old when she died. Kati was younger, than me, by two years, I'm already eighty-one years old. I never would have believed that after all that suffering I would live to be eighty-one years old.

After the war, we were here in Pest with my friends in a rented apartment. Three friends took one apartment. My fiance hadn't come home, yet. I had a fiance during the war, who was in the work service, and they didn't take my picture away from him. 'I always think about you, my dear love, and even the greatest suffering will be easy. Budapest, 1944. June 28.' There were other love letters, I just can't find those. They took my mother's last picture away from me, I cried so. Well, we lived from one day to the next. I was lucky that I could adjust to people, and I could say what they wanted to hear.

And the Joint 13 gave us food and something to wear. I got a coat, a dress and food. My name was written on the list, I looked, maybe I might find somebody. I looked for my brothers. My older brother and younger one. Once I saw, 'Ignac Mermelstein, Prague'. I was so happy! I had no idea how he got there. Then he quickly arrived in Pest, and we met here in Bethlen square. Then we started looking for my older brother. We expected him to just come home. One after the other, quite a lot of young people came home, those who could take it.

One day my fiance and I, who was already home, went past the Dohany street Jewish temple and somebody starts yelling from across the street, 'Olga! Jack (then still Jakab) is in the Arena Street [Dozsa Gyorgy Street, today] school.' I didn't know from my joy, if I shouldn't start running there to see him sooner. I went there. 'Oh god, look at you,' and I started crying. He pushed me away. 'What are you crying for?', he said. 'Be happy that I'm alive. I been through Typhus. You know how they dropped dead from that? Like flies', he said. 'Be happy, that you can see me like this, that I could wake up and could come home. Because the others, they burned down the lager and burned them.

My younger brother was in Theresienstadt. My older brother in Koszeg, in forced labor. Then he was in Bergen-Belsen. The family was scattered, and you had to live with that. The greatest suffering wasn't even that we weren't together, it was when I found out that they'd cremated my mother in Auschwitz. I saw the crematorium, but I didn't want to believe that they were burning up women and children. For many years, they didn't talk about the children. They burned up a million and half children, innocent children! And old people, and nobody talked about that. The memory of a million and a half children. Under the open sky, completely free, as if the sky was free, and the stars, all the stars changed into children. And for long decades, everyday they have been constantly reading the names. I was there in Yad Vashem. Terrible, terrible.

I have a list. When they celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the death of our martyrs, then I made a note for my children and my grandchildren. 'On the 50th anniversary of the death of our martyrs, so that you don't for the old victims, ever!' And then here I started listing them - Eszter Herskovits, 49 years old, lived in Huszt, killed in Auschwitz. She was my mother. My father, Marton Mermelstein, 44 years old, he was taken away in Prague, they killed him in Theresienstadt in 1941. My grandmother, Julia Stern, was 83 years old, lived in Remetemezo, in Erdely, was killed in Auschwitz. My mother's siblings: there were seven of them, six of them were killed. Samuel Herskozits, was 65 years old, and his wife, she was 63 years old, they took them to Auschwitz, one of their sons, Laszlo, was 43 when he was taken to forced labor. I don't know where he died. And there was another son, Erno, he lived in Satoraljaujhely, he was likewise in forced labor, his wife, Elza was taken to Auschwitz at the age of 32. Their child was three when it went to Auschwitz. Dezso Herskovits, 62 years old, and his wife 58 years old, were taken away from Dombovar to Auschwitz. They had ten children, they were in Pest, of the ten, thank God only one was killed, Karoly, age 26. He was called up for the work service in Dombovar. Two among them went into hiding, two families. The others were conscripted into work service and stayed alive. Hanna, 58 years old, who lived in Kolozsvar went to Auschwitz with her two children, Frida, 32 years old, and Marton, 28 years old. Sara, 56 years old, was taken away in Szinervaralja. Aunt Fani, 52 years old, her husband, Lajos Samuel, 52 years old, and their two children, Eva and Jozsef were taken away in Remetemezo. So all my mother's siblings died except the youngest.

A couple things are missing from my father's side: my great aunt Libi, 49 years old, my father's sister, Auschwitz. Her daughter, Judit, eight years old, Auschwitz. Her husband, 57 years old, Auschwitz. Plus one little girl, Olga, nine years old, Auschwitz. Herman Stern, my father's uncle, died in Theresienstadt, they took him away in Ersekujvar.

On my husband's side, Janos Banyai's father, Adolf Brand, 62 years old, Auschwitz. His mother, Judit Kalman, 53 years old, Auschwitz. His grandmother, Mrs. Zsigmond Kalman, 83 years old, Auschwitz. His uncle, Zsigmond Brand, 64 years old, Auschwitz. Bela Brand, my husband's cousin was in forced labor, I don't know where. Bela Kalman, his mother's brother and his wife, 50 years old, Auschwitz. Their little daughter, Marika, ten years old, Auschwitz. Gabriella Banyai, my husband's sister's first daughter was six years old, she died here in hiding, and their smaller daughter died, too. I wrote here that the aforementioned were recorded by the Auschwitz survivor, seventy year old lady, stamped with the number 11506. That's what was left to me. Horrible. I knew them all.

My husband, Janos Banyai was from Nagykanizsa, born in 1916, died at the age of 87 last year. One year ago. Originally, he was a watchmaker, then he graduated from the Economics University, then he finished a steel-industry technical [school], he liked to study, he studied a lot. In the end, he was always a watchmaker. He was a technical manager too, but he loved watch making so much, that he gave up the manager position. He retired as a watchmaker, poor man. He was sick a lot, in the end he went blind, struggled a lot.

They were originally the Brands. In 1929, they wanted to emigrate to America because they already had relatives there. Big families were popular then. They were a big family, and a part of it emigrated. I think, two or three of them were in America, and they also got ready to immigrate. But for some reason, it didn't work out, I don't know why. Then they magyarized their name to Banyai. And since 1929, they were Banyais.

His parents had a little shop, it went really well. His great grandmother was called Lina Markovics. Mrs. Zsigmond Kalman nee Lina Markovics. My mother in law was called Judit Kalman. My father in law was Adolf Brand. My husband had an older brother who was called Sandor Banyai, his wife, Mrs. Sandor Banyai, was my cousin, Olga. My father-in-law and mother-in-law and her mother were killed in the war.

At my wedding in 1945, all of them laughed cheerfully. Though we should have cried at the wedding. We didn't cry because somebody always did something on purpose so there wouldn't be crying. I couldn't do anything to stop it, anyway. I was in a borrowed dress at my own wedding, I got it from my cousin's girlfriend. It wasn't ugly. She got a dark blue dress - there was an assistance program, and they loaned it to her. It was a Jewish wedding, we were married in the Dohany Street temple [synagogue]. There wasn't a white dress, nor a veil, just a dark-blue borrowed dress, and that was fine. I could buy new shoes, the shoes were my own. And beyond that, the two friends with me were my own. There was nothing to laugh at then, but we were cheerful, that we made it this far, that somebody among us was getting married. Who would have thought that we would somehow get home. Everyone just thought of death there, mainly when I saw the crematorium smoking.

So I was the first to rush to get a husband. My husband quickly moved in, as soon as he got back from the work service. Anyway, I was already engaged before [the war]. Then everything was fine, because we were free. And we expected an easier life. We thought that if we get free of Auschwitz, then everything will be okay. Three or four months went by, since we got home, and I suddenly gained so much weight for my wedding. There were no relatives at my wedding. But that circle of friends was there, who were in Auschwitz with me. So this is how we looked three months after the war. We could eat already and we could smile. We had something to be glad about. That at last, something good is starting, a new life.

Such loyal friendship can only be formed there [in Auschwitz]. I found a picture, where there weren't any relatives, just deportees, friends, who I made in Auschwitz. I keep in contact with the girls, who I was together with in Auschwitz. There were eight of us, and we loved each other so. We helped each other stay alive. That was good. We didn't withdraw in Auschwitz, a person found someone they could tell things to. All the bad things, difficult things... Aside from hauling bricks, it was good that we were there for each other, because we could talk a little to each other.

One of the girls' uncle was a hospital director here in Pest. My girlfriend said, if you are going to give birth, go to my uncle. You don't have to pay, he'll arrange to have the birth done for free. A year after the war, it was still a really difficult world. I don't know whether I could have paid or not, and it felt good that she said it. As if I was part of a family.

My children never had a grandmother, grandfather nor aunt. If there was one, they were far away, because they tried to get as far away from home as they could. Though everyone in the family were big Hungarians. My husband and I were equally unfortunate, that they exterminated our whole family, and because of that I was nervous, and he was also nervous. How can one live eighty years? And that's the miracle, if anything He was nervous, he was sick too, and still we raised two children. That is such a holy miracle. We suffered a lot.

Soon after my wedding, my siblings scattered across the planet, and we never saw each other. It didn't matter that we had stayed alive, I never saw them, the same as if they had been killed. It hurt many times. I saw them three times in sixty years. That was very painful, and the way we look at around eighty, we won't see each other again. But it's good that they call sometimes. It was my birthday not long ago, and they called me, both of them. It was really good to hear them speak, I was glad that I have somebody. I was happy to at least hear their voices. That's how I lived out my life, because my husband didn't want to emigrate. My older and younger brothers left with an empty sack in 1945. I got married then. They yelled, 'You coming?' I said, I couldn't go. They said, 'Then god bless you!' They would have taken me, too, but my husband didn't want to go. His only sibling was here. And he felt this was his home. We stayed.

My brothers felt that they had nothing to gain here. If a country was capable of exterminating its' own residents, I don't know how many hundreds of thousands of innocent people and children, then they had nothing to gain by staying. They had to find a new home, which would accept them! It was painful for them also, that they had to go away, leave their friends here and like I said, we were very close. Of course, they had no property, it wasn't difficult leaving that. What they had, they carried it off, it was nothing to cry about. In Auschwitz, there was something to cry about.

They went to Czechoslovakia, they were there for a while. Then they went to France, my older brother stayed for five or six years. He learned French. Then he went to Canada, that's where he met his wife. They lived there for three years, while they got together enough money to travel. Then they went to California, to Los Angeles, and got themselves together very nicely. Sometimes my older brother worked twenty hours a day. In the beginning, they struggled a lot, because they weren't really accepted in America either.

My little brother went to Israel. Poor guy, they didn't accept him either, because they didn't know him. There was an aunt there, Olga, who'd never seen him, and didn't want to accept him. She only allowed him to put his belongings in her attic. That could only happen in the Mermelstein family. The Herskovitses welcomed me with so much love. Though they weren't close relatives.

My younger brother was very industrious. First he worked as an electrician, and once he even had an accident. I wrote him then to pack up and come here if he wants to live! He let me convince him. He came home, but just for a visit. Later, he retrained himself to be a tailor. Then he went to Los Angeles, too. In Los Angeles he had a business in the most elegant quarter. He had a salesman, too. One has three sons, the other has two sons.

This apartment, too. An old lady had to die so that I could get an apartment, because an old lady lived here. One of my husband's comrades from the work service said that unfortunately his mother never came back. The apartment is empty, I'll sell it to you. Then, in the end, it was only one room, because there were people already living in the other.

My husband's father and mother were killed. My husband's family was well- off, his parents had a spice business in Nagykanizsa. They pillaged that along with their small warehouse. The house and the business were left there, empty. They took everything. From the dulcimer to the expensive pictures, the goods and the shelves, too. Then they sold it after the war for 13,000 forints, a four-bedroom apartment and the business. A constable showed up, the neighbor. My husband was left with a double-cover gold watch, an earring, a gold ring and a chain which he gave to me. I really cherished it, because my previous necklace was taken by the constables, they ripped it off my neck.

From the 135 grams of gold my husband had left, we bought this room. Just this room, there was a share renter [share-renting]14 living in the other room. He was a country postman. He lived in the kitchen with his family, and kept rabbits in the prettiest of the rooms. They got along nicely. Then we came, and he had to put the rabbits out. We lived for thirteen years in a share-rent.

After the war, I finished a shorthand and stenography course. When I worked in a nursery, I finished an different course, and I became a social worker. Wherever you could find work, I worked there. In the nursery, I became the nursery director, because I was really hard-working. I tried terribly hard. Then I worked for thirty years in the Zrinyi Printing house as a stockpiler. So I was a paper stockpiler and I retired from there.

My husband was very often sick in the work service also, and when he got back home, he was always in the hospital, he'd been so destroyed. He couldn't face the loss of his parents, he really loved his parents. He couldn't face the fact that all his loved ones in Nagykanizsa had perished. Then he began studying. He worked and he studied, which really wore him down. Then somehow, we couldn't get along because of religion. He wanted to be an atheist, I wanted to stay Jewish, we argued quite a lot about that. He objected, for example, that we spoke Yiddish. It wasn't allowed. Although, he was Jewish, too. He was in a labor battalion, he suffered a lot. We didn't argue, we just debated. Because I was concerned about the child. Zsuzsi was seven years older than my son.

After the birth of my daughter, I fell into bad condition again. After the war, I gained weight, then I constantly lost it. And I was very weak. I worked, the family and job, it was hard getting to where I am today. I was here at home with my daughter until she was seven months old, then I had to go [to work]. I put her in a nursery, and she got blood poisoning there. I took her to a doctor, and said this child is sick, vomiting, doesn't want to eat, is crying. The doctor said to my colleague - the doctor was a close acquaintance of mine - that, this woman is crazy. She says this child is sick. I look at her, how beautiful. I told him, maybe she's beautiful, but this child is sick, I'd like to have her examined. He gave me a referral to the hospital. I took her in, and the child got worse day by day, so bad that she threw up everything they gave her. There were a lot of children there, and at that time a lot of them died. My daughter just didn't get better. They said I have to feed her one spoon of mother's milk every hour. They cut her leg here, her hand here, both of them, and on her thigh where there's a hole, a depression. So they were trying to feed her with blood, because she always vomited the mother's milk. She was in the hospital for three months before she finally got better. And how did she get better? That day she'd nearly died. Her eyes had rolled up. The doctor said, 'Sweet girl, you can see yourself'. I wanted to give her blood. The doctor said, 'You? You look like a consumptive.' I was in with her for twenty hours. I didn't want her to get stranger's blood. In the end, she got stranger's blood, and she's still bearing the consequences. She has liver problems, which she got from the stranger's blood. It was really hard for me to save her. I took her home, and I started crying, my husband consoled me. Don't cry, we'll have another child. Then seven years later, Gyurka [from Gyorgy - George] was born.

Zsuzsi only has her high school diploma, and two years in the conservatory. Plus she finished a librarian course.

In fall of 1956, Pali, my husband's cousin and I took our daughters to ballet [classes]. The girls were about ten or eleven, they were really good friends. The children danced, and we sat there and waited. All at once, we hear there's a big commotion. Across the street, there was a Stalin statue, it disappeared. [The Stalin statue on Dozsa Gyorgy street was pushed off it's pedestal on October 23, 1956, then it was dragged to Blaha Lujza square, and cut to pieces.] Pali says, oh-oh, let's go home, there's something really strange starting here. We grabbed the kids, they stopped the dance, and people scattered, everybody rushed home with their children. By the time we got home, there were a bunch of rascals in the tavern on the ground floor of our building. There was a rabble-rouser. He went into the tavern, and said, 'Whoever is Hungarian, is with us!' Oh-oh, I said, that's not a joke. Then later, when we were standing in line for bread, I heard them yelling, 'We're not afraid, just the Jews are afraid!' When they start selecting, 'us Hungarians aren't afraid, just the Jews are afraid', that's trouble.

I decided to submit our passports [submit the application for them], and we're going to America. My brothers were already living in America then. I wrote to my brothers, and they were very decent, they were helpful. They wrote that they're arranging things and maybe they can do something. Of course, it couldn't happen so fast, because it wasn't just us and my relatives applying. Very many Jews emigrated then. Things went really slowly. Then I spoke to my brothers on the telephone, I went over to Pali's house, and we talked from there. My little brother asked: Do you want to come? I said I really did.

He arranged it, sent the money, but we couldn't defect, because they caught us on the border. My son was three years old, I carried him on my back, he slept the whole way. He woke up on the border, and started screaming. My husband's brother came too, with two kids who were born after the war, they also came back. They were let out in 1957, because my brother-in-law wasn't obligated for military duty. My husband was, he was a soldier. Everybody [in the family] got out, who wanted to go. At least four or five from the family left, we couldn't leave. And my husband didn't really want to. But if his brother left, he would have gone, but it was already too late. So we were left behind. Yet, we were in the best position, the money was in our hands.

Then we became really lonely. We didn't want to leave illegally, and we applied for passports. They didn't give us passports, because my husband was obligated to military service. They let his brother out because he was never a soldier, he had weak eyes. So he left with his family easily. Though he wouldn't have gone, because his son would have stayed alive. His oldest boy was twenty-one when he died a hero's death in Israel. Then his father went after him, his heart couldn't stand it. He went to work, then died.

We were lonely, but we had very good neighbors and very good friends. Not just the Auschwitz ones, I made friends. I was very clever about making friends. I can tell from first sight if you can talk to this person. And then, if I hear a good word, that's enough for me. But if people look at you with disgust, or make comments, that's what I can't stand.

I had a lot, also. I had lot a in Pilisszentlaszlo for thirty years. That was the main vacation. I got a larger sum because of my parents deportation, and my brothers also sent their parts, and in 1969 I bought a lot for 12,000 forints. There was a piece of forest, it was a marvelously pretty place. Then the lots were cheaper, I bought it through OTP [National Savings Bank]. Then I bought a little wooden cottage for it. Likewise, for 12,000 forints, and ran in electricity, that already cost a lot more, but not right away, we got electricity ten or fifteen years later. It was something like 40,000 forints altogether, but I saved a lot, because I wanted it to be habitable. It was one space. Then I cleverly furnished it. We had furniture made from the left over wood, and sometimes there were four of us there. There were two beds, if Zsuzsa and her family came with, they slept on mattresses. We all fit inside. Once, my grandson and his father slept outside in a tent. They were nice summers. Modest, but it was great for me. The shower for example was out in the garden, because only a basin fit inside the room. We filled the basin from the shower, stuck it out in the garden, and the sun warmed it up. Later we ran water pipes in there, too.

I worked diligently, and if I got some extra money, then I didn't take it home, I put in savings, so that it would be good for something. That's how I got together the nice little Pilis [house].

My husband also went out to Pilis. We divorced, but not according to Jewish rites, just officially. We lived separately like this for forty years. But he ate at the same table as us. He lived his life here. He had a girlfriend, he went there at night. In our old age especially, we were fine, it didn't matter that we were living separately, because he was always at home. Then, last year, the poor man died at the age of eighty- eight. I was very sorry, and I miss him a lot. It makes no difference, we did live fifty-eight years together. Through good and bad. It would be good if he were still alive.

In 1973, Zsuzsi got married, they divorced a few years ago. She finished a gardening technical [school], but she really loves music. She sang in various choruses for a long time, and even went to the conservatory. My son is a journalist. He graduated from a printing school, worked as a printer, at the Zrinyi Publishers, no less, before he became a journalist - he finished Law School. He got married, then divorced. They're really good kids.

I've got osteoporosis, and I'm always scared I might break something somewhere and it won't heal up. And I see that I haven't got any strength. My grandson is very strong, he always takes my arm. He's a very generous, very decent child. He's my daughter's boy, Gabor. He was born in 1977, I retired in 1978 and I raised him. His mother was often sick, and never at home.

Gabor was twelve years old when I told him that he's Jewish. His father is Christian, his mother Jewish. You know, you're Jewish after your mother. 'I'm not Jewish', he said, 'I'm not anything!'. And he shrugged his shoulders. He was insulted that I told him that he was Jewish. It turned out why he denied it so. He was still little, going to elementary school, the kids Jew-bashed each other. He also jew-bashed. 'You're a Jew!, You're a Jew!'. He told me this later, that that's why he was so upset. After that the child went away to vacation at Szarvas [summer Jewish youth camp], in that Jewish social group. He really liked it. They did sports, swam, were free, there was good food, so it was good. He came home, he said how great he felt there, they learned a lot, swam around, and they said, they should sign-up if they want to go to Israel, to get to know Israel. I asked him, do you want to go? I'd really like to go, but I haven't got any money. I said, then I'll give you money. Go on! He went, and fell in love with Israel. Letters came. It's a wonderful country, how pretty. Everything's beautiful, everybody's nice, everybody's good, he found his place. When he came home, he started telling me about it. He has to learn the language, he has to go again because everybody was so friendly. Okay, sonny, if you want to go, arrange it. It wasn't expensive, so he went. He was there for two and a half years. He learned to read and write Hebrew. When he was gone for a half year, already the letters were coming, how great it is, we should come, too. I always wanted to live in Israel. I thought, I'll go too, I get my pension, I'll be fine. My daughter and I both went, and we rented an apartment.

I was in Israel until 1998 with my grandson, a half year, but I was already ill. And the doctor was far away, I couldn't even speak to him, because he was Russian. I had to go to the doctor's everyday, I didn't understand him, he didn't understand me. Then I thought, I'll come home to get myself healthy. I remained here nicely. I was in the hospital a lot in the last ten years. Nearly regularly, they took me into the hospital. I have a kind of sickness where I'm ill a lot since the stroke, and occasionally I get fits, and then they take me in. Then the kids also came home.

My daughter is in her fifty-eighth year. She retired, she gets a disability pension. My son is fifty years old. He always says I'm living until I'm a hundred and twenty. I asked, how many friends of yours have grandparents? Not a one. Now, see. I'm now already the last - plus Kati - of those I was in Auschwitz with. Kati is two years younger than me. But she's had it bad, because both her sibblings died.

The good Lord [sic] let my brothers through the war, and they didn't believe in anything. An that's how they raised there children, and yet their children became religious. One of them is constantly praying in Israel. The other is equally religious, lives in New York, has very pretty children.

Up to now unfortunately or thank god, people have gotten all mixed together, so already the Jew is mixed with the Christian. My daughter also married a Christian boy. But they never talk about it, that you're Jewish or you're Christian. They get along well, so much so, that my grandson is practicing the Jewish religion. I'm very glad that he's saving something from Judaism. Because I'm just half Jewish. I keep the traditions, but I don't go much of anywhere. But I'm pleased that the temple is full, that they don't forget the religion. My daughter's generation was really left out of these things. The young people, it seems to me as if they're returning to God again and again. My children mostly concern themselves with Judaism for my sake. If there's some program then maybe they go, but they don't feel what's Judaism and what's religion.

On Friday night, I light the candle, I have a kind of candelabra, and then I remember at least those ancestors that are already gone. I can't do more. I wasn't properly religious either. I don't know what the religion is. I believe in God, but I'm not religious. I light the chandelier - not a candle, a chandelier - every week, for the memory of my parents. I keep the holidays, the customs, all those kinds of things which my mother kept.

To tell you the truth, the political changes [in 1989]15 didn't shake me yet, nor delight me. I was already ill, I was old, and I hoped that it will be better than it was, better for the children than it was.

It doesn't make a difference which [political] system there is, just let people live, that's why they were born, so they can live. Well, let them live. And the poor people want to live, also. Let there be food for them everyday, and shoes on their feet. I know what poverty is. There were poor people in my time who had a lot of children and they had one pair of shoes. There were three or four kids, and they took turns going to school in them. They bought one big pair of shoes, that fit everybody, and then you go to school in them today, tomorrow you go in them, etc. That's the truth, because I lived with them. But that was after the war, the consequences of it. Things hadn't gotten back in place, yet. Nowadays they don't do things right. When everybody's got food, then people can start collecting, as much as they want, they won't take it with them to their graves anyway.

Glossary

Anna Hyndrakova
Prague
Czech Republic
Interviewer: Pavla Neuner
Date of interview: June 2003

Anna Hyndrakova is retired but still a very active person. She works for the Jewish Museum in Prague and with the Association of Former Prisoners of the Terezin Ghetto.

She lives on her own in a nicely furnished apartment. The room where the interview took place is her cabinet, in which she has a lot of books and a desk with a computer.

She is proud of having learnt how to work on a computer and using the Internet. She showed me a number of belongings treasured from World War II including a toothbrush from Terezin.

• My family background
• Growing up
• My school years
• During the war
• Our deportation to Terezin
• From Auschwitz to Christianstadt
• Post-war
• My children
• Glossary

• My family background

My grandfather on my father's side was called Vilem Kovanic, but I don't know when he was born. I didn't know him at all. It was said that he might have been a dealer in feathers. I know that he came from a Czech family and they spoke Czech, but he also spoke German.

His first wife died but she left him a son, Izak. I didn't really know him though; he seemed really old to me. I know that he lived in Lanskroun and that his two daughters, Truda and Hana, immigrated to Palestine. Izak died before World War II.

My grandmother on my father's side was called Julie Kovanicova, nee Kopecka. She was a housewife and gave birth to nine children. My grandmother died when her last daughter, Olga, was born in 1898. Until that time, my grandparents had been living in Kolin.

After my grandmother died, my grandfather moved to Prague and got a housekeeper, Marjanka Zazova. His eldest daughter Irma and Izak also looked after him a lot. My grandfather died in Prague in 1924. He had a Jewish funeral.

My paternal grandparents had nine children together: Arnost, Irma, Leo, Elza, Petr, my father Pavel, Zdenek, Ota and Olga. Arnost had a workshop with his brother Petr in Liberec and was killed in Auschwitz. Irma was a married housewife with two children. She was killed in a concentration camp.

Leo survived Terezin 1 as he was able to show that he was living in a mixed marriage - his Russian Jewish wife had burnt all her papers and persuaded White Guards 2 to draw up new ones to say she was Christian Orthodox. Her name was Polina, but we called her Aunt Pesa.

Elza and her husband Jindrich Flusser had a shop in Prague called Bambino where they sold children's clothes. She ended up in Auschwitz, along with her three sons and husband.

Petr, who was my dad's twin, was executed in the concentration camp Flossenburg in Germany. He had a little workshop in Liberec for calculating machines, something like calculators; it was called Mira. Anyway, some 'treuhender' [trustee] who wanted it denounced him as a spy. Petr had two sons, Heinzi and Harry, but they also perished.

Zdenek survived Terezin because his wife Ruzena was an Aryan and he had been baptized. Their three children, Vera, Pavel and Zdenek, also survived.

Ota also had an Aryan wife; he was in Terezin for about two or three months and survived. Ota had four children: Ota, Milca, Milan and Jiri. Milca died before the war. Ota and Jiri perished during the Holocaust. Milan survived a concentration camp.

Olga was the only one to remain single; she helped her sister Elza with her youngest son. Somehow she couldn't find a suitable match, so her family sent her to America to stay with relatives. The journey was by ship, and she sat out on the deck sunbathing until she got really burnt. She arrived in America but because she was red all over, she didn't appeal to anyone, so she went back. She was later sent to the gas chamber at Auschwitz.

My grandmother on my mother's side was called Katerina Spitzova, nee Adlerova, and was born in 1861 in Berkovice, which is about 30 kilometers from Prague. She spoke Czech but I don't know what family she came from. All I know is that she had a sister and two brothers. I didn't know my maternal grandfather at all, because he died before I was born. He was called Bedrich Spitz.

My grandmother lived with us in one apartment. She was quite a self- conscious and self-sufficient woman. When they went out for a beer in the evening, for instance, she would order a stout, but she always gave dad the money for it. My grandmother was the most religious person in our house; she kept to a kosher cuisine. She had a small haberdashery store in the center of town, where she sold thread, pins, needles, thimbles, press studs and tape measures.

I used to play in that little shop and I would also arrange the goods. On Sundays she would put everything into a sack and go round villages on the outskirts of Prague selling things. Her shop was in a good place, near the Jewish Quarter. Right opposite was Mrs. Gachova's little store, a kosher butcher's. But it was then decided that this house would be pulled down, so Mrs. Gachova and my grandmother were given notice to quit.

From all the turmoil, my grandmother had a stroke in 1933. It happened in the house where we were living, at the butcher's, where she had just gone to buy me a sausage. She kept that sausage in her hand for three days, for they couldn't wrest it from her grasp. After that, she was paralyzed down one side of her body for seven years and mum looked after her at home. When it got worse, later on, she stayed at the Masaryk Home in a medical place for the terminally ill, where she died in 1940. I was very fond of her; she was a nice person. Whenever I go to the Jewish cemetery, I always say to her, 'Hello grandma', and I feel she can hear me. After her death we didn't keep the Jewish traditions at home like we had done before.

• Growing up

My dad was called Pavel Kovanic and he was born in 1891 in Kolin. He went to a Czech elementary school and probably trained as a shop assistant later. He came from a Czech family, so we spoke Czech at home. My dad and mum spoke German together only when they didn't want me to know what they were saying. My dad could also speak Russian, because he had been in Russian captivity in World War I as a soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army [see KUK army] 3.

He was still in captivity in Moscow with his brother Leo in 1917, when they applied to join the [Czech] Legion. They got a letter which read: 'Brothers, your application is being dealt with. For the time being watch out for Jewish Bolshevik agents who are mixing with POWs.' After reading that, they couldn't give a damn about the Legionnaires, so they stayed in captivity until the end of the war.

Uncle Leo came back with a Siberian Jewess named Polina who he had married over there. My dad was a supporter of Masaryk 4 and a patriot. He wept whenever he heard patriotic anthems like Our Czech Song [Ta nase pisnicka ceska]. He respected Masaryk for the stance he took in the Hilsner Trial 5.

My mum was called Augusta Kovanicova, nee Spitzova. She was born in 1894 in Prague. She had seven brothers and sisters, but only three reached adulthood - Eduard, Julius and Matylda. Eduard and his wife Anna had two children, Eva and Didi. The whole family died in a concentration camp. Julius died along with his wife; they didn't have any children. Matylda and her husband died in the Holocaust; only their son Ervin survived.

Mum went to a German-language school, but not out of conviction, it's just that there weren't Czech schools everywhere. She spoke Czech with my grandmother but wasn't too confidant about her written Czech. She had a compulsory education. Mum made friends with my dad's sister Elza and it was through her that she met him.

Elza was actually my mother's best friend. Dad often used to say how they had been together at some gathering and that he accompanied all the girls home but took Mum home only at the end, because he liked her. Even back then, when I was little, I used to ask myself why he didn't take her home first if he liked her. They had a Jewish wedding and were married by Rabbi Reach.

My mother wasn't as religious as my father. She took the Jewish religion more as a historical tradition. She was a housewife; she did all the sewing for us and, whenever necessary, helped out my grandmother in the store.

Mum was a very small lady. Once, when I was sick, she went to the school to ask what they were learning about at the moment. My teacher later said to me, 'Anicka, that small dark-haired lady that was here, was that your mum?' I said, 'No, my mum is tall.' But she was actually smaller than me - she just seemed tall to me at the time. At the age of 14 I was already taller than she was.

My dad became a commercial traveler, selling perfume for a firm called Korwig. He usually traveled by train; he didn't have a car. He used to give me these little tubes of toothpaste, which my friends and I liked to suck on - we'd then spit out the foam on the street. He often met up with other commercial travelers; they all knew each other and probably went on trips together. I knew some of them, because they and their families often went on holiday with us in the summer.

Dad had his bar mitzvah, but he wasn't religious and he never fasted on Yom Kippur. I recall that one day my dad went off to a have a snack on Yom Kippur but said he was going to the synagogue, and I remember my mum said, 'Pavel, just so long as grandma doesn't find out!' I never saw him wearing a tallit, tefillin or a kippah.

My parents were traditional Czech Jews who liked it over here. In 1930 they registered as Czechs, not Jews. [Editor's note: There was an official census in 1930 and people could choose the nationality - like Czech, German, Jewish etc.] My dad was amused when, during the war, I started to go to meetings of Hashomer Hatzair 6, which was a left-wing Zionist movement.

He said that Zionism is when one Jew sends another Jew to Palestine with a third Jew's money. During the occupation, when we were entirely dependent on the Jewish community, as the community was our only authority through which everything got arranged, my dad had a whole-hearted dislike of them [Jewish officials of the community, who were closer to Jews who professed Judaism before than to assimilants].

Every Sunday my dad would go to the Bulvar Cafe. That was on Wenceslas Square in the center of Prague. In the afternoon I used to go with mum to fetch him. From time to time he liked to smoke a cigar or a Virginia. He was a great person - so nice and kind. I remember that he had really beautiful hands.

When the weather was nice, we used to go to a garden restaurant on Letna Plain in the afternoon. I'd get a glass of syrup and water - a kind of raspberry flavored soda water. Mum had a coffee and dad might have had a beer. We also went on day trips to Krc Wood, at the end of which there was a pub where we had beer and cheese.

My sister was called Gertruda Kowanitzova, nee Kovanicova, and was born in 1921 in Prague. She was seven years older than me. I think she went to a Czech high school and then to a private school of advertising. She then got a job in an office somewhere and drew for fashion magazines, from which she earned a living on the side. She was very clever and good with her hands. She could speak French and German and was really smart and beautiful. She could also play the piano, even though we didn't have one.

Mum was really skilful - she made clothes for us and she always sewed something for me with whatever material was left from a dress she had just made for my sister. Needless to say, my sister wasn't happy about this - she said she went around in the same clothes as I did and that everyone would see the brat was my sister - because when she went on a date, I used to loiter behind her with a friend. In fact, we liked each other a lot, but we only realized this during the war, when it was too late for everything.

Until I went to school I was at home with mum. We didn't have a nanny. When mum needed to be in the store in place of my grandmother, she took my sister and me with her. One day, my sister - this was when she was little, before I was born - vanished from the store and wasn't anywhere to be found.

They all ran around like crazy looking for her, and in the end they found her. As it turned out, she had taken a brush and had gone out to sweep the pavement - she swept and swept until she ended up four blocks away.

I didn't want to eat anything as a child, as I wasn't interested in food. I usually 'sabotaged' afternoon tea somehow, but whenever mum gave me fifty halers or a crown to buy an apple, then I would go get some sausages from the horsemeat butcher. I was afraid mum would find out, but she would have been glad to know I was eating at least some meat: minced horsemeat and horsemeat sausages with a slice of bread; the butcher, Mr. Karabec, always had really soft bread which was very floury underneath.

One day at home they were looking for a small pan, which I had somehow managed to lose and my sister became suspicious. She looked behind this tall clock and there was the little pan, in which there were some dried out, moldy scrambled eggs. As long as I could eat, I didn't, and when I wanted to eat later on, there wasn't any food.

• My school years

I went to a Czech elementary school. After that it was on to either the council school or the grammar school. Grammar school was for people who wanted to get a higher education; the council school was for those who didn't expect they would be carrying on with their studies or who would get an apprenticeship or go to a technical school, perhaps to a commercial academy.

At the time of the Munich Pact 7, my parents wanted me and my sister to learn foreign languages, so that it would be possible for us to emigrate.

They sent me to a preparatory school, preparing me for an English grammar school. Actually, I repeated my fifth year of elementary school here, but this time everything was in English. It was excellent and I learnt a lot there. We had several language lessons every day.

I then took an entrance exam for the English grammar school, but I wasn't accepted [see Exclusion of Jews from schools in the Protectorate] 8. They called for my dad and told him that my exam results were excellent but that they had a policy of 'numerus clausus' for Jews, which meant that no more than 2.7 percent of pupils could be Jewish. [Editor's note: The number of Jewish pupils was constantly restricted until no Jewish pupil was allowed to study.]

Anyway, they suggested he apply for an exception. That was at the end of the school year 1939/1940. Well, my dad got really angry and said he couldn't give a damn about asking for permission to send his child to go to school, so he went and enrolled me in a Jewish school.

In September 1940 it was no longer possible [for Jews] to go to a normal school. I was lucky to have already enrolled in the Jewish school, because I wouldn't have got there after that. For example, a friend of mine at the time and to this day, Bohunda, didn't make it to school.

There were probably around 60 of us in the class, but a deportation train then took away half of the children and teachers. They took on more at the school and those who didn't make it had lessons in groups where they sometimes did exams later on. Dad said to me: 'You've done the fifth year [of elementary school] twice, so you're a clever girl.' He then put me straight down for the second year [of high school].

And then, on the order of the Germans, they skipped a year in order to increase the size of the labor force. As a result, I then went on to the fourth year. I went to the Jewish council school only for two years.

I used to enjoy Czech and art lessons a lot in council school. I wrote nice compositions and wanted to become a writer. But I hated German and arithmetic - I sabotaged these lessons and always got poor marks. I wrote composition exercises that I swapped with boys for lines they had written in German. In Czech lessons we were given the task of writing compositions on themes like 'My holidays' or 'Sundays with my parents', and the teacher, Mrs. Lauscherova, often gave me lines for being naughty during German lessons. I would have to repeatedly write out, for example, the declension of adjectives and nouns in the singular and plural, which I had to do by the next day. Once I had to write out 180 lines by the next day. Anyway, some boys wrote the German lines for me, because the teacher didn't read them anyway; she just glanced over them to see if they had been written and then tore up the paper.

Our Czech language teacher was excellent, but I hated Mrs. Lauscherova. She just couldn't understand why we were so naughty. For her, German was the language of Goethe and Schiller and she couldn't see that for us it was the language of the occupiers. She really tormented me with German. If only she had said something like 'Hey, just learn a bit.

After all, you're not stupid and we'll be deported anyway, so it might come in useful.' Instead, she preferred to give me poor marks in German, even though she knew I would have to do a resit. It was just vindictive of her. In order to move on from the second year I had to learn a long poem by Goethe in German, which I know to this day, in the same way I don't know the grammar to this day.

Mrs. Lauscherova taught everything; she actually knew everything, apart from pedagogy. Even after the war she gave lessons in Greek, Latin, physics, German, needlework, cookery, chemistry and math. She even gave lessons to children who came back and wanted to study to make up for lost time.

I also had my first religion lessons at the council school. In addition to religion itself, there was Judaism and Hebrew. I also had poor marks in that subject because I didn't want to learn it. Otherwise there were excellent teachers there, for instance secondary school professors who were now out of work.

This Jewish council school was based in Jachymova Street in Prague's Jewish quarter. First, I went to the school there, then I worked there at the Jewish Museum and now that is where I go to the [Terezin] Initiative Organization 9. Whenever I go through that passageway I always wonder what ever happened to the little children whose feet used to pitter-patter around here.

I used to read a lot, and still do. I began reading Rodokapsy [cheap paperbacks] and when my sister saw this, she started to give me books from the European Literary Club, which I read at quite a young age. So I read novels from childhood, but only the ones by good authors, not romantic fiction or whodunits.

I was also a good swimmer; in tests I used to swim across a lake with a boat going alongside me. I also did ice-skating and went skiing several times. I went to Maccabi 10 from the age of four and then I really wanted to go to Sokol 11, because I liked those disgusting Sokol girls' outfits. I asked mum and she went to the Vinohrady Sokol Hall, sometime in 1938 or 1939, to sign me on.

However, the woman in charge said she was sorry but they didn't accept Jews. Instead I went a few times to the Workers' P.T. Unit [Physical Training], which was a kind of social democratic organization. One time we were doing an exercise known as the 'Candle', and my insteps were stretched when one girl turned to me and said, 'You've got Jewish feet.' After that I stopped going there. Unfortunately I never learnt to ride a bike. I didn't have a bike, besides it wasn't very safe on the roads, with all that traffic where we lived.

When we were still living with grandma, we observed Pesach; I used to say the mah nishtanah, or rather I would sit on my dad's lap and he would prompt me. We had a Yahrzeit at home. This was a kind of calendar next to which we lit candles on the anniversary of the death of someone in the family.

We also had the Haggadah, but I didn't read it as it was in Hebrew on one page and the same text in German on the other. We went to the synagogue, but only on high holidays. When we lived in Vinohrady we went to the synagogue on Sazavska Street, which was later bombed.

On Yom Kippur we didn't go to school and I was really glad because I actually had double holidays. I can remember Simchat Torah, when children were given sweets and the Torah was kissed. Mum used to say, 'Just pretend, with your fingers like this, don't kiss it - you don't know who touched it before you.' We also celebrated Chanukkah.

When mum took my sister to dancing lessons and dad was on one of his trips, I used to sleep at the caretaker's place so I wouldn't be at home on my own. His daughter, Marta, was a friend of mine. Marta was Christian. In the evening she would kneel beside her bed and pray, but she wasn't really all that religious; she just did it in front of me.

I also wanted to show that I prayed; I knew that Jews didn't kneel, so I just stood and muttered something. On St. Nicholas' Day my dad came home with some oranges, apples and nuts. We celebrated Christmas, but we never had a Christmas tree. At Christmas we ate fried carp and potato salad. I also gave mum a present on Mother's Day.

We observed Jewish and Christian holidays, just like we did Czech ones traditionally. I don't think that my parents were believers. They didn't bring me up in a religious way. I came to religion only during the war when I was in the Jewish school.

First of all, I was living with my parents, sister and grandma in the center of Prague, in an apartment with two rooms and a kitchen. It was a pretty terrible place with a communal gallery - it was dark and had bed bugs. There was no running hot water and no bathroom in the apartment.

There was a bathroom and a laundry room on the ground floor, where we would sometimes go to have a bath, but that would involve getting wrapped up and going through the yard, upstairs again and across the gallery. So the way we did it, on Fridays, before Sabbath, a zinc bath was taken out and we took turns to get washed - I got in first, then my sister, then our mum. There was a large tiled stove and a stove water-tank, and the water was heated up in pots back then.

In 1938 we moved to a nice area in Vinohrady, on Krkonosska Street, where my dad's two sisters were living at the time. This apartment was of a better standard, light-filled and healthy. There was a bathroom there but no heating, of course, just a big boiler. Mum bought black furniture, which shone from the polish. In the room there was a sideboard, couch, table and chairs.

We had running water and a bathroom with a bath and washbasin. But we had to light up the boiler whenever we wanted to take a bath. We lived on the third floor and we had to carry coal up from the cellar. Gas was used to heat the water in the washbasin, though. We had an old two-ring gas cooker.

The stove was used for cooking only in the winter, when we used coal for heating. The bedroom was unheated, though. We only heated the kitchen, which is where we spent most of the time. Otherwise we used gas for cooking which was quite modern at the time. The rent was 3,000 crowns, which was the same as our rent in the center of town.

The apartment was in an apartment building next to Riegr Park. We were in close contact with dad's family because his sisters lived near us. This apartment also had two rooms and a kitchen. At first, I shared a room with my sister and my parents had the bedroom. Later on, when my sister got married in 1941, I moved into the bedroom with my parents. We didn't have anything of particular value at home, no artistic objects. Dad just had his stamp collection, which our neighbor didn't return to me after the war.

When we were still living in our first apartment, mum would often keep a goose in the cellar for its fat. She used to bake 'dough cones' on the stovetop, which she then fed to the goose. It was always quite an event with the goose. At night mum went to feed it and check it was okay, because if the goose had suffocated, she would have had to throw it away.

The goose was kept in a small box. These days the animal rights people would come out against such a thing, because the goose was completely square-shaped by the time it was taken out of the box. It was then killed in the kosher way, but this wasn't done in front of me.

I can remember being at the cinema before the war when a film about Janosik 12 was on. In the film, Janosik says 'Since you've baked me, you might as well eat me', and then they stuck him on a hook, at which point dad covered my eyes with his hat so I wouldn't see it. Likewise, they wouldn't have killed the goose in front of me.

Anyway, the goose was then skinned and we had delicious crackling. On the inside of the sideboard drawers mum wrote when the goose was weighed, how heavy it was, how much fat it had on it, and how much the liver weighed.

As it was so fat, the goose had a big liver. We stuck almonds in it and roasted it in its fat. It was delicious. And then we made several meals out of it. The giblets were prepared in a thick sauce, which dad really liked. He couldn't pronounce the letter 'r' properly, so it was funny when he said he wanted 'thwee wings'. The goose legs were put in a cholent stew and the breasts were prepared as beilik with potato dumplings. The beilik was seasoned with garlic and salt. On Pesach, mum used to make something really good. It was from matzot and was baked like a cake, kind of smooth, stuffed with dried plums and, when it was ready, wine was poured over it. It was stuffed with nuts and was very sweet.

Our standard of living corresponded to that of the lower middle class. I never felt in need of anything, but what we had was no luxury. When my parents were doing well, we had a maid, and when they weren't so well off, we didn't have one. It kind of varied. A cleaner came round to our house when there was a lot of washing to do. I remember that we had a servant.

I also remember that bailiffs from the tax office came round to our place. When you owed taxes in those days, they'd come and put stickers on things and if you didn't pay your taxes on time, they'd come and take away your things. That didn't happen to us, though. Most members of our family were middle class. Only Uncle Arnost had a car. We were something like the 'poor relatives'.

It was my mum's dream to go to the sea. Every year we made plans to go, but in the end we never did. We always went to Brandys nad Orlici in East Bohemia, where it was very beautiful. Some of our relatives and friends also went there. I've got happy memories of it, but mum never did get to see the sea. We used to spend the entire summer holidays in Brandys.

Dad would come to stay with us at the weekends. We had a rented room there. We used to go by train and sent our things as registered luggage. They would wrap up a large wicker basket, as well as dishes, because mum did the cooking. We lived on the square, but it wasn't far from the river. The square was full of little stores.

They already knew us there and when I had some money I would go to buy toffees. It was nice to walk past the baker's shop because there was always the delicious smell of bread. Others who went there included Mr. Stransky, the Flussers and, later on, the Barnais, with whose daughter, Margit, I went to school and remained friends after the war. We were a kind of big summer community over there.

As there were a lot of us in the family, we didn't usually meet up together. We went to the Stranskys and the Flussers a lot. My parents had Jewish friends. I didn't just have Jewish friends back then; when we lived on Na Porici Street I had a friendship with Marta, who wasn't a Jew. We went to school together. There were a lot of Jewish families living in Vinohrady, which is where we moved to when I was in the first year at school.

The main thing was that two aunts with their families were living near us, so I made friends with their children. To this day, I've kept the friends I had in those days - like Mrs. Havrankova, who is now on the social commission of the Jewish community in Prague, or Mrs. Timplova. When I was little I spent my free time with my parents, later on, with my friends.

We used to play in the Jewish cemetery on Ondrickova Street in Prague in Zizkov or in the Old Town Square. There were no funerals any more and we weren't allowed to go anywhere else as Jews. We would romp about on the graves, but we didn't think anything of it, as we were only little.

Also mothers with small babies were going there for a walk. Above all, we weren't allowed to go anywhere else. So we would play at the Hagibor 13 grounds. Hagibor was the only sports ground where Jews were permitted, so that's where we did most of our sports.

At the time of the Munich Pact in 1938, I remember that dad was somewhere in Moravia, I was sleeping with mum in his bed and she was crying. She was worried about how dad would get here now. I can also remember that my sister was on duty at the air-raid defense in May 1938 during the first mobilization. People were supposed to go around with gas masks, and all she had was this case with plums in it.

• During the war

I was brought up in such a way that I was supposed to greet everyone I met. I used to say 'salutations' to my mum's friends. In September 1941, mum sewed a yellow star on my jacket and said to me: 'You needn't be ashamed of it, it isn't your fault, but you're not to greet anyone any more, as it might make them feel awkward or even threatened.' I remember going out with my friend, Bohumila, who didn't wear the star to begin with, as she was of mixed race.

We were walking together - me with the star on, her without - when we met some woman who said to my friend: 'You should be ashamed of yourself, going around with a Jewess.' When she got home she made a scene and said she wanted to wear the star, too.

Another time, I was going to her place to ask if she could come out. I went down a hill and saw three boys standing there. They spat at me and then spat on my new leather gloves, which I had been given at my sister's wedding. Normally, I would have got into a fight, but I didn't do anything. I just walked on.

It also happened that two of my fellow-pupils kept bullying me on my way home from school. My mum went to see our teacher, Mrs. Stefkova, to complain. She probably didn't like us, because otherwise she would have dealt with the two girls herself. But she went to tell their parents.

The father of one of the girls, who was a bookbinder, gave his child a smack and that was the end of that, but the other father thought he was a cut above. He came round to our place and rang the bell. My sister opened the door on the chain and he put his foot in the door and said we were Jewish swine and that Hitler would come and show us.

That was after the Munich Pact, but still before the occupation [see Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia] 14. When Mrs. Stefkova died and I went with the class to her funeral, I felt a kind of satisfaction, as if to say: 'You see, you're in a coffin, not me!' Otherwise I didn't come across any overt anti-Semitism. Our neighbors were quite helpful to us, for they let us hide things at their place, even though, for the most part, they didn't give them back to me after the war.

In 1940 or 1941, dad was no longer allowed to work as a commercial traveler. His boss was no longer Mr. Korwig but a Mr. Simsa, who wasn't a Jew. Mr. Simsa behaved very decently and even gave dad some money, although he was no longer working for him. Jews weren't allowed to travel or to be employed by an Aryan-owned firm.

Jewish firms were closed down. After that, dad got a job painting lampshades, and I helped him with it. They were garish items for export to Germany, but at least he got the odd crown for them. I made up my own designs and drew catkins. You got more money for your own designs. We used acetone paints, which smelt awful. Mum didn't make me do the dishes any more. Instead, she told me to go out for some fresh air.

Adults suffered a great deal in this situation. We had a map of Europe on our kitchen wall, and my uncles used to meet up, since they weren't allowed to work any more, and would engage in political debates on the whereabouts of Hitler and such like. I know that it gave them great pleasure when the Soviet Union was attacked, because they said: 'Now Stalin will show them.' But we children didn't take too much notice of it.

In October 1941, my sister married the Jewish man Frantisek Kowanitz in Vinohrady Town Hall. It was a civil wedding, and, for the occasion, I got some leather gloves and silk stockings. They got a red dinner service from Aunt Elza, which I still have to this day. From another aunt, my sister got a gas oven, as well as an embroidered lace tablecloth with twelve covers, which was - and still is - very expensive.

Frantisek was born in 1916; he was a distant relative. He worked as a chief clerk and was in the coal business. By the time I met him he was no longer allowed to do his job. We all lived together. I didn't like him at first, because they talked a lot and were all very jovial while I had to do the dishes.

I was about 13 and I kept a diary in which I wrote that I didn't like him because I had to be in the kitchen all the time. My sister probably read it, because he started coming into the kitchen after that and said things like 'You're my sister- in-law' and 'Dear sister-in-law', so I liked him a lot then.

Frantisek was really good-looking and clever. He was a fine person. But we didn't know each other too well. My sister and me didn't understand each other too well either, on account of the big age difference between us. By the time we had started to see eye-to-eye, we were in Terezin.

They obviously got married quickly because deportations were already taking place at that time and they wanted to go together. Immediately after the wedding, Frantisek was sent to a work camp [forced labor camp] in Lipa and then to Terezin. My sister went to Terezin in December 1941.

I remember the period after the assassination of Reichsprotektor Heydrich [see Heydrichiade] 15, because we were playing in the cemetery when suddenly my mum came running in. She took me by the hand and dragged me home, absolutely terrified, because they were expecting a pogrom. The police came to our house in the night.

All three of us were standing together in our pajamas while they searched the apartment to see if anyone was hiding there. Our lives were pretty restricted after that. [see Anti- Jewish laws in the Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia] 16.

We weren't allowed to go skating, for instance. They took people's dogs, cats and canaries away from them, which must have been terrible for the children, but we didn't have any pets. I somehow thought it was natural that other children could go skating while I couldn't. Or that we were allowed only two hours to do our shopping each day.

The grocer from next door, however, occasionally left us things he wasn't supposed to. All this didn't frustrate me; I was just bothered that friends kept disappearing. Later on, we just kept company with other Jews. Because of all the inequality and lack of freedom, I was actually quite looking forward to going to Terezin, for I saw it as a kind of scout outing.

Once in Terezin we were kind of relieved that we were among our own kind and that everyone wore the star. We were equal among equals. No one had to worry about being thrown off a tram, whether moving or not, or about the Hitlerjugend 17.

• Our deportation to Terezin

In September 1942 my parents and I were summoned to board a deportation train to Terezin, but for some reason the train departed and we were left standing at the assembly point. Several dozen people stayed behind and, to this day, I still don't really know why. Anyway, along came another train and we were given new numbers.

In the end we spent six weeks at that assembly point at the Trade Fair Palace in Prague. The Jewish community gave us supplies and we spent the time just lolling around. Today, a hotel is located there, but there's also a memorial plaque. In those days there were low, wooden pavilions from some trade fair there.

We went on transport Ca to Terezin; that was in October 1942. Two or three days later, the train went straight to the gas chambers at Auschwitz. But because my sister and brother-in-law had already been in Terezin for some time and knew the ropes, they hid us, so we managed to escape it.

I later said to myself that if we had gone on that first transport to Auschwitz, my parents would have perished two years earlier than they did; they wouldn't have known they were going to the gas chamber, so this would have spared them all kinds of suffering.

But because we survived it and were reclaimed from another two transports, once because I was ill, the other time because dad had a job at the disinfesting station, it wasn't until May 1944 that we went to the family camp at Auschwitz, where, for a number of weeks, we lived next to the gas chambers and the crematory chimneys, with all the stench.

My first job in Terezin was in the box-making workshop, where they colored those disgustingly garish bookmarks. I would have liked to do that but I didn't get to do it - what I did was stick cellophane wrappers on powder boxes. I then became seriously ill. It began with an infection of the middle ear and then I got a high fever, although I didn't know why, and then I got jaundice. By the time I had got a bit better, I got phlegmon in the neck, and then I got jaundice again.

I was let out of hospital in February 1943. I then went on a course for dentist's assistants and worked as an auxiliary assistant at the dentist's. Later on, my parents wanted me to get more fresh air, so they arranged for me to work in the garden. My brother-in-law was in the disciplinary service, but I don't know what my sister did.

At first, my sister lived apart from her husband, but they later built a kind of closet out of wood-wool slabs in the attic of a house, and there they lived, which was a big advantage. Those who went on the first transports to Terezin had certain privileges.

They [my sister and brother-in-law] lived with their daughter, Jana Ivana, who was born in Terezin in June 1943. We called her Honzulka. Dad worked at the disinfesting station, mum worked in the 'Warme Kueche', which was a warming-up kitchen. Each barrack had a room with a stove where they reheated things people had cooked for themselves earlier; heating was only allowed in the winter. We ate what we were given.

At first we had something from home to improve the food or else we would receive a package from a relative. At first, I lived with mum, but the barrack had to be evacuated later on for the Dutch transports [in 1943]. I was then sent to the youth house.

Life in the youth house was the best what you could have in Terezin. We learned and read a lot, poems by Wolker, Villon, Halas, Seifert and Nezval. [Editor's note: Wolker, Jiri (1900-1921): Czech proletarian poet. Villon, François, real name F. de Montcorbier or des Loges (1429 (1432) - 1463 (1467)): French lyrical poet.

Halas, Frantisek (1901-1949): Czech proletarian poet. Seifert, Jaroslav (1901-1986): Czech poet and Nobel prize holder (1984). Nezval, Vitezslav (1900-1958): Czech poet, dramatist and translator.] We were equal; everyone wore yellow stars. We were visiting lectures, concerts and theatre performances.

• From Auschwitz to Christianstadt

In May 1944 I was placed with my parents to be transported again. We were put along with fifty people in one cattle-truck with two buckets of water and some bread. I don't remember how long the way to Auschwitz was. In Auschwitz most of us didn't work because we were in the family camp. We saw smoke from the crematorium and knew what it meant. Mum's hearing wasn't very good, which protected her quite a bit from the nerve-racking situations that the others went through.

She didn't hear the screams and wails, the barking of dogs, the cries and groans of the people around us. The toil began only in the other camps. A selection was carried out in June 1944 and I was separated from my parents, who stayed behind. I was sent to the women's camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau. They took us to the sauna. I had a picture of my mum, dad and sister on me.

I cut out their heads with manicure scissors and wrapped them in cellophane and hid them under my hair- clip. We were searched to see if we were hiding anything. I kept shifting the photos. I had them in my mouth when I was examined by a Slovak woman, who said: 'What's in your mouth, you goose?' 'Photos,' I replied. 'Who of?' 'Mum.' 'Go on then.' So I smuggled them through. I was there about a fortnight and it was sheer hell. There were endless roll calls. For entire days we gazed across the ramp at our old family camp. One morning the camp was empty.

In July they sent us to Christianstadt [now Krzystkowice in western Poland]; this belonged to Gross Rosen. There were several workplaces in Christianstadt and I was allotted to the forest commando. We went to a forest where we knocked down trees and pulled out the stumps. When we left it, there were roads there. They didn't have an asphalt covering - that wasn't finished - but they were graveled. After that, we worked in a munitions factory and in a sandpit, where we loaded sand onto trucks. That was terrible drudgery.

In February 1945 our camp received transports from eastern areas that had been liquidated. When I saw the state those girls were in, I persuaded a friend to run away with me. Another girl joined us, so we managed to escape from the death march the third day of marching while we stopped on a road surrounded by woods.

On the way we claimed to be from the Sudetenland and that we were escaping from a Czech camp. But in three days we were informed on by a farmer and they came for us because I was having hallucinations, as I had a high fever, probably dysentery, and, in my delirium, I was speaking Czech. Well, in short, they caught us and took us to the Niesky camp, which was a camp for Aryan men only. We were there for about three days and were then taken to labor camp Gorlitz.

The last day of the war we felt something in the air. The camp was in a big mess, everything was over but in fact wasn't because the fascists were still there. At a roll call we had there at the end of World War II, the Lagerfuhrer [camp commander] offered to take us to the Americans. They wanted to go to the Americans themselves so they would get better treatment. He horrified us by telling us everything that the Russians would do to us. We were afraid to stay in the camp, because it was said that the Germans would place mines in it and set it on fire, so we left with them. There were twelve of us, with horse and cart to carry their provisions, and we escaped with them. The cart was full of margarine, marmalade and bread. We met the Red Army only on our way to Prague.

The Germans escaped to the Americans. They went west; we went east. We lost our way and then there were only four of us, with one cart. In one town we met some SS men from our camp who recognized our men and forced them to change clothes with them - our civilian clothes for their German uniforms.

That was a very critical moment, because we were still in Germany and they knew who we were and that we were on the run. We were saved by the presence of mind of a fellow-prisoner who said we had lice and maybe even typhus.

People in Germany helped us on the way; we spoke German with them. I can remember when the armistice was signed. All of a sudden, there were signal rockets going off everywhere, it was as light as day. One of the girls was an Austrian; the other two were German Jews.

We slept in a pub: me and the Austrian in a room downstairs, pretending to be German refugees and the two men in the attic. At about four in the morning, the door was kicked open by a Russian soldier who pointed his sub-machine gun at us. Instead of saying who we were or showing our tattooed numbers, we went to embrace and kiss him, and we made such a racket that the two men upstairs came down to find out what was going on.

The soldier was going to shoot them; well it was all pretty drastic and it was only by chance that he didn't do us in. He thought we were Germans. He then took us to his commander's office where they gave us the necessary bumf to say we were from a concentration camp, so we could then get to Prague.

I returned to Prague on 11th May, but I knew my parents weren't alive. My sister's friend and my cousin were on one of the last transports to go through Christianstadt, and her friend told me that my sister had gone with her little girl on the last transport from Terezin in October 1944 straight to the gas chambers at Auschwitz. Her husband died in 1945, somewhere on the death march. He had phlegmon in the leg.

• Post-war

After the war I went straight to my uncle Ota's wife's place, but she soon threw me out. I then went to my aunt Pesa's place, but things didn't work out there either. In the meantime, I lived with two girls who invited boys home and went with the American soldiers to Pilsen.

I applied to stay at the Jewish orphanage, but it was full, so I had to wait for a place to become vacant. My brother-in-law's son bought me some new shoes and got me a job with a pediatrician, Doctor Kubena - I worked there part-time for a thousand crowns a month. I had to hold the children while they were being inoculated and to look up card indexes, but I only did this during the holidays. I then went to a school of graphic arts.

I lived at the Jewish orphanage in Belgicka Street, before they moved us on to the Jewish women's home in Lublanska Street. I was living there even when I was married. Because of personal reasons I don't want to talk about my husband.

I got married at the beginning of 1949. In March 1949 they were closing down the brothels, one of which became a university hall of residence for married students. We got a tiny little room there. All we could fit in was two beds, a few chairs and a small table. There was an inbuilt sink and cupboard.

When I left Lublanska Street and started to live with my husband, we were pretty badly off financially, because they took away my grant of 1,200 crowns, seeing that I was married and my husband was earning. But he wasn't earning anything at the time, and when he was, it was very little. I had an orphan's allowance, at first 427 crowns, then 600 crowns, which was a pittance.

We were poor, but it was a start, just as it was for other young people. But what made it worse was that girls normally bring something with them to the marriage from their family, whereas I didn't even have any shoes. After the war I returned to our pre-war apartment but somebody was living there and the lady who opened to me banged the door.

We had some of our property hidden away at our aunts' and friends' places. One aunt gave me all the photos she had kept. My sister had got a gas oven as a wedding present from another aunt. I stayed with that aunt and would often stare at the oven, absent-mindedly.

She said, 'what are you staring at the oven for, it's not Gertruda's, I bought it for myself.' In reply, I asked her what good would a gas oven do me when I didn't have anything, except perhaps for sticking my head in it. Some of the neighbors returned things, but most of them didn't.

After the war I graduated from the secondary school of graphic arts with pretty good results. But I don't have any great talent or any compulsion to do art. I just like to make things with my hands, but it doesn't exactly have to be art with a capital A. I'm good with my hands. I forgot a lot of my English.

After the war I went to a language school, but I stopped, as I didn't have the money for it. I also studied at university - the School of Politics at the Central Committee of the Czechoslovak Communist Party. It was the only university I could go to, as I didn't have a high school education, as I had been to a secondary technical school. I had a go at studying history externally, but I had two children, neither of whom was completely healthy to start with, and then I got to thinking that I was too old to do a normal course of study, and besides there wasn't the money for it.

The main thing was that it was completely new stuff for me, as I had never learnt about Ancient Rome and Greece, so I decided to drop it. I then went to the School of Politics, where I got a First. They taught mainly economy and the history of philosophy and the history of the Czechoslovak Communist Party 18.

I joined the [Communist] Party, but first of all I was in the Czechoslovak Youth Association 19. On the one hand, all my friends had joined the party, on the other, the Russians had liberated us and I thought that it was the only force that could prevent what had happened ever being repeated. And they wanted me to join. No one else wanted me. No one would miss me if I didn't return to the orphanage in the evening. In the Youth League, I was in a committee; it was a fine group and they arranged their meetings according to when I could make it.

For example, we were supposed to have a meeting on Friday. And I said, 'I can't on Friday, no way, that's the only time we get a decent meal at the orphanage. If I come to the meeting, then I miss out on the only decent meal, the Sabbath dinner.' So they rescheduled it. And being in the League was only a small step from being in the Communist Party.

Anyway I believed in it. Uncle Leo said to me, "Don't go there, your dad was a Social Democrat.' But I thought that it was basically the same thing, except the communists were a bit more revolutionary and more for young people.

I had my first doubts during the Slansky Trials 20. After that, I no longer believed in it, but I still wanted to believe. I was mystified as to why, all of a sudden, a person's Jewish origin had to be stated. I hadn't seen socialism as an anti-Semitic system, nor had I come across any extreme manifestations of anti-Semitism after the war. I was ejected from the Party in 1969.

• My children

I have two children, a daughter and a son. My daughter, Alena, was born in 1950, my son, Pavel, in 1954. When I had Alena in 1950, that completely took up all my time and energy. My first child was the first one I had ever held in my arms and had had to look after. When my daughter got German measles, I was told that while she had a temperature she shouldn't lie down too much, as there was a risk of pneumonia.

So I paced up and down the apartment, nursing my child and shouting out loud, 'She's going to die on me, they've all died on me.' I've never vomited, but both my children used to throw up quite often. Once, when my daughter was still very young, she threw up in her swaddling clothes.

I got really scared, so I took hold of her and brought her to the pediatrician's, where there was a waiting room full of people - I had such a desperate look in my face that all the women let me go first. The doctor said, 'Now then, what's the matter?', and I said, 'Doctor, she's vomited.' He looked at me and said, understandingly, 'Don't worry, that often happens.'

Both of my children have been to university; Alena is a microbiologist and managed a laboratory, Pavel is chemical engineer and runs a research and development laboratory for a large company of millers and bakers. They both have their own families.

My daughter lives with her husband in the Czech Republic. My son married a French woman and lives in France. I go to see them nearly every year. They didn't have a religious upbringing, as I hadn't had one either, but they always knew that I was Jewish and they knew about what had happened to me.

They have an awareness of the tradition and a tremendous solidarity. I once heard my son talking to his sister about the 'halakhah', and he said, 'You're lucky, your children will be Jewish, but not mine.' They have been to visit Auschwitz and Terezin. I have three grandchildren, Anna, Marie and Pavel, aged 20, 17 and 14.

Before I had children, I worked as an artist at the Head Office for the Mechanization of Agriculture. I then took maternity leave. Later on, I ran the photo archive of the Institute for the History of the Czechoslovak Communist Party. From 1969, I worked at the Jewish Museum where, along with Mrs. Frankova, I put together the Holocaust documentation center.

In 1974, the then director Erich Klima sacked me for political reasons. The museum was state-owned and everything depended on the director. While Mr. Benda was in charge, we were a bit restricted, of course, but it was okay. And then Klima became director.

He banned the use of certain words. Whenever an exhibition was being prepared or something was being written, such as an inventory, we were not allowed to write 'Transports to the East', for instance, because it was from the east that freedom came.

In those days, the archive was basically not in operation; we sorted everything and turned it into the Terezin and Persecution Documentation collections, which are still in use to this day. People came there for photos and documents. I can remember once that a rabbi came from America to select photos and documents.

In those days we bent the rules a bit, because instead of charging for these services, we asked them to send us some books. That rabbi was an anti-Communist and was very active; he asked us why we had gone to the deportation trains like sheep and why we hadn't hidden somewhere.

I was responsible for his care at the time because I was the only one whose English was so-so. I told him, 'And where would you hide for six years?' He replied, 'Well, the streets are so small here.' He then also asked why we hadn't gone to Israel, upon which I asked him, 'And why didn't you go there?'. He said, 'Well, I support Israel financially.' Anyway, we then sent him what he had selected, and he took his revenge on the Communist regime by not sending us the books he had promised us. So we didn't get to read them.

After they had given me the sack, my daughter found me a job through an ad, which I did until 1982. That was as an economic organizer at the Central Bohemian Head Office for Communications, which meant that I paid out the wages and traveling expenses, and such like.

When I went to collect the money I was always accompanied by a security guard. He carried a gun and I was supposed to carry the bag with the money in it. But the bag was chained to the hand, so it couldn't be put down, and there was usually an amount of 300,000 to 380,000 crowns to carry.

The bag was really heavy because there were also coins in it, so my escort carried it for me. One day, however, there was a security check and they found out that he was carrying the money and the gun, which was just not possible. I said, 'I can't carry it as you can't put it down.

Anyone can see that.' They told me that I should carry the gun then. And I was given all these rules as to when I could and could not use it, so I thought to myself that this was all a bit too much. I told them, 'Surely you don't think I should risk my life for some money.' So I decided I would retire as soon as possible, which I did in 1982. I could have retired earlier as I have a certificate under Article 255 21.

I don't want to talk more about my life in the 60s, 70s and 80s.

I then did the books at the Jiri Wolker Theatre and, later on, I looked after my grandchild, since my daughter was unable to find work for a long time. And then, starting in 1991 I began to document the testimonies of Holocaust victims at the Jewish Museum with my colleague Anna Lorencova. I went to see people who had survived and recorded their testimonies on a cassette, which I then archived at the museum.

Whenever I made friends with someone, it never mattered whether that person was a Jew. But it is a fact that if I found out he was a Jew, then it brought me closer to that person in a different way. In the 1950s we began to live in a house with a garden, which was fine for the children. We also went to visit my in-laws, who lived in Mnichovice, not far from Prague.

I didn't go the synagogue. I used to bake Easter cake at Easter and I celebrate Christmas with my daughter and granddaughter. We have carp [for Christmas dinner] and give each other presents. We also celebrate our birthdays together. I don't celebrate Jewish holidays; I only light the candle in honor of my sister and parents.

Before November 1989 I distributed Samizdat publications 22, for which I also wrote, but mostly we listened to Radio Free Europe 23. I was enthusiastic about the revolution [see Velvet Revolution] 24. I went on demonstrations even beforehand, and was once showered by a water cannon. We weren't at the demonstration on 17th November though, because we were moving house on 1st December. I was packing and making preparations, so it was a bit of a hectic time. After the revolution, my personal life changed in that I got divorced and remained single. Also, I had very bleak prospects as to how I would manage to pay the rent on my low pension. Things later improved thanks to various compensation funds and humanitarian contributions. After the divorce I started to work again, collecting the testimonies of Holocaust survivors for the Jewish Museum.

I've been to Israel once - for three weeks in 1991 on an invitation from some friends of mine. I have friends there with whom I broke off correspondence during the Communist regime because things were really starting to hot up over here; I didn't know what to write because I wasn't allowed to say the truth. But we have since renewed the contact and now send emails to each other.

I have a friend there who had been in Terezin but I only met her after the war in the women's home where we became friends. I also have an old school friend over there who was also in Terezin and who I see whenever she comes over.

My best friend from the concentration camp immigrated to America in 1968, but she has already died. I thought about emigrating, although not to Israel, but in the end I decided not to go. We also asked our children to think about it but they couldn't make up their minds.

I am an active member of the Terezin Initiative of which I have become third deputy chair. After the revolution I also worked at the Institute for Contemporary History where I contributed to the publication of three works, one of which was on eminent people in Terezin. I also took part in the preparations for a new exhibition on the Terezin ghetto and for a new exhibition to complement the Czech exhibition in Auschwitz. At the moment, I'm preparing for publication the Terezin 'Tagesbefehle' [Daily Orders]. [Editor's note: They were published in fall 2003.] I feel I owe a debt of gratitude to those who didn't survive and that I'm paying this off by doing something in this field.

• Glossary:

1 Terezin/Theresienstadt: A ghetto in the Czech Republic, run by the SS. Jews were transferred from there to various extermination camps. It was used to camouflage the extermination of European Jews by the Nazis, who presented Theresienstadt as a 'model Jewish settlement'.

Czech gendarmes served as ghetto guards, and with their help the Jews were able to maintain contact with the outside world. Although education was prohibited, regular classes were held, clandestinely. Thanks to the large number of artists, writers, and scholars in the ghetto, there was an intensive program of cultural activities.

At the end of 1943, when word spread of what was happening in the Nazi camps, the Germans decided to allow an International Red Cross investigation committee to visit Theresienstadt.

In preparation, more prisoners were deported to Auschwitz, in order to reduce congestion in the ghetto. Dummy stores, a cafe, a bank, kindergartens, a school, and flower gardens were put up to deceive the committee.

2 White Guards: A counter-revolutionary gang led by General Denikin, famous for their brigandry and anti-Semitic acts all over Russia; legends were told of their cruelty. Few survived their pogroms.

3 KuK (Kaiserlich und Koeniglich) army: The name 'Imperial and Royal' was used for the army of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, as well as for other state institutions of the Monarchy originated from the dual political system. Following the Compromise of 1867, which established the Dual Monarchy, Austrian emperor and Hungarian King Franz Joseph was the head of the state and also commander-in-chief of the army. Hence the name 'Imperial and Royal'.

4 Masaryk, Tomas Garrigue (1850-1937): Czechoslovak political leader and philosopher and chief founder of the First Czechoslovak Republic. He founded the Czech People's Party in 1900, which strove for Czech independence within the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, for the protection of minorities and the unity of Czechs and Slovaks.

After the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in 1918, Masaryk became the first president of Czechoslovakia. He was reelected in 1920, 1927, and 1934.

Among the first acts of his government was an extensive land reform. He steered a moderate course on such sensitive issues as the status of minorities, especially the Slovaks and Germans, and the relations between the church and the state. Masaryk resigned in 1935 and Edvard Benes, his former foreign minister, succeeded him.

5 Hilsner Trial: In 1899 the Jew Leopold Hilsner was accused of ritual murder. During the first trial proceedings the media provoked an anti- Jewish hysteria among the general public and in legislative bodies, as a result of which Hilsner was sentenced to death, despite the lack of any direct evidence.

Both his ex officio counsel and President T. G. Masaryk tried to demythologize superstitions about the blood libel. In 1901 Emperor Franz Josef I changed the sentence to life imprisonment but he did not allow a retrial probably out of fear of pogroms. In 1918 Hilsner was granted pardon by Emperor Charles.

6 Hashomer Hatzair: 'The Young Watchman'; A Zionist-socialist pioneering movement founded in Eastern Europe, Hashomer Hatzair trained youth for kibbutz life and set up kibbutzim in Palestine. During World War II, members were sent to Nazi-occupied areas and became leaders in Jewish resistance groups. After the war, Hashomer Hatzair was active in 'illegal' immigration to Palestine.

7 Munich Pact: Signed by Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom and France in 1938, it allowed Germany to immediately occupy the Sudetenland (the border region of Czechoslovakia inhabited by a German minority). The representatives of the Czechoslovak government were not invited to the Munich conference.

Hungary and Poland were also allowed to seize territories: Hungary occupied southern and eastern Slovakia and a large part of Subcarpathia, which had been under Hungarian rule before World War I, and Poland occupied Teschen (Tesin or Cieszyn), a part of Silesia, which had been an object of dispute between Poland and Czechoslovakia, each of which claimed it on ethnic grounds.

Under the Munich Pact, the Czechoslovak Republic lost extensive economic and strategically important territories in the border regions (about one third of its total area).

8 Exclusion of Jews from schools in the Protectorate: The Ministry of Education of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia sent round a ministerial decree in 1940, which stated that from school year 1940/41 Jewish pupils were not allowed to visit Czech public and private schools and those who were already in school should be excluded.

After 1942 Jews were not allowed to visit Jewish schools or courses organised by the Jewish communities either.

9 Terezin Initiative Foundation (Nadace Terezinska iniciativa): Founded in 1993 by the International Association of Former Prisoners of the Terezin/Theresienstadt Ghetto, it is a special institute devoted to the scientific research on the history of Terezin and of the 'Final Solution' of the Jewish question in the Czech lands. At the end of 1998 it was renamed to Terezin Initiative Institute (Institut Terezinske iniciativy).

10 Maccabi World Union: International Jewish sports organization whose origins go back to the end of the 19th century. A growing number of young Eastern European Jews involved in Zionism felt that one essential prerequisite of the establishment of a national home in Palestine was the improvement of the physical condition and training of ghetto youth.

In order to achieve this, gymnastics clubs were founded in many Eastern and Central European countries, which later came to be called Maccabi.

The movement soon spread to more countries in Europe and to Palestine. The World Maccabi Union was formed in 1921. In less than two decades its membership was estimated at 200,000 with branches located in most countries of Europe and in Palestine, Australia, South America, South Africa, etc.

11 Sokol: One of the best-known Czech sports organizations.

It was founded in 1862 as the first physical educational organization in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy.

Besides regular training of all age groups, units organized sports competitions, colorful gymnastics rallies, cultural events including drama, literature and music, excursions and youth camps.

Although its main goal had always been the promotion of national health and sports, Sokol also played a key role in the national resistance to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Nazi occupation and the communist regime.

Sokol flourished between the two World Wars; its membership grew to over a million. Important statesmen, including the first two presidents of interwar Czechoslovakia, Tomas Masaryk and Edvard Benes, were members of Sokol.

Sokol was banned three times: during World War I, during the Nazi occupation and finally by the communists after 1948, but branches of the organization continued to exist abroad. Sokol was restored in 1990.

12 Janosik, Juraj (1688-1713): Slovak folk hero. He was a serf in the Fatra mountains in Upper Hungary (today Slovakia) and became an outcast. According to legend he robbed rich noblemen and townsmen and gave the haul to the poor.

Janosik participated in the Rakoczy uprising against the Habsburgs (1703-11). He joined a unit of irregulars and after the suppression of the revolt they became mountain robbers. He was caught by Lipto county authorities and executed in Liptoszentmiklos (today Liptovsky Mikulas). Janosik is the hero of many Slovak folk tales and legends and also celebrated in folk songs.

13 Hagibor: Prague camp, located on Schwerinova Street. Most of the people interned here were Jews from outside Prague living in mixed marriages. The internees who were fit to work were employed in the 'mica works' of the firm Glimmer-Spalterei, G.M.b.H. On 30th January 1945, it was decided to deport the entire mica works to Terezin.

The number of Jews interned at Hagibor subsequently dropped from an average of 1,400 to a mere 100-150. In total, 3,000 people passed through the camp. Hagibor was allegedly closed down on 5th May 1945, and the remaining internees returned to their homes.

14 Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia: Bohemia and Moravia were occupied by the Germans and transformed into a German Protectorate in March 1939, after Slovakia declared its independence. The Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was placed under the supervision of the Reich protector, Konstantin von Neurath.

The Gestapo assumed police authority. Jews were dismissed from civil service and placed in an extralegal position. In the fall of 1941, the Reich adopted a more radical policy in the Protectorate. The Gestapo became very active in arrests and executions.

The deportation of Jews to concentration camps was organized, and Terezin/Theresienstadt was turned into a ghetto for Jewish families. During the existence of the Protectorate the Jewish population of Bohemia and Moravia was virtually annihilated. After World War II the pre-1938 boundaries were restored, and most of the German-speaking population was expelled.

15 Heydrichiade: Period of harsh reprisals against the Czech resistance movement and against the Czech nation under the German occupation (1939- 45). It started in September 1941 with the appointment of R. Heydrich as Reichsprotektor of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, who declared martial law and executed the representatives of the local resistance.

The Heydrichiade came to its peak after Heydrich's assassination in May 1942. After his death, martial law was introduced until early July 1942, in the framework of which Czech patriots were executed and deported to concentration camps, and the towns of Lidice and Lezaky were annihilated. Sometimes the term Heydrichiade is used to refer to the period of martial law after Heydrich's assassination.

16 Anti-Jewish laws in the Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia: After the Germans occupied Bohemia and Moravia, anti-Jewish legislation was gradually introduced. Jews were not allowed to enter public places, such as parks, theatres, cinemas, libraries, swimming pools, etc.

They were excluded from all kinds of professional associations and could not be civil servants. They were not allowed to attend German or Czech schools, and later private lessons were forbidden, too. They were not allowed to leave their houses after 8pm.

Their shopping hours were limited to 3 to 5pm. They were only allowed to travel in special sections of public transportation. They had their telephones and radios confiscated. They were not allowed to change their place of residence without permission. In 1941 they were ordered to wear the yellow badge.

17 Hitlerjugend: The youth organization of the German Nazi Party (NSDAP). In 1936 all other German youth organizations were abolished and the Hitlerjugend was the only legal state youth organization. From 1939 all young Germans between 10 and 18 were obliged to join the Hitlerjugend, which organized after-school activities and political education.

Boys over 14 were also given pre-military training and girls over 14 were trained for motherhood and domestic duties. After reaching the age of 18, young people either joined the army or went to work.

18 Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSC): Founded in 1921 following a split from the Social Democratic Party, it was banned under the Nazi occupation. It was only after Soviet Russia entered World War II that the Party developed resistance activity in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia; because of this, it gained a certain degree of popularity with the general public after 1945.

After the communist coup in 1948, the Party had sole power in Czechoslovakia for over 40 years.

The 1950s were marked by party purges and a war against the 'enemy within'. A rift in the Party led to a relaxing of control during the Prague Spring starting in 1967, which came to an end with the occupation of Czechoslovakia by Soviet and allied troops in 1968 and was followed by a period of normalization. The communist rule came to an end after the Velvet Revolution of November 1989.

19 Czechoslovak Youth Association (CSM): Founded in 1949, it was a mass youth organization in the Czechoslovak Republic, led by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. It was dissolved in 1968 but reestablished in April 1969 by the Communist Party as the Socialist Youth Association and was only dissolved in 1989.

20 Slansky Trial: Communist show trial named after its most prominent victim, Rudolf Slansky. It was the most spectacular among show trials against communists with a wartime connection with the West, veterans of the Spanish Civil War, Jews, and Slovak 'bourgeois nationalists'.

In November 1952 Slansky and 13 other prominent communist personalities, 11 of whom were Jewish, including Slansky, were brought to trial. The trial was given great publicity; they were accused of being Trotskyst, Titoist, Zionist, bourgeois, nationalist traitors, and in the service of American imperialism. Slansky was executed, and many others were sentenced to death or to forced labor in prison camps.

21 Certificate under Article 255/1946 Coll.: Certificate awarded to certain people involved in the national struggle for liberation during World War II. It was issued by the Ministry of Defense and entailed certain advantages, such as early retirement.

22 Samizdat literature in Czechoslovakia: Samizdat literature: The secret publication and distribution of government-banned literature in the former Soviet block. Typically, it was typewritten on thin paper (to facilitate the production of as many carbon copies as possible) and circulated by hand, initially to a group of trusted friends, who then made further typewritten copies and distributed them clandestinely.

Material circulated in this way included fiction, poetry, memoirs, historical works, political treatises, petitions, religious tracts, and journals.

The penalty for those accused of being involved in samizdat activities varied according to the political climate, from harassment to detention or severe terms of imprisonment.

In Czechoslovakia, there was a boom in Samizdat literature after 1948 and, in particular, after 1968, with the establishment of a number of Samizdat editions supervised by writers, literary critics and publicists: Petlice (editor L. Vaculik), Expedice (editor J. Lopatka), as well as, among others, Ceska expedice (Czech Expedition), Popelnice (Garbage Can) and Prazska imaginace (Prague Imagination).

23 Radio Free Europe: Radio station launched in 1949 at the instigation of the US government with headquarters in West Germany. The radio broadcast uncensored news and features, produced by Central and Eastern European émigrés, from Munich to countries of the Soviet block.

The radio station was jammed behind the Iron Curtain, team members were constantly harassed and several people were killed in terrorist attacks by the KGB. Radio Free Europe played a role in supporting dissident groups, inner resistance and will of freedom in the Eastern and Central European communist countries and thus it contributed to the downfall of the totalitarian regimes of the Soviet block. The headquarters of the radio have been in Prague since 1994.

24 Velvet Revolution: Also known as November Events, this term is used for the period between 17th November and 29th December 1989, which resulted in the downfall of the Czechoslovak communist regime. The Velvet Revolution started with student demonstrations, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the student demonstration against the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia.

Brutal police intervention stirred up public unrest, mass demonstrations took place in Prague, Bratislava and other towns, and a general strike began on 27th November. The Civic Forum demanded the resignation of the communist government.

Due to the general strike Prime Minister Ladislav Adamec was finally forced to hold talks with the Civic Forum and agreed to form a new coalition government. On 29th December democratic elections were held, and Vaclav Havel was elected President of Czechoslovakia.

Saint-Petersburg
Russia
Interviewer: Sophia Kozlova
Date of interview: June 2002

Lev Borisovich creates a very nice impression. He is an elderly man with massive features and a kind glance.

His speech is rather monotonous, unemotional, he narrates a bit laid-back.

However, Lev Borisovich remembers a lot of interesting details and sometimes talks about his life with great enthusiasm.

The furniture in his apartment is rather modest, but at the same time everything is very clean and neat.

• Family background
• Growing up
• During the War
• After the War
• Glossary

Family background

My paternal grandfather, Elyukim Khapun [1863-1914], was a blacksmith; and all his relatives and brothers were blacksmiths, too. His daughters only married blacksmiths; thus all men in the family were blacksmiths. They lived in Vinnitsa, in Kamenetsk-Podolsk province of Ukraine. There was not much work for a blacksmith in Vinnitsa, so they left for neighboring villages looking for day labor.

Exactly at that time [1870-1880s] the Odessa-Kishinev railroad was being constructed. Some of the relatives went there, since they lived poorly and the payment at the construction site was good. In Vinnitsa they usually repaired fences and shoed horses; such work was not difficult. At the construction site they made parts for the railroad. After that they returned to Vinnitsa.

At that time, by the beginning of the 20th century, the population of Vinnitsa was 80,000-100,000 people. My father's family had a monopoly for blacksmith's work in town. There were four marketplaces in Vinnitsa, and since peasants came there on horseback, each marketplace had to have a smithy. All blacksmiths at the marketplaces were brothers. Grandfather could not work at that time because he was old.

His brothers were very well known; they were highly-qualified blacksmiths. They didn't only repair things, they also made equipment for wells. Gypsies were their competitors, for example, they made copper basins. There was no aluminum at that time, only copper and tin.

Vinnitsa was a 70% Jewish town. Besides Jews Poles, Ukrainians and some Germans lived there, but almost no Russians. Jews were in very close relations with each other and talked only in Yiddish. If they didn't speak Yiddish, then they talked in Ukrainian with the Ukrainians who lived in town. Russian was also well known. For example, before the war people in a tram only spoke Yiddish, and some Russians and Ukrainians spoke Yiddish as well. There were beggars sitting in front of the marketplace, and they knew how to beg in Polish, if a Pole approached, and in Yiddish, if a Jew approached. All in all several languages were popular in Vinnitsa. There was a Roman Catholic church and a Lutheran Church in Vinnitsa. When the Soviets came into power, an aero club was organized in the Roman Catholic church. The Roman Catholic church was so big, that inside it an airplane was disassembled and assembled again, and it remained there. Later the Znaniye Society was set up there. Now it is the Roman Catholic church again.

There was a district in Vinnitsa, which was called Jerusalimka. There were several streets with a lot of alleyways in between. Even when one walked there with eyes closed, one knew that it was Jerusalimka because of the dreadful stench. There were two-storey houses where poor people lived. In the course of the Soviet Power all of Jerusalimka was destroyed, and Verkhnyaya and Nizhnyaya streets were built instead. Several houses were constructed in the country and all former Jerusalimka citizens were moved there.

My father, Boris Elyukimovich Khapun [1898-1970], was the youngest in the family, ninth or eleventh. I only know his brothers Nutyr and Girsh by name. They had families, but I can't tell you anything about them. The others brothers I don't remember. As a child my father studied in cheder for two or three years; he did not study anywhere else. He was proposed for some courses later on. Since everyone in the family was a blacksmith, my father also became a blacksmith; it was inevitable. Father didn't shoe horses. Plants were constructed and developed in Vinnitsa at that time [1910-1920s], and various specialists were in demand. Father went to a plant and worked there as a blacksmith. The family expanded during that time and lived in a big house in friendship.

My paternal grandmother, Golda Khapun, born in 1863, was a very gentle person. Her older daughter, aunt Peisya, was managing the whole house and ordered everyone about, including the blacksmiths; such an interesting paradox.

In 1905, they say, there was a big Jewish pogrom. It's not true that the government didn't fight against pogroms. When there was a pogrom in Vinnitsa and Berdichev, the tsarist government sent Cossacks 1, either from Don or Kuban, to suppress the pogrom-makers. Cossacks were heavily built men and behaved conceitedly towards the local population. For instance, they came to the smithy because they also needed to shoe their horses. Cossacks believed that they had a privileged status. They bumped into my uncles, or, to be more precise, grand-uncles. A conversation started and, since they behaved haughtily, they were verbally refused. A scuffle began. There were twelve Cossacks with horses, harness, weapons; and the blacksmiths were fewer in number. But when the brawl began, they beat those Cossacks up so badly that the latter weren't able to leave on their own. The Cossacks complained about it to their officer. The colonel started an investigation. Since it wasn't possible to talk to the beaten, he had to wait for some time.

I know about this incident from what my father told me. He was a small boy at the time (he was only seven years old), and he could not have seen it all, but he knew the story very well. The policemen visited the colonel, saw the beaten and started an inquest in order to punish those bandits who had beaten up the Cossacks. But the blacksmiths escaped. There was this village fool in Vinnitsa. He was short, weak and a bit twisted. The police and the Cossacks looked for the guilty but couldn't find them. At that time it was impossible not to reveal a crime.

So they caught the village fool and brought him to the colonel. The colonel said, 'What kind of Cossacks I have, that such shabby Jew men can get the better of them?' He turned out that guy and closed the case. The Cossacks suppressed that pogrom, so it cannot be simply said that the tsarist government welcomed the pogroms.

There was another interesting story about those blacksmiths. There was a draft to the tsarist army, and one day in 1898 they were all drafted into it. Since the brothers departed for the army, all their cousins and other relatives came to see them off. The draftees got drunk for courage and arrived drunk for the draft. On that day the natives began to mock at the Jewish guys, who came to the draft. The latter tolerated that for some time, but then beat them up. Blacksmiths were very strong guys, of origin and because of their occupation, since they worked with sledgehammers all day long. A serious fight began, and all draftees scattered away, so the draft was closed for that day. A guard told me about this incident when I worked at a plant in Vinnitsa. He was drafted at that time, too. He told me this story, which happened to him, and when I later asked my father about it, he told me that it had really happened.

For some time all relatives lived together in one big house. They lived in friendship and never discussed each other's family matters. My paternal grandfather and grandmother were religious people. Their family observed all holidays and fasts when they occurred. They baked matzah, kept kosher and took poultry to the shochet at the marketplace, it was not allowed otherwise. Everybody went to the carver. One brought him a chicken; he read a prayer, cut the chicken and let the blood flow. There were also women, who later plucked the chicken. No one cut the chicken on his or her own, only with the help of a carver.

Holidays were celebrated by the whole family. Hamantashen, triangles with poppy-seeds, were made for holidays [for Purim]. When everybody gathered at the table, songs were sung; and the men drank wine and plum or sour cherry nalivka. Wine and nalivka are prepared by different methods. For nalivka a big bottle is used, into which sour cherries, or plums, or raspberries or other berries are poured; then sugar is added, but no water. The sugar melts bit-by-bit and liquid appears; its volume increases and nalivka is ready. Wine is produced when the berries are drafted and wine ferments. When nalivka is produced the berries are not drafted.

The hostess cooked some refreshments; guests didn't bring any food. Men talked about their business and women talked about theirs. Men drank nalivka and women ate wine sour cherries, it was a tradition. But even for the Purim holiday, when according to tradition, everybody had to drink himself into oblivion, they never got drunk. They observed all holidays according to the Jewish tradition. Later they didn't only celebrated Jewish holidays, but also [Soviet] revolutionary ones.

All in all my relatives were superstitious. They believed that if someone was scolded, it would influence his life. And many of them, especially women, were very much afraid to be scolded. There was also a taboo among the Jews: it was prohibited to gossip. Jews have a word called 'mouser' in their language. If a person was given this nickname, everybody started to avoid him. Here's an example: My grandmother had a neighbor. When the Germans came, he, a Jew, became a priest and behaved really badly. He did not assist his fellow countrymen. Everyone was killed, but they didn't touch him. After the war he put on soldier's boots, breeches and a soldier's blouse and walked with ease. No one informed against him. Mouser means the end, a complete boycott on a person. That's why nobody said anything about that traitor.

Father was taken to the army during the Imperialistic War [WWI]. He didn't want to go to war, but he was a healthy man. However, the conditions were such, that one wasn't accepted to the army in case of absence of teeth. So father went to the dentist and pulled out healthy teeth without anesthesia. But after he had pulled out his teeth, he was nonetheless enrolled for the army. He served in the infantry under Kerensky 2. He had a picture of himself: so slender, with shoulder straps and a red bow on his chest. The Revolution had already begun, and those who were supporting it wore bows. The Jews were suppressed under the tsar, but Kerensky abolished all prohibitions, the Jewish Pale 3, for instance. That's why father supported him.

When the army and the front fell apart, everybody was allowed to go home with their weapons. My father asked for a reference note to prove that he was not a deserter. He was issued a reference note, which said: 'Berka Elyukomovich, released from the army as such.' Later he often told guests about it. He walked home on his own; trains were taken by storm. So he walked and was stopped and asked for his documents; they read his reference note and laughed.

When my father participated in the Civil War [1918-1921], there was no Communist Party in Vinnitsa; there was a trade union. The trade union protected itself from gangs, which consisted of peasants. Why not rob the Jews with impunity? The peasant bandits took carts, stole things and left. People tolerated it for some time, but then they lost all patience. They organized their own guard and began to defend themselves from the gangs. Once they rushed into a village with a weird name, there was Malye Khutora and Bolshiye Khutora, where the bandits came from.

They were in different locations. The townsmen mutilated a lot of people; some were killed. The bandits were punished, because they were rapists, robbers and mutilators. After that event the peasants' banditry stopped, but new gangs were formed: first Petlyura 4 came and then the Poles occupied the territory. A Jew, whose family was killed by Petlyura's gang, later murdered Petlyura. This Jew pursued him and found him in Paris. Petlyura had one minister who was Jewish, it was only a rumor, and I don't know details. We know his descendants, his relatives.

During the NEP 5 times [1921-1924] my father became a NEP-man and started a cooperative, and relatives joined it. They took a half-dilapidated house near the bridge, repaired it and worked there. They earned some money for their work and it was distributed not according to the contribution of the member, but according to the number of children in his family.

Aunt Peisya and uncle Boris had many children, and since I was an only child, the rule made my mother indignant. Father was the chairman but our family got least of all. Father did earn good money, but mother wasn't pleased with it all the same. However, my father couldn't behave differently. He was the youngest in the family, and he couldn't give instructions to his brothers.

His relatives must have acknowledged my father as chairman because of his organizing capabilities. He even had a nickname in the family: professor. I was surprised at that time that Ukrainians and Russians addressed him by his name and patronymic and with [the formal] 'You'. At the same time father had pupils aged 15-16, who called him Berl and addressed him with [the informal] 'you', not 'You'. I didn't express my surprise, but thought to myself, 'Why is that so'. The patronymic wasn't used because all were relatives and not only natural relatives. For instance, my aunt Peisya married Boris, and he also joined the team.

When conflicts arose, the Jews didn't appeal to the state court, it was considered indecent. For instance, when there was a conflict between a NEP- man and a worker, or between a husband and a wife (if one wanted a divorce and the other one didn't), no one even considered to appeal to the state authorities, let alone, the court. For example, carts were rented in order to deliver something. When payment time came, a dispute arose, which had to be solved. In Vinnitsa it happened the following way: one party got itself an 'attorney', a representative; the other party did the same. These people got together and settled the dispute.

If they came to an agreement, they parted; if not, both representatives consulted a third party. My father was always invited to be a judge and settle disputes. His decisions were never discussed because it was connected with serious trouble for the defeated party: respect was lost, because Jews were around. Father was respected. There was the Bar Association [a league of attorneys, professional community] with attorneys who obtained their education in Russia and abroad, but they also respected his opinion.

After the NEP time, my father joined the Communist Party, as it was prestigious, in fashion and convenient at that time. He was a man of principle, didn't change his mind and didn't take bribes. Later, when he worked at the chemical plant, he invented some things. But he was semiliterate. He told the shop master about his proposal. And the chief engineer was later given these diplomas and big bonuses for these proposals. When the sugar plant was constructed, automated scales appeared. It was German equipment, and no one knew how to repair it. Father had a look at it and fixed it.

Father's older brother Nutyr left for America in the 1920s. Before the war he wrote a letter to his relatives, saying that he was in a good position and able to assist them, if they gave him their address. They came to my father for advice. He told them, 'Why do you need it, everybody is being put into camps now'. So they never wrote back. I later looked for that uncle, but didn't find him. He sent pictures with his letter. I remember that my father was filled with indignation because of them: he was of patriarchal breed and in the picture his brother wore shorts and held a tennis racket. In his last letter Nutyr wrote that he was very busy and couldn't write letters.

He said, that his wife would be happy to correspond, but that she knew no Russian or Polish, only English. If they were satisfied with that, she would write to them. No one knew English at that time and everyone was scared. My wife is still afraid of the NKVD 6. Thus the contact was lost. Mother also called me Nutyr sometimes. She thought that I was stubborn, and that uncle was also very stubborn. He left for America in spite of his relatives asking him to stay.

When the pogroms began, and after the Soviet Power and other trouble came, many of our relatives emigrated. It was possible to emigrate during the NEP time and after. Several families got together, not only relatives, and left for America. However, when they arrived, they were not let in, embargo was already introduced. So they decided to go to Mexico. Thus five or six families lived and worked in Mexico. Aunt Sonya, Peisya and Clara also went there.

Father also wanted to leave for Mexico, but grandmother didn't want to. She had daughters and she wanted to take them with her, but father said that would be too many people and refused. So they stayed while the others left. They had a boss there who they worked for. They were semiliterate people, but craftspeople of very high qualification.

They decided to return after some time. They had no money, and were five or six families, each with no less than three or four children. They started to write to father, 'Save us, we want to come back home'. My father was well-off. He owned two houses in Vinnitsa, one of them a two-storey building. He sold the houses for nothing and sent the money to his relatives in Mexico. He also sold the houses because the collectivization started and everything would have been taken away anyway.

When his relatives were ready to go home, they told their boss about it. And he replied, 'What are you, fools? You're going to join the polar bears. The climate here is wonderful, earnings are good, why don't you stay? I will give you a raise and a house, which you will be able to redeem gradually.' But they left, suffered in the war here and almost everyone perished. Unfortunately, I don't know more about my grandparents.

My grandfather on mother's side, Leiba Simkhanovich Gutkin [1885-1918], was a tailor. To be more precise, he was more of an organizer than a tailor. He set up several tailor's workshops in Odessa, which sewed clothes for sale, mostly suits. He was mobilized into the army and fought in the Russian- Japanese war [1904-1905]. He came from Odessa, which means his behavior was rather peculiar. There was a colonel, also from Odessa. My grandfather helped that colonel very much, almost saved his life. The colonel told my grandfather: 'Why are you a Jew, get converted into Russian Orthodoxy, or at least Islam, but don't be a Jew. Then I will make you an officer and you'll be a respected man.'

In order to avoid the conversation, my grandfather told him, 'I'll think about it.' The war ended, he returned to Odessa, and the colonel started to serve at the Odessa garrison. My grandfather found out that he had come back and wanted to pay his respects to the colonel. And the latter told him again, 'I will make you an officer, reject Judaism.' My grandfather didn't. So he told him again, 'We will organize shvanya for you.' Shvanya is a tailor's workshop. Since that man was a colonel, he began to place orders with my grandfather for soldier's uniforms. Thus grandfather became the owner of several workshops.

My maternal grandmother, Lyubov Rafailovna Gutkina, nee Zakhterova [1885- 1967], came from a prosperous family. Almost all her relatives had left for America. She fell in love with grandfather and wasn't able to leave for America, because she stayed with her husband. She got married, first a son was born and then my mother. All in all she had five daughters; her son died. During World War II my mother's sisters were evacuated; only one, the youngest, perished. She had health problems, stayed in a boarding school or some special home, and for some reason they couldn't find her.

Grandmother fed the tailors at the workshops, because they worked long hours and had no time to go out to eat. She cooked lunch for them. From that time the following joke survived: Those Jews, who worked at the cooperative, were always very hungry. When grandmother gave them lunch, she had to bring bread, then the first course and then the second course. So, once she brought some bread and went to get the first course. When she came back she saw that there wasn't a breadcrumb left on the table. So she went to get some more bread. She brought it and left again to bring the first course. When she returned, there wasn't a single piece of bread left. Then her little daughter began to pull her skirt, and grandmother, strung-up with the situation, told her, 'Stop that or I'll put you on the table.'

In 1918 my grandfather died of typhus. He was looking for food in different towns, fell sick and died. My grandmother was left with four or five children in Odessa without any livelihood. The Civil War was at its height. My mother, was 13 years old. My grandmother had a sister in Vinnitsa. They exchanged letters and she moved to Vinnitsa with her children. Her sister's name was Sonya and her husband's last name was Ulman.

When my grandmother came to Vinnitsa, she lived at her uncle's place with the children for some time, but then she realized that she had to live on her own. They lived poorly and had to work. My mother and her sister Vera went to work, I don't remember what they did. The third sister entered a college and became an obstetrician, and the fourth sister became an economist. Later their condition improved but it was very difficult at first. My grandmother believed in God, but when the collectivization started and non-ferrous metals were collected from the citizens, grandmother handed in her copper candlestick for Chanukkah, and her menorah.

My mother, Esfir Lvovna Khapun, nee Gutkina [1905-1975], helped all her family after she got married. My father was a very active and hard-working man, but he worked at two or three places. In 1934-1935 a serious famine 7 broke out in Ukraine and one third of the population died. My father always worked hard and earned a lot. As a matter of fact he supported grandmother and all my mother's sisters. They needed clothes, since they were young girls. My mother always helped. My father did not interfere; he merely brought the money. My mother was a housewife. Later she worked as a nurse in a hospital.

My aunts, those who did not perish, received a higher education or secondary special education. Both my grandmothers were literate, could write in Russian, read prescriptions and understood German. I don't know where they studied. My mother went to a common school, she had beautiful handwriting, but she wasn't very literate and usually made three mistakes per page.

I would like to say a few of words about the Jewish way of speaking. Jews have always been teased for their incorrect speech, but I say that no one speaks better than a Jew. When one wants to imitate a Jew, one speaks smoothly and with a singing accent, but this isn't correct. Maybe they did speak that way in the past, but it doesn't exist anymore. Among those Jews whom I knew in Vinnitsa, everyone had higher education.

My parents met when they were both in their early twenties. After they saw each other for some time they got married. At first they lived with father's family. My mother was a young wife and wanted to cook some meal for my father, for example, a pie or vareniki, which were very popular in the Ukraine and were cooked with sour cherries' or other berries' filling. But when the boys, rather frank and spontaneous, saw such food cooked by her, they ate everything immediately. Mother was indignant with their behavior, she did not want to cook for all of them. She was an individualist. She made father move and they started to live on their own. I was already born by that time. At first father left, then his brother Girsh became a trade-union figure and was provided with an apartment; later someone else left. So one by one many departed. At the same time a lot stayed behind and lived in one house, both before and after the war. Some separated but paid visits to each others families.

Growing up

My parents were religious, but not Orthodox. They didn't pay a lot of attention to praying, but observed the traditions. We had guests on Saturdays. Father's friends came, drank nalivka, but there were no drunk people. The traditions were observed, yet not strictly; matzah was cooked. Later it was sold in stores but it was seldom purchased, because everyone got used to making it at home.

There was a synagogue in the main street in Vinnitsa. It was of the same type as the Leningrad one: A gallery for women above and places for men below. A philharmonic society was set up there during the Soviet times. There was another synagogue, in which a gym was built. Father adhered to democratic views. He didn't like the atmosphere at the synagogue. They didn't only pray there, but also solved public problems. Jews got together and settled some problem. Everyone had to speak in order to come to a mutual agreement. But if a poor man stated that something had to be done, they showed him well-off Jews and told him, 'Where are you sticking your nose into? Don't you see there are respected people here?' Father didn't like it at all, that's why he almost never attended the synagogue. He didn't like the attitude towards the poor, who were treated as if they were people of second quality.

In the Soviet time [1930s] the Vinnitsa community still existed, though the synagogues didn't operate anymore. There were four or five of them in Vinnitsa before. The main synagogue was shut down earlier, in the 1920s. There are prayers according to Jewish tradition, which can only be said if there's a minyan - ten people, all men. Such meetings were held in private houses and were half-legal. They gathered mainly at widows' places. If a widow allowed people to come to her place, they were all anxious to do so, because it was some kind of assistance to her. Money wasn't only collected for this widow, but also for some other good causes. People came to pray and make donations. As a matter of fact, I never attended these meetings; neither did my mother. But father did, since he considered it a tradition. All in all, however, he believed that if God existed, it was possible to address Him and talk to Him directly. He is Almighty, so why gather in a certain place?

Earlier people attended one certain synagogue in each district. It wasn't allowed not to come to the synagogue, because it meant loss of authority and prestige. Even if one was an unbeliever or unserious believer, or simply a sympathizer, he attended the synagogue. People came to the synagogue both to pray and to communicate. There was no other way.

Every well-off Jew had paupers whom he patronized. These people came to eat at his place not only on Saturday. Such beggars also visited our house. I remember one poor woman, who often came to our place. She always smelled very bad and I had an aversion to her. When mother took care of her, gave her bed-sheets, shirts or something else, I did not understand why she did that. But it was impossible not to help.

In Russian Orthodoxy when a person dies, funeral repast [commemoration] is organized. The deceased and his good deeds are recalled at the repast. Jews have no such funeral repasts. On the contrary, a fast was organized; people took off their shoes and sat in mourning for a whole week. We observed it all, everybody without exception.

Jews always have a matchmaker, and everybody knows that woman is a matchmaker. She has a list of all marriageable girls and young men. It was not necessary to ask her for help. If there was a pair that saw each other and planned to get married, it was still on the matchmaker's list. The matchmaker saw that there was a beautiful girl and a handsome man, who deserved each other. So she went to the family of the young man or the girl and offered them to get acquainted. They were very good psychologists and could organize it all. The tradition wasn't always maintained but matchmakers existed. They were paid for what they did. Sholem Aleichem 8 has a story about male matchmakers, two friends, who met and in the end matched two girls.

The family of the girl was supposed to pay dowry. If the family was poor, the wedding was arranged on the condition of parity. If the young man was poor and the girl was rich, her family paid. Poor girls were called soykha. They had no dowry, but they also needed to get married. So balegoles [carters] visited various houses. They were robust guys accompanied by several women. They talked to the host and hostess, 'This girl is getting married, and dowry is required.' Normally it happened in the yard, there were yards at that time and all doors and windows faced the yard.

When a certain amount of money was brought out, the balegoles looked at it and said, 'No way, that's not enough.' And if they were told, 'I have no more money', a scandal started. Women screamed, balegoles yelled and all neighbors ran out of their houses. They also visited mother, she gave money, but she usually checked, who approached. If it was a brawler, she tried to secretly leave the house. All in all, if the man said that he had no money, he was told, 'I can lend you some, you can pay back later.' It was impossible to wriggle one's way out of it. This was how a girl was prepared for a wedding if she had no parents.

Klezmer musicians were definitely present at weddings. It was an interesting Jewish tradition. They were not invited, but they wandered about looking for a wedding. Sometimes two bands came to one wedding. Such situations sometimes ended with a fight about the use of musical instruments. Why? Because the wedding organizers never paid the musicians. Those guests who ordered the music paid them. When the guests came to a wedding, they entered one by one in order to pay respect to each guest. The musicians played a flourish to each, a welcome march. And the guest in his turn had to give the musicians some money. It was all agreed beforehand. At one of the weddings my grandmother Lyubov was lost in contemplation over something, and when the musicians suddenly started to play flourish to some guest, she had a stroke. She died. She was 82 years old.

There were sahvors. If the hostess couldn't cook properly, she didn't invite the cooks, but the sahvors. They were both bakers and organizers. It wasn't their occupation in the full meaning of the word; they were just people who could cook very well. They were paid for their work, and the musicians paid them, too. If a woman was invited to organize a wedding, she immediately ran to the musicians to tell them about it. Klezmer musicians paid her for the information.

The most important dance was cher. Only the Jews have this dance. People stood in four couples crosswise. There were special figures. Gradually all these couples had to exchange partners. That is why in this dance a certain number of bars has to be played. It wasn't allowed to stop in the middle, because some of the dancing couples would go through the ritual, and others wouldn't. That's why this dance was the most expensive one. Just imagine a man, who wants to improve his image in the eyes of other guests, and for this purpose orders cher. Everybody orders dances, but those who want to prove their authority, order cher, because it's very expensive. If a waltz is ordered, the musicians, having received their payment for it, will play only several bars. Then another pays, and another. A Jewish dance is like a Georgian one, or any other Caucasian. When you see Russian or Slavic dances, you see that dancers stamp their feet. Negroes [African Americans] tap-dance, but Jews jump like dragonflies. When cher started, only those danced, who liked to dance and could dance well. And they performed such unbelievable things with their legs with such ease! It was a wonderful sight.

When I was small, five or six years old, a Jewish teacher, a melamed, began to teach me. He was hired by my parents. He was supposed to teach me Yiddish. At home I spoke Russian. But he just visited me for a short time, about a month, because I didn't understand what he wanted from me. The teacher was old. Jewish families merely hired teachers if they wanted their kids to have Jewish education because there were no cheders at that time.

There was no bar mitzvah. My parents were communists. Maybe they did something according to tradition but I don't remember. There were no special celebrations. However, when I was thirteen years old, and took liberties, violated something, or behaved badly, they reproached me, saying that I was already thirteen, how could I behave that way, one could get married at that age.

I was mainly brought up in the street, but I saw all traditions and ceremonies. Mother followed the rules and wanted me to be a decent boy, not a hooligan, who does blameworthy things. I was almost never blamed for anything. We had this boy in the neighborhood; his name was Boma. He was so fat that it was impossible to go anywhere with him, as he attracted everybody's attention. His brothers decided not to give him food anymore, and he was very hungry. They had a house with a cellar. There were no fridges at that time, and there was ice in the cellar. Ice was procured in winter, put in the cellar, so that in summer the temperature was low there. Soup, second course and other food were stored there. Since Boma was very hungry, he went into the cellar, where several neighbors kept their food (each had soup, second and third courses) for several days. And Boma ate each neighbor's food bit-by-bit. When mother found out about it, she repeated to me a hundred times that what he had done, was very bad, that it was a crime.

I remember that in my childhood theaters in Vinnitsa were always packed, especially when popular Jewish actors arrived. There were such festivals. For example, there was Epelbaum, a famous Odessa and Vinnitsa singer. Then Clara Yung came. When she arrived, there was a welter in the theater. I actually didn't seen any pure drama performances there. They were all musical shows.

I started school in 1932. There were around 70% Jews in our class. There were also Poles, Ukrainians and one German. There was no anti-Semitism in our class. One trick was played on someone once, but the person who had done it, was blamed for that and never repeated it. There was no difference between the pupils. Poles lived at the place where Boma lived. It turned out that they formed a group of their own. When I visited their place to see my friends, who lived in that house, I didn't need an interpreter. I listened to what they said and understood everything perfectly. They spoke in Polish, and I replied in Russian, and we understood each other very well.

Germans also lived in Vinnitsa. When I worked in Vinnitsa at the chemical company, a funny episode happened. I worked as an engineer in the Management Department. A large German delegation arrived in order to solve some assembly and operation problems. The General Manager invited me to the meeting. Germans sat on one side, our administration team on the other. A Russian interpreter came to help with the conversation. He was a Chekist [State Security Office employee], all interpreters were freelance Chekists. The General Manager gave an introduction speech. The interpreter translated it into German. After the German representative gave his speech, when it would have been the interpreter's job to translate, it turned out that no one needed a translation, everybody understood him. When the Germans ended their speeches, they immediately received answers to all their questions. Judging from their age, the Germans had participated in the war, and thus knew Russian. So the interpreter sat there like a dummy.

During the War

After I finished school war broke out. I was in evacuation in Tashkent with my family. We got there by train as soon as the war began, that was in 1941. I entered Ashkhabad Infantry College and was enrolled into the army from the second year of my studies. I was in the army until the end of the war. I stayed in Stalinsk, now it is called Novokuznetsk, after I was wounded. There was a metallurgical plant there. I found myself in the labor army. Those, who could not serve in the army, because of wounds, but could work for the frontline, were enrolled into such labor army. They worked in the hinter-front and close to the frontline. The college was there and it was possible to study part-time, which I did.

When my father was in evacuation, he worked at a plant. Every time they came to mobilize, father was not touched; no one could imagine that the plant management would send him away. Father worked until he fell ill. When he became very weak, he asked my friend, the manager of a park, if he could work at the attractions, because they also came out of order. The manager said, 'He's an old man, why does he want to do that?' I told my father, 'You have a pension, I'll give you money, get some rest, why work?' This was exactly what disappointed him. He didn't reply but I knew that he was displeased.

Our relatives in Vinnitsa, who were young, were evacuated. Those who were of mobilization age were enrolled into the army. Part of them perished, part came back crippled, some returned fine. Many of those who were older stayed in Vinnitsa, and they all perished. But since they were blacksmiths, and the Germans located their administrative unit in Vinnitsa and required blacksmiths, they killed aunt Mekhlya, but did not touch her husband. They took him to the unit to work for them. He was a skilled blacksmith so they kept him. They told him not to go outside, because his appearance left no doubt about his nationality. But he couldn't stand it and one day went outside. One Ukrainian saw him and told him to follow him. That Ukrainian decided to hand him over to the police, since the police paid money for each handed over Jew. Uncle was walking, thinking, 'I can kill him with one blow, but everybody in the street will see it; what else can I do?' Suddenly he saw German soldiers from the unit he worked in and they read in his eyes that he begged for assistance, though he didn't say a word. They told him, 'Follow us.' The Ukrainian said, 'I have to bring him to the police.' They started to argue. The Germans said, 'We have a military unit of our own and we are police, follow us.' The Ukrainian followed them to the unit and they started to beat him. Then he disappeared, and my uncle never saw him again. The Germans must have killed that Ukrainian.

Later on when our units began to advance, it was possible to hear artillery firing. Vinnitsa is crossed by the Buk. Germans found themselves on one side and our forces on the opposite side. And those guys, the Germans, told my uncle, 'You know, we have to leave, your forces are attacking. You have to save yourself, we can't help you anymore.' The Germans brought all men of call-up age and older, around fifty years old, to Germany. Uncle got into a former lyokh, a type of cellar, where a warehouse had been organized before. In winter pieces of ice were sawed off and that cellar was filled up with them. During summer the ice was used. But there was no ice at that time, because no one needed it under the Germans. My uncle got inside. But other men knew about that place, too. They also started to look for a hiding place and stayed in that cellar. They knew my uncle. Machine-gun firing could already be heard. One of the men said, 'If the Germans come in and see that there's a Jew among us, they'll kill us. Let's kill him, then we can say that we killed a Jew.' Some of them began to approach him, but there was this decent man, a Ukrainian, who said, 'What are you doing? You're saving your life and want to murder a man?' They calmed down. Then our people came into the cellar and my uncle was released. When his son Mordkha returned from the army, my uncle climbed onto the cart in order to go meet him. The horses got frightened, uncle fell off the cart and killed himself. He tried to save his life during the war but later perished like that. Mordkha had a family, had daughters and lived in Vinnitsa all the time. He was a very nice man. His last name was also Khapun. Once workers came up to me and said, 'Do you have relatives named Khapun?' I said, 'I don't know.' They told me, 'We know one very decent man, is he a relative of yours?' I didn't know what to say, because there were Khapuns in Vinnitsa who were Ukrainians. It turned out that it was my cousin Mordkha's relative.

There was a synagogue during evacuation in Tashkent. To be more precise, it was a big room in a private house. I went to a rabbi and told him, 'We have relatives in Odessa.' We failed to find them. One of them left for the Far East. He was in the army, graduated from college, became a lieutenant and was assigned to work in the camps [The Gulag] 9. He rescued a lot of people. My future wife's uncles were also imprisoned in the camps, and he helped them as much as he could. He almost got into prison for that himself. He had a decent commander, who told him, 'Stop it, or you'll get into prison yourself.'

After the War

When the war ended, I wanted to leave the plant where I worked. I wanted to return home. I wrote an application asking for release. But they didn't want to let me go. The chief electrician didn't even want to hear about it, he just spat at me. The plant was very big, almost as big as the Moscow district. I took them to court and the court released me, so I left to continue my studies. After the war my older cousin lived and studied in Dnepropetrovsk. I already worked as a mechanic at that time, but I needed higher education. My cousin studied at a similar metallurgical institute. We exchanged letters and he invited me to come. I visited him and we studied in the same group. I graduated from the Dnepropetrovsk Metallurgical Institute named after Stalin.

When we finished our studies, my cousin was already married and stayed in Dnepropetrovsk. I was not captivated by the city, and left. I was assigned to work in Makeyevka, in the Donetsk region. It was impossible not to go; otherwise one would have been imprisoned. I was severely injured at the plant there. There was an accident: I stepped on a hot object, tripped and burnt my hands, both palms. The pain was unbearable; I almost fainted. I was told to put my hands into cold water, I did so and it became less painful. When I took them out I felt terrible pain again. I couldn't put on my pants and eat because of the burns. I even thought that they were completely burnt, but my hands got better within a month. I don't know how they healed. I left for my home place and began to work at the chemical plant in Vinnitsa. My parents lived there, too. They came back straight after the evacuation; their house was demolished by the Germans.

In 1966 I moved to Leningrad, where I worked in Sevmormontazh, then in Glavzavstroy. [Enterprises specializing in the field of installation of various structures, like ore reloading complexes at marine ports.] I both liked and disliked my work. When I recall the brightest moments of my life, I can only recall a few events. I worked in the North and in the South, in Mariupol and in Murmansk; I was an assembler and had to travel a lot. Later I worked in Krasnoye Selo.

My boss was Jewish. I got fewer bonuses, awards and gratitude. He wanted to show that he didn't pay attention to nationality. It was very unpleasant for me. When he was on vacation, he was replaced and my relationship with the new boss was totally different. Later his attitude towards me influenced other people, too. I was Deputy Secretary of the Party Bureau. And the Party Bureau Secretary, Osetrov, had no leg. He was injured and ill most of the time. I had to do all the work for him. I was responsible for ideas and propaganda. All communists and non-party men had to attend the studies. We had a group of propagandists; I had to give them material, which I received from Raykom. [The committee of the local department of the Communist Party.] And they conducted further studies at the workshops. Sometimes I conducted these studies. It wasn't difficult for me; I managed to do everything.

There was the Marxism-Leninism University. It had to be attended by young communists; it was the supreme level of studies. I wasn't only a student there, but also a lecturer. I certainly understood the nonsense of those studies, I believed in a lot of things. First of all, now capitalism and competition are discussed, but at that time there was planned economics. I considered that nothing could be better than planned economics, where everything was prescheduled, completed; everything was known and there was no anarchy. Now it's all being denied.

My wife, Larisa Lvovna Sterenberg, was born in 1927 in Vinnitsa and lived there before the war. Later she was in Kuibyshev [Samara] in evacuation. After the war her family returned to Vinnitsa, and Larisa soon left for Moscow. She entered the Foreign Language Institute there and moved to Leningrad after graduation.

I have known Larisa since my childhood. We went to the same Russian school. She knew our class, and she even liked boys from our class, but I didn't pay attention to her. Later we became students and found ourselves among a group of friends. Our mutual friends still keep in touch. At first Larisa didn't pay attention to me. We had been dating occasionally since she was 18, but she only agreed to marry me when she was 29. We met sometimes and lived in different places. I lived in Makeyevka and she studied in Moscow. She came to Vinnitsa for holidays. I also went there for my vacation. We saw each other and there were 'high and low tides' in our relationship. She even wanted to move to my place in Makeyevka, but I understood that she wouldn't do it, so I didn't propose it to her. Later I lived in Vinnitsa, and she was already in Leningrad. She entered the Pedagogical Institute, then the post-graduate department and became a teacher of English. I worked in Vinnitsa. Once, when I went on a business trip to Leningrad, I married Larisa. After that I had to return to Vinnitsa. I lived there for some time but soon moved to Leningrad for good.

The difference between my status in Vinnitsa and in Leningrad was huge. I was an engineer and later a chief engineer in Vinnitsa. When I came to Leningrad from this rural town, people looked at me as a villager. Vinnitsa was totally different. I was 37 years old. Those, who I played with as a child, had grown up. One of them was a Raykom Secretary, another was an Obkom Secretary [Obkom, or regional committee; boss in Soviet slang] and another was an Ispolkom 10 Secretary. They all knew me perfectly well, we were in close relations and I felt at ease. There was no question whether to accept me to work or not. There were friends around, I had a name and proven myself. Once there was this man who came from Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, and decided to criticize me. And the Gorkom Secretary stood up and said, 'Look for someone else, because we know him very well, he does excellent work.'

When I came to Leningrad in 1960, I started to look for work. However, it didn't appear to be easy. All chiefs saw that I was a Jew and told me that they weren't in need of specialists. Once I came to a plant to talk to the chief. I felt that he looked at me trying to figure out if I was a Jew or not. Then he asked me to show him my passport, which I didn't need to do. I felt his peering look. He certainly didn't reject me openly. This was a peculiar diplomacy. He told me that just the day before a person was found for the position, but that he wanted to write down my data. I understood he was bluffing. I was embarrassed by the laws of that time: If one stayed without work for a month, the record of service would be interrupted. I was afraid that my work experience would be interrupted. This influences the pension and sick-list payment. I decided not to spend any more time looking for a job and took the first decent position that came along.

In 1960 our daughter Olga was born. After finishing school she wanted to go to university. I consulted a man who worked at our plant, who graduated from the university recently. We decided not to take the risk. Olga went to the Railroad Institute instead. She was the only girl at the faculty and always got excellent marks. She became a mechanical engineer. Not long ago she was at the graduates' party and everybody remembered her as being the best student. One of the teachers persuaded her to enter the post-graduate department at the Water Transport Institute after graduation. But Olga was rather indifferent to it. That teacher even called my wife, tried to persuade her and asked her to influence our daughter's decision.

I can't say that my wife and me tried to follow Jewish traditions in our family or tried to raise our daughter that way. We visited the synagogue very rarely, almost never. Of course I remembered my family's traditions, but that was more of the past, just memories of my childhood. At the same time I often tell my only grandchild, Alexandra, stories from my childhood. I want her to know what the life of her great-grandparents was like. Now that my wife and me are old, we have become more interested in our heritage, Jewish traditions and Jewish community. This is mostly thanks to Hesed. We don't only get help from it, but it also keeps us in touch with the world. We enjoy reading its newsletters, and if we could only move around better, we would take part in its social events more actively.

Glossary:

Iosif Gurevich
Uzhgorod
Ukraine
Interviewer: Ella Levitskaya
Date of interview: April 2003

Iosif Gurevich and his wife Ludmila live in a two-bedroom apartment in a five-storied 1970s building in a new district of Uzhgorod. They have a similar way of speaking and are both nice and friendly. Iosif and Ludmila make a wonderful couple. They are caring and loving partners. The first thing that attracts a visitor's attention in their apartment is the large number of books. Iosif has always been fond of reading. After he retired he got the opportunity to spend as much time reading as he wished. He collected books with a great fondness. There is a selection of books by contemporary writers in his collection. Iosif is a man of average height. There is something boyish and naughty in his eyes and smile. He has a wonderful sense of humor. When he was telling me stories about his childhood and about the provincial town, where he spent his childhood, I couldn't help laughing. Iosif has not left his home since his heart attack. He suffers a lot from lack of communication with the outer world. During the interview he had heartaches several times. I offered him to postpone the interview, but he refused. Iosif willingly spoke about his family. There are pictures of his family and his wife's family on the walls and the bookshelves. Iosif knows many poems by heart. He recited some to me.

My family background
Jewish life in Konotop
My mother
Growing up
Our religious life
My school years
The war begins
Post-war
Married life
Glossary

My family background

My father's family lived in a village, six kilometers from the small town of Konotop [in Sumy region, about 300 km from Kiev]. I don't remember the name of the village. It was an old Ukrainian village where several Jewish families lived. The Ukrainians were farmers and the Jews were tradesmen and craftsmen for the most part. There was no synagogue in the village. On Saturdays and Jewish holidays Jewish men went to the synagogue in a neighboring village, two kilometers from their home village. All Jews in the village observed Jewish traditions and followed the kashrut. There was also a shochet in the village. Both poor and rich families celebrated Sabbath and Jewish holidays. If a boy was born to a Jewish family all Jewish men came to the brit milah ritual on the 8th day. Boys had their bar mitzvah at the age of 13. Jews and Ukrainians got along well and helped each other. Every Jewish family had Ukrainian friends that came on Saturdays to light the lamp and stoke the stove. There were no pogroms 1 in the village.

My paternal grandfather Tevel Gurevich was born in this village in 1864. My grandmother Frida was born in 1865. I don't have any information about her place of birth or her maiden name. My father didn't tell me anything about his family.

My grandfather owned a mill before the Revolution of 1917 2. All members of the family worked at the mill. My father told me that it was a good source of income for the family. He didn't tell me anything about their house, however, and I've never been to the village where he lived. They were an ordinary Jewish family, did their business and lived according to all Jewish laws. They were religious, went to the synagogue, celebrated Jewish holidays and followed the kashrut. They spoke Yiddish at home. They were real Jews.

I remember Grandfather Tevel well. He was a tall broad-shouldered man with a beard and payes. He wore a black silk yarmulka at home and a hat outside. On weekdays he wore casual peasant's clothes. When he went to the synagogue on Sabbath and Jewish holidays he put on a long, black jacket. He was very strong, even in his old age. From what I remember he was never ill and never complained that he was tired or not feeling well.

My grandmother was a short, good-humored Jewish woman. She always had a nice smile and a kind word for other people. I remember her wearing long, dark clothes. On hot summer days she wore blouses with a high collar and long sleeves. She didn't wear a wig, but always had a kerchief on her head. Like all other women in Konotop, she went to the synagogue on Jewish holidays.

My grandmother gave birth to ten children. Only seven of them survived. The oldest, Shaya, was born in 1888. Then came two daughters: Esfir, born in 1891 and Bertha, born in 1893. Ilia followed in 1895 and Chaim was born in 1896. My father Samuel was born in 1898, and Iona, the youngest, followed in 1899.

All children had classes at home with a melamed. They learned to read and write in Hebrew and Yiddish, prayers, the Torah and the Talmud and Jewish traditions. All, except for Ilia, only finished two years at the Ukrainian elementary school in the village. My grandfather provided a better education for Ilia, though. Ilia finished a lower secondary school in Konotop and went on to studied in an accountant college. I was acquainted with all my father's brothers and sisters. They were nice and decent people. All sons worked at their father's mill, and the daughters helped my grandmother about the house.

After the Revolution of 1917 the Soviet authorities began to put a lot of pressure on my grandfather. He had to pay high taxes. The only reason why they didn't expropriate his mill was because he didn't hire employees. During the period of the NEP 3 the family business improved. This lasted until 1923 when the Soviet authorities did expropriate the mill. The family had nothing to live on any more. It was impossible to find a job in a small village, so they moved to Konotop, where it was easier to find work and support the family.

After moving to Konotop my father's older brother, Shaya, worked at the state-run grits facility. He was a tall and beautiful man. He had a Jewish wife and three children. When Shaya lived in Konotop he was religious. He observed Jewish traditions and went to the synagogue. Before the Great Patriotic War 4 his family moved to Moscow. Shaya couldn't go to the synagogue or celebrate Sabbath there. The Soviet authorities persecuted religion, although the constitution of the USSR stated that religion was each individual's private business. However, it was officially considered that religion was alien to Soviet people. Shaya and his family celebrated Jewish holidays at home. He died in Moscow in 1969. Shaya's grandchildren, my nephews and nieces, live in Moscow now.

My father's sister Esfir got married in Konotop. She and her husband moved to Leningrad. I don't remember her husband's name. Esfir had two children. She was a housewife. During the Great Patriotic War Esfir and her children were in the blockade of Leningrad 5. Her husband perished at the front and her children starved to death. Esfir was the only survivor. After the Great Patriotic War she moved to Moscow and lived with Shaya's family. Esfir died in 1970.

My father's sister Bertha was single. She lived with her parents in Konotop and helped my grandmother about the house. Bertha died in Konotop in 1971.

My father's brother Ilia was married and had a son called Ilia. He lived in Kursk with his family and worked as chief accountant at a big sugar factory. Ilia wasn't religious and didn't observe Jewish holidays. My uncle had tuberculosis which caused his untimely death. When I was 13 I went to a pioneer camp in a pinewood near Konotop where my father rented a house for Ilia. The air in pinewoods was good for him. Ilia stayed there the whole summer and then my father took him back to Kursk. Ilia died in 1938.

I have no information about Chaim. I only saw a picture of him. My father didn't tell me anything about him. I also know very little about my father's younger brother Iona. He was mentally ill. He died in a mental hospital in Kiev in 1939. My father went to his funeral in Kiev. Iona was buried in accordance with Jewish traditions in the Lukianovka Jewish cemetery 6 in Kiev. In 1960 this cemetery was destroyed and a TV tower was erected on the site. We got no notification and couldn't remove Iona's ashes to another cemetery.

Jewish life in Konotop

My grandparents on my mother's side came from Konotop. My grandfather, Arkadi Simonovski, was born in 1870. I don't remember my grandmother's name. I just know what my mother told me about her. My grandmother was born in 1871 and died in 1924, the year when I was born.

Konotop was a small patriarchal town. I remember the town from the time when I was a child. The population was 35-40,000 people. Konotop and its outskirts stretched for a distance of about 3 x 3 kilometers. There was a big railroad station, four kilometers from town, and a big military airfield and an aviation regiment. There was a small cinema in the main street, shops, a pharmacy and a fire brigade. We often went to the cinema where we listened to music in the hall before the screening of a movie. A violin, a grand piano and a saxophone player were in the foyer of the cinema. A circus came on tour to our town. It performed in the park. Our whole family went to see the circus.

In the evenings and on Saturdays and Sundays the residents of the town liked to go for a walk in Konotop. There were mainly one-storied houses and just a few two-storied ones in the center of the town. The Jews didn't have their own neighborhood; their houses were scattered among Ukrainian houses. There were Jewish doctors, teachers and lawyers. There were wealthy Jewish tradesmen during the NEP period. The majority of Jews were craftsmen and many worked at the plant. There were two big plants in Konotop: a big mechanic plant for the manufacturing of mining equipment and a locomotive repair plant at the railway station. At 7 o'clock in the morning the factory sirens woke up the town. There was also a siren at lunchtime and at the end of the working day.

There was a synagogue on the outskirts of Konotop, not far from our house. Once my father took me to the synagogue. It was a two-storied wooden house. There were also Torah scrolls there. I was surprised that women were sitting on the balcony. This was the only time I was at the synagogue. There was a cheder near the synagogue and a Jewish school. The cheder and school were small. The Soviet authorities persecuted religion. Fewer and fewer Jews sent their children to the cheder and the Jewish school. The language of teaching at higher educational institutions was Russian. Jewish parents wanted their children to have fewer problems in the future. If they studied in Jewish schools they had fluent Yiddish but poor Russian, which might have become a problem for their further studies.

There was no anti-Semitism and Ukrainian and Jewish families lived next to each other without having any conflicts. There was a shochet in town. The Jews bought chickens at the market and took them to the shochet. Poor Jews were deeply religious while wealthier people with education hardly ever observed Jewish traditions. My mother's family was like that.

My mother

Grandfather Arkadi owned a crockery store, which was expropriated. He became either a shop assistant or a commodity manager at another store, I don't exactly remember. All those events had their impact on my grandfather and he died at the end of 1925. My grandmother was a German teacher in a Russian grammar school for girls in Konotop. There were only male teachers at the grammar school for boys while there were many female teachers in the school for girls. My mother told me that they had male teachers in mathematics, drawing and religion for Christian children when she was in school. The rest of the teachers were women. After the Revolution of 1917 the grammar school was closed.

My grandparents had five children. The oldest, Riva, was born in 1898. The second one was my mother Elizaveta, born in 1900. Then came Nyunia, born in 1903. The fourth daughter was Rosalia, born in 1905 and the youngest, Sonia, followed in 1908.

My mother's parents weren't religious. They didn't even speak Yiddish at home. None of my mother's sisters knew Yiddish. They spoke fluent Russian. They didn't observe any Jewish traditions at home. I know for sure that they didn't celebrate Sabbath. I cannot say for sure whether they celebrated Jewish holidays or not, but I don't think they did. None of the daughters was religious. I knew all of them and my mother, who didn't observe Jewish traditions, wasn't an exception in her family. They were all raised that way.

My mother and her sisters received secular education. They finished Russian grammar school where they learned to play the piano and sing. Riva was the only one that continued her education. She moved to Kiev where she finished a college. Upon graduation she married a Russian man. After her marriage she finished another college. I don't know if she worked. She left her husband some time before the Great Patriotic War. He became a drunkard. They didn't have children. My father visited her in Kiev. That was before Riva divorced her husband. My father stayed there one day and returned home. He said that Riva suffered a lot from her husband's behavior. She stayed in Kiev and perished in Babi Yar 7 at the beginning of the war.

My mother's sister Nyunia lived in Konotop. She was married, but had no children. Nyunia worked as a typist at the Statistics Department. She was in evacuation in the Ural during the Great Patriotic War and returned to Konotop after the war. She died in Konotop in 1956. She was buried in the town cemetery.

My mother's younger sisters, Rosalia and Sonia, were very young when their parents died. When my mother got married she took them into our family. They lived with us until they got married. They married two Jewish brothers, Isaac and Evsey Shmerkins. Shortly after the wedding the two families moved to Priluki, a small town [about 150 km from Kiev]. The sisters were skilled typists and their husbands were qualified bakers. They were wealthy; our family wasn't. Before the war my mother and I visited them once. Our visit lasted three days. After my grandmother died my mother was like a mother to her sisters and they loved her dearly. They were very happy when we came to see them. They spoke about their life with my mother, tried to entertain and feed us well. When we were leaving they gave us presents and some money. After the Great Patriotic War both families settled down in Lvov. Rosalia had a daughter: Esfir. In 1991 Rosalia, her husband and daughter's family moved to Australia. She died in Australia in 1992. Sonia and her husband had a son, Arkadi, named after his grandfather. He finished Lvov Polytechnic College and got a job assignment to a heating power plant in Simferopol, Crimea. Sonia died in Lvov in 1985. After her death her husband moved to their son in Simferopol where he died in 1995.

Growing up

My parents met when my mother studied at grammar school. There were often balls arranged at their school. My father used to come to these parties in a horse-driven carriage. He was a handsome and well-dressed guy and managed to impress my mother, although they were different in many respects. There was a romantic story in my mother's life. During the Civil War 8, after the Revolution of 1917, Germans came to Ukraine. I guess this happened in 1919. A young German officer and my mother fell in love. He wanted to take her to Germany. When my mother's father heard about it he tied my mother to the table. The Germans left and my mother stayed in Konotop. Perhaps, my mother married my father to forget what had happened back then.

My parents got married in 1923. I don't think they had a traditional Jewish wedding. I believe they had a civil wedding. Well, at least my religious grandfather Tevel never once came to the house. Grandmother Frida often came to see us, but my grandfather didn't. I guess, he must have had a good reason for that.

My mother became a housewife after she got married. My father did badly paid manual work. My parents were poor. They rented a small 15-square-meter room in a one-storied house with two porches and entrance doors on the outskirts of town. There was a small river in this neighborhood where I liked to play when I was a child.

I was born on 11th March 1924 and I was named Iosif. My father insisted that I was circumcised in accordance with the Jewish traditions. My maternal grandfather Arkadi liked me a lot and was happy that there was a man in the family since he only had daughters. My mother told me that my grandfather never let go of me. Somehow there were no notes made at my birth, so my grandfather registered me in April 1925. Therefore, all my documents, including my birth certificate, state that I was born on 5th April 1925. Perhaps, my grandfather saved my life unintentionally because I was only recruited to the army at the very end of the war. My brother Arkadi was born on 11th March 1932. On the 8th day after his birth he had his brit milah. I remember that my grandfather Tevel came to our house and watched the process through the window. After the circumcision all attendants sat at the table where it had been carried out and had a meal. My grandfather was standing by the window and didn't come into the house.

Grandfather Tevel died in 1933 during the time of the famine in Ukraine 9. I remember his funeral. I was nine years old then. My father took me to the room where my grandfather was lying on the floor covered with a black blanket. The mirror was also covered with black cloth. My father and I left our shoes at the threshold and entered the room barefoot. There were relatives and neighbors in the room and the women were sobbing. My father didn't take me to the cemetery. My grandfather was buried in accordance with Jewish traditions in the Jewish cemetery in Konotop. My father recited the Kaddish. He couldn't sit shivah because he had to work.

Grandmother Frida always came to visit us on Jewish holidays. She gave my brother and me Chanukkah gelt on Chanukkah and brought hamantashen on Purim. She also visited us on ordinary days. My father's older brother Shaya took grandmother to his family after grandfather died. When he moved to Moscow with his family in the 1930s my grandmother refused to go and went to her daughter Esfir in Leningrad. My grandmother died during the blockade of Leningrad in 1941. She remained religious throughout her life. I know this from Uncle Shaya.

Soon after my brother was born we moved into a brick house for four families across the street from our old house. The Russian stove 10 was stoked with wood since coal was way too expensive. We didn't have much furniture: a table, my parents' bed with nickel-plated balls on four posts; I slept on a squeaky wooden bed and my brother Arkadi slept in his cradle. There were self-made rugs on the floor. My mother kept the room very tidy. She got very angry when my father didn't wash himself immediately after he came home from work. He didn't feel an urge to do so and that drove my mother mad.

My father was an ordinary man who grew up in a Ukrainian village. He had Ukrainian friends when he was young. He was kind and sociable. He didn't have any profession. All he knew was how to grind grain, which didn't require any intellectual efforts. He worked as a loader, joiner and mechanic. He was almost illiterate. My father wanted to go to a drivers' school, but failed at the exams because he had only studied at school for two years. My mother was different. She got a good education, liked to read and knew a lot about music. My father found it boring and unnecessary. However poor we were my mother tried to keep up with her standards. She made her own clothes. Even though she wore dresses made from cheap fabric or altered from old clothes they were always up-to-date. Her clothes were impeccably clean and ironed. My mother raised my brother and me while my father was always at work. My father liked drinking since his colleagues drank at work. He often came home drunk. Of course, my mother, my brother and I were very unhappy about it. He liked to dress up and have a stroll in the town. That's the kind of man he was, and, what could one do about it?

There was no running water in Konotop. We fetched water from a water pump about 400 meters from our house. I fetched water in buckets on a yoke. There was a period in the early 1930s when water was sold. Aunt Bertha and my grandmother were hired to sell water. There was a shed in the street with taps in front of it. My grandmother and Aunt Bertha were sitting inside the shed. A bucket of water cost 1 kopek. We used the water for cooking and minor washing. We went to the sauna to wash ourselves.

We bought food at the market. My mother had to work miracles to feed our family of four. We had all necessary clothes and enough food; the only time when we didn't have enough food was during the period of the famine in 1932- 33. My mother boiled potato peels and goosefoot grass then. Those were hard years. Many villagers traveled to towns looking for food and work. They were dying in hundreds. Several times a day a horse-driven cab drove across the town picking up corpses.

Our religious life

We only spoke Russian in our family. My father sometimes addressed my mother in Yiddish, but she always replied in Russian. I didn't learn any Yiddish. I wish I knew Yiddish. My mother wasn't religious. We didn't observe any Jewish traditions or celebrate holidays. My mother used to say, 'I don't need matzah. I'd rather have a dozen cakes'. My grandmother always brought us some matzah on Pesach. On Jewish holidays my father always went to his older brother Shaya where my grandmother lived. My mother didn't let my brother or me go there because she believed that we didn't need to be involved in those outdated celebrations.

My father had all religious accessories at home: tefillin, tallit and a prayer book. Early in the morning, before he went to work, he prayed. He never taught my brother or me how to pray. Perhaps, he didn't do it because my mother was against it. On holidays he went to the synagogue. Once my father took me to the synagogue. I remember something round-shaped in the middle and Jewish men going around this round-shaped something. [Editor's note: Iosif must be talking about the festival of Simchat Torah when the men walk around the bimah 7 times with the Torah scrolls in their hands. The round-shaped something is the bimah.] There were also Torah scrolls. I was surprised that women were sitting on the balcony. This was the only time I was at the synagogue. I wish I had been there more often.

The Orthodox synagogue and Orthodox Christian and Catholic churches were closed during the period of struggle against religion in the 1930s. This was happening all over Ukraine. I remember how bells were removed from cupolas. There was a crowd standing in front of the church shouting communist slogans. They looked like cheering each other. Then a few people from the crowd climbed ladders by the walls to the cupola of the church. It took them a while to throw a rope loop upon the top of the cross. They managed at last and again the crowd cheered. One end of the rope was thrown down and tied to a hook on a trailing line fixed on a truck. People got down, the engine started and the truck began to move slowly. The cupola and the cross fell down. The crowd was overwhelmed with joy, but this wasn't all. A few young men climbed the bell tower, ripped off a copper bell and dropped it onto the ground from the height of about 15 meters. The bell fell to the ground and broke. The crowd cheered again. A red flag was installed on the bell tower. We, boys, were cheering along with the crowd. Long afterwards I remembered what I didn't seem to notice back then: a bunch of old Christians standing aside, watching everything with an expression of horror. They crossed themselves, whispering prayers. Old men held their hats in their hands like they do at a funeral.

There was a kolkhoz 11 and a mill on the outskirts of town. Some time in 1938 my father became a miller. He was good at this job. He had earned little before, and in the kolkhoz he didn't get any salary at all. Only in the fall, when the crops were milled, did my father receive some grain and money. Collective farmers had no rights and didn't even have passports, but my father was an employee there. He built a shed and kept pigs in the yard of our house. We sold pork and ate it. We could afford to buy some clothes, and I remember, I also got a suit and white fabric shoes that I had to rub with chalk.

My school years

My aunt Bertha submitted my documents to the Jewish school in 1931. Since I hadn't reached the age of 7, according to my birth certificate, I wasn't admitted. The following year my mother took me to the Russian school. This was the only Russian school in Konotop; the rest of the schools were Ukrainian. Boys and girls studied together. There were about ten Jewish children among my 30 classmates.

I had many Jewish and Ukrainian friends. I didn't face any anti-Semitism, but I heard the word 'zhyd' [kike] from senior pupils. In my family we were raised to make no difference between nationalities.

I was fond of literature at school. We had a very nice teacher of Ukrainian and Russian literature. I read a lot and knew many poems by heart. I still read poetry and make notes if I like something in particular. I was a good pupil. I was also fond of history. I didn't really like mathematics that much. We didn't have any books at home except for textbooks. I borrowed books from the town library. I was very fond of sports, too. I went in for football, gymnastics and acrobatics. Physical culture was well developed at the time. There were skid-pans, bars and a football ground in every yard.

We celebrated Soviet holidays at home and at school. We celebrated 7th November [October Revolution Day] 12, 1st May, Lenin's birthday. There were parades and amateur concerts at school that my parents came to watch. My mother cooked something delicious. We didn't have guests since we were poor and besides, there wasn't enough space. Only relatives visited us occasionally. On 1st May we went to a forest by bus. We took food with us and arranged a picnic in a nice spot. We ate and sang Soviet songs such as 'For Motherland, For Stalin' and danced. I remember that the first toast was always to Stalin.

I became a pioneer at school and felt very honored. I had a red necktie and believed that everybody around was staring at me. In summer I went to a pioneer camp in the pinewood. We lived in wooden barracks. Every evening we made a pioneer fire and sang patriotic songs. We were told about the current situation and capitalist schemes. We were taught to be patriots of the Soviet Union. We played military games. In the evenings we sometimes had dancing parties. I danced with a girl for the first time in this camp. When I finished the 8th grade I joined the Komsomol 13, but there was not ceremony. Everybody was admitted and it was a common process.

The arrests that began in 1936 [during the so-called Great Terror] 14 didn't involve our family. My father was either a joiner or a loader and Soviet authorities weren't interested in him, although they sometimes did arrest workers like my father if somebody reported on them. I remember posters on the walls saying, 'Be watchful - an enemy is near!' Some of my classmates' parents were arrested, but their children continued their studies and nobody mentioned to them that they were children of 'enemies of the people'. I remember the 'Black Maria' driving in our street, and my parents sighing with relief whenever it passed by. [Editor's note: 'Black Maria' was the name for the dark vehicles of the NKVD 15 in which arrested people were driven off from their homes to their first interrogation. They were vans with small barred windows painted black.]

I watched all movies in the cinema before the Great Patriotic War. They were simple Soviet films like Tractor Drivers, Volga-Volga and If War Comes Tomorrow. My favorite film was The Great Waltz. It was miraculous: the music, actors and clothes - I admired it all. There was no theater in Konotop. There were radios that looked like big black plates on the walls in the houses.

The 8-year Jewish school in Konotop was closed in 1939. Many children came to study in our school. There were several of them in my class. It was difficult for them to study since they had very poor Russian.

The war begins

In 1939 we heard that Hitler had attacked Poland. We were taught at school that our army was the strongest in the world. It never occurred to anyone that Hitler would dare to attack the USSR. We weren't interested in the international situation at that time. This was the time when we experienced love and affection for the first time, and we were far from thinking about what was happening in the rest of the world.

22nd June 1941 was a Sunday. We were on vacation from school. I finished my 9th year at school and was planning to enter a college in Kiev. We thought that while on vacation I would go to my mother's sister Riva in Kiev to choose a college. That morning my mother went shopping and I was still sleeping. My mother came home without any goods and said that Germany had unleashed war on the USSR. We were patriots and believed Stalin and the Party. Stalin said that we would beat the enemy on his own territory. So, why worry? People believed that the war wouldn't last long. Nobody hurried to evacuate. Only two plants were evacuated from Konotop. Workers' families and equipment left on two trains. Then people began to evacuate.

My grandmother and Bertha went to Esfir in Leningrad. Thousands of refugees from Belarus moved through Konotop. There were Jews and Russians among them. There was also cattle evacuated, but we didn't even consider evacuation. After the war I got to know that the Germans shot 12 Jewish families in Konotop and the rest of the Jews managed to evacuate. My father worked until the last minute. I saw Bachmach, a town 25 kilometers from Konotop, being bombed. There was such a huge ball of fire that it could be seen in Konotop.

When my friend and I went to a bookstore to buy textbooks for the 10th grade, the Germans began to bomb Konotop. A German plane dropped a bomb that hit a fuel storage facility on the outskirts of town. Beams from the storage facility flew 100 meters up into the air. Then German planes attacked an airfield in Konotop and there was a battle between planes. The Germans were firing at our planes. They were small wooden planes while the German Messerschmidt fighter planes were armed. We watched it from the street. There were no people in the streets. I ran back home and asked my mother what we were going to do. She told me to go to my father, who was at work, and ask him.

There were many villagers that brought their grain to be ground. The farmers understood that the Germans were near and that they needed to have stocks of flour. I said to my father that we had to leave town immediately or we would all perish. My father and I went to the chairman of the kolkhoz to ask for a cart and horses. The chairman told my father to take all we needed. My father harnessed two horses into a cart and we rode home. On the way we went to pick up my mother's sister Nyunia. Her husband was a doctor and went to the front. My mother, my 8-year-old brother and Nyunia sat on the cart. My father reined the horses and I rode on my bicycle beside the cart. We rode 250 kilometers to Kursk. I don't remember how many days our trip lasted, but I don't think we covered more than 50 kilometers per day. When we were going past some town, Germans troops were landing, but we managed to escape. We didn't have any money. We only had some clothes. We stopped at a market to sell some clothes and buy some food. We were taken to the militia department. My father was charged of speculation, but we were released later.

What we saw on our way to Kursk was terrible: crowds of people on vehicles and carts running away. In Kursk we went to my father's brother Ilia, but he wasn't there. We were told that they had evacuated. We had evacuation papers for the town of Ruzaevka, in the Mordova Soviet Socialist Republic near the Volga River [about 700 km from Kursk], that we had obtained in Konotop and decided to head there. I don't remember how we got there. In Ruzaevka we were accommodated in the evacuation agency, which was the cultural center and stuffed with people. There were no chairs and people were sitting on their luggage. We got a meal: porridge. We were sent to a village that was also overcrowded. We returned to Ruzaevka and heard an announcement about a train going to Middle Asia and all those willing to move there had to come to the registration office. We decided to go because we didn't have any warm clothes with us and the climate in Middle Asia was warmer. The train we boarded was a train for cattle transportation. My aunt got in touch with her husband at the evacuation agency. His hospital was deployed in Tula region. She received an invitation letter from him and moved there.

The four of us went to Middle Asia. Our trip on that cattle train lasted 28 days. It was a very hard trip. There were lice and women cut their hair. It was dirty. There were no toilets. We arrived at Gorchakovo station in Fergana valley, 500 kilometers from Tashkent [Uzbekistan] and 3,500 km from home. We went to Margilan station. This was in October 1941. We were accommodated with an Uzbek family in a village. We lived upstairs in a booth of 2,5 x 2 meters. We had to find work. There was a cattle base at the station that bred and slaughtered cattle for the front. My father and I were laborers there. Later I found a job as a postman at the local post office where I worked for about two months.

I was a patriot and so were many other young people. I went to the military registry office and told them that I was born in 1924 and wanted to serve in the Air Force. Young people born in 1924 were to be recruited in 1942. I was sent for medical examination and was registered for military service. After a month I was sent to Kharkov Infantry School, deployed in Namangan. Although I went in for sports I had rheumatism. About 80 of us came to the school. There was another medical examination that I failed to pass due to my health condition. I returned to Margilan. Two weeks later I was ordered to come to the registry office again. There was a train full of recruits from the neighboring location. We were sent to the Far East. We arrived at Boretz Kuznetsov station in Primoriye [over 5,000 km from Margilan]. We were accommodated in huge storehouses where we stayed overnight. On the following day commanding officers from various military units came to 'buy' us for the infantry, tank units, Air Force and Navy. Three people - one officer and two first sergeants - 'bought' me. They argued and asked me about my education, until I was finally taken to the Pacific Navy. I served in the Navy in the Far East from 1942-1947. All this time I sent my requests to be taken to the front.

I came to the Navy in September 1942 when combat action near Stalingrad began. We were punished and put into the guardhouse for asking to go to the front. They asked us, 'Who's gonna stay here?' We got little food and had no warm clothes. It was cold in fall and winter and the only clothes we had were our uniforms. At the end of my guarding time I couldn't get downstairs because I was so cold. I joined the Communist Party in 1943. It was simple during the war: the soldiers submitted their application to the deputy political officer. There was a meeting on that same or the following day where they were admitted to the Party, even if they hadn't been candidates before. At that moment I believed that it was a duty of every decent man to be a member of the Communist Party.

I have bright memories of Victory Day 16, 9th May 1945, when we heard that Germany had capitulated and the war was over. Soldiers and officers hugged and greeted each other. There was a meeting and then a festive dinner. We were happy and thought about our plans for the future. However, the military men of the Pacific Navy had to postpone their plans for two years. When the war with Germany was over in 1945, the war with Japan 17 began. Our fleet took part in combat action. It was strange, but I didn't have any fear during the battles. I had a feeling deep inside - it's hard to describe it - that I was invulnerable. Fear came some time after a battle when we recalled our fellow comrades that had perished. I have a medal 'For Victory over Japan' and the orders 'Combat Red Banner, grade III' and 'For Courage'. I demobilized in 1947. Upon demobilization I received a diploma 'For Faultless Service in the Pacific Ocean Navy'.

I didn't face any anti-Semitism in the army. I lived with people of various nationalities for five years and we were friends. We were like a family. Basically there was no anti-Semitism before and during the Great Patriotic War. Besides, it seems to me that in extreme situations people have different values. What mattered was one's personality and not nationality. There were several Jews in the Navy. We were friends for a long time after the war. I had friends of various nationalities.

My first love was my classmate Nadia Volkova, born in 1925. She had a Jewish mother and a Russian father. Her mother was the director of a kindergarten in Konotop and her father was a doctor. During the war he worked in a big hospital. Nadia was a nice girl. I cared about her a lot. We went for walks on the outskirts of town after classes and kissed. At the beginning of the Great Patriotic War Nadia and her mother evacuated to Mordovia. From there she went to the Radio Operator School in Moscow in 1942. The school trained radio operators for partisan units. We corresponded. Nadia studied in Moscow for six months. When she finished this school I received her last letter, in which she wrote, 'We'll probably never see each other again'. This was true. Nadia was sent to the Kharkov partisan unit and perished. I don't know any details of her death. She was awarded the title of 'Hero of the Soviet Union' posthumously. There are photographs of all Heroes of the Soviet Union from the town at the railway station. There are about ten photographs and one of them shows Nadia in her field cap. She sent this picture to me in the Far East.

During my military service I hardly ever wrote letters to or received any from my family. Mail services were unreliable. Letters hardly ever reached their addressees. I knew that my father went to the army a month after I was recruited. He was a driver at the border with Iran. My father served there until the end of the war. My mother and Arkadi stayed in Margilan. At the end of 1942 my mother fell ill with enteric fever and died in hospital in December 1942. I can't imagine how my 10-year-old brother Arkadi survived. He worked at a kolkhoz until May 1945. After demobilization my father found him and took him back to Konotop. Other people lived in our room. My father didn't feel like telling them to move out and he found a small room where he lived with my brother.

My father went to work at the mill. My brother didn't go to school during the war and was too old to do so after the war. He went to study at a vocational school to become a tool joiner. After finishing this school he went to work at the tool shop at the Konotop plant of mining equipment. My brother enjoyed this work. He got more money than the engineers there.

Post-war

My father married an elderly Jewish woman whose husband had perished at the front. My father wasn't religious after the war. He and his wife celebrated Jewish holidays, but only formally. My father died in 1973. My brother and I buried him in the Jewish cemetery in Konotop in accordance with Jewish traditions. His second wife also passed away.

My brother married Rosalia, a Jewish girl from Konotop in 1956. They had a common civil ceremony in a registry office and a small wedding party for relatives and close friends in the evening. Their daughter Elizaveta, named after my mother, was born in 1957. Some time afterwards a big plant of electronic microscopes was built in Sumy and the chief engineer of the Konotop plant was appointed director of this plant. He asked my brother to work there. My brother and his family rented an apartment in Sumy and lived there until my brother received an apartment of his own. Their daughter got married and moved to Lvov with her husband. Her daughter Yana, my brother's granddaughter, was born in 1977. Elizaveta died in an accident in 1980. She was 23. She was buried in the cemetery in Konotop.

My brother and his wife moved to Konotop and raised their granddaughter. Arkadi, his wife and his granddaughter emigrated to Germany in 1990. They live in Dortmund. Yana got married and works. My brother and his wife are pensioners now. We correspond with them. I'm very concerned about my brother. His wife is very ill and doesn't have much time left. She needs to go to a mental hospital. If my brother loses her his life will be difficult. Apart from losing a close person, he will have language problems because he doesn't know German.

I wanted to continue my studies after my demobilization. I couldn't obtain permits to go to Moscow or Leningrad and didn't want to return to Konotop. In evacuation I had met a boy from Lvov, two years older than I. He had finished his first year at the Faculty of History at Lvov University. He told me a lot about Lvov. I corresponded with him and he suggested that I went to Lvov upon my demobilization. I obtained a permit to go to Lvov. I visited my father and brother in Konotop and went to Lvov.

My mother's sisters Rosalia and Sonia lived in Lvov. During the war they worked at a military hospital in Lvov and they stayed in this town after the war. I lived with Aunt Rosalia for about a month. I didn't have a profession but had to go to work. I could play volleyball and swim very well. I had been trained in the Navy. I got a job as a PE teacher at a vocational school. The management of this school sent me on a three months' course of advanced training at Lvov College of Physical Education. I was offered to enter this college, but I was thinking of some other profession than a PE teacher. I went to the Mechanics Department at the Food Industry Technical School. I became a 2nd-year student since I had finished nine years at secondary school. This technical school trained specialists for alcohol and yeast factories. Three years later I became a mechanical technician. I got a job assignment at an alcohol factory in Lvov region in 1950. I became chief mechanic and then chief engineer at this factory. I met my future wife, Ludmila Volosova, in Lvov. She came to work in Lvov upon her graduation from Odessa Food Industry Technical School.

Married life

My wife is Russian. She was born in Kazanka, Nikolaev region in 1922. Her father, Klimenti Volosov, was a farmer before 1917. They were a wealthy family and had a house, cows and horses. They had three children: Ludmila's older brother, who perished at the front, Ludmila and her younger sister Valentina. When the Soviet regime was established Ludmila's father was declared a kulak 18. The family was forced to leave their house. They destroyed their belongings. They had no place to go and lived under the threat of being sent into exile in Siberia. Ludmila's father had a distant relative in the district town. He was a manager in an office. He issued them some ID certificates - villagers had no passports - and they managed to go to Krivoy Rog. Nobody knew them there and it was easier for them to get lost in a bigger town. Her parents lived there all their life. Her father worked at a plant and her mother was a housewife. Her brother was recruited to the army when he was a 2nd-year student at a College. He served in the army two years and when it was his time to demobilize the Great Patriotic War began. He was in Belarus on the first days of the war and perished there. Ludmila's family was in evacuation in Tashkent. After the war they returned to Krivoy Rog. Ludmila entered the Production Faculty at Odessa Food Industry Technical School. After finishing this school she got a job assignment at a plant in Lvov where we met.

We got married within a month. My family didn't have any objections against me marrying a non-Jewish girl, and Ludmila's parents treated me like a son. We didn't have a wedding party. It was a hard and miserable time. We had a civil ceremony. In the summer we went to my relatives in Konotop on vacation, and then we visited Ludmila's parents in Krivoy Rog.

In 1953 the director of our trust offered to send me to the reconstruction of the alcohol plant in Uzhgorod. The plant was located in the suburbs of Uzhgorod. The director of this plant was recruited to the army and I was appointed director of the plant. We completed the reconstruction of the plant and I continued to work as its director. When the former director came back I stayed at the plant as chief mechanic. Uzhgorod was a small and pleasant town. It was much smaller than it is now. It was a quiet and clean town. People were calm and never in a rush. Subcarpathia 19 is a multinational region. There are Romanians, Hungarians, Czechs, Ukrainians, Moldavians, Russians and Jews. There were many Jews in town before the war. Many Jews perished in Subcarpathia during the Holocaust. They were taken to concentration camps in Germany.

There was no anti-Semitism in the area before the war. Other nationalities treated Jews with respect. They were only suspicious about those that came from the USSR. Subcarpathia joined the USSR after the Great Patriotic War as a result of the Yalta Conference 20. Teachers, engineers, doctors and other professionals came to Western Ukraine from Eastern Ukraine. Later, when the local population got an opportunity to study at universities, they expressed their negative attitude towards the 'eastern people' from the USSR. One could hear things like, 'Did you get an invitation to come here?'

We rented an apartment. Some time later all alcohol plants were closed due to lack of resources. My wife and I got job offers from other towns, but we didn't want to leave Uzhgorod. We got used to living there. I went to work at the design office for local industries. There were about 25 employees in this office. I began as an engineer and was promoted to chief engineer. Later I was appointed director of the design office. I graduated from the Extramural Heat Engineering Department of Lvov Polytechnic College as a professional heating engineer. A few years later I was called to the regional party committee that told me that I was appointed chief engineer of the Regional Department of Local Industries. I worked there until 1968. Then 'UkrNIIstromproject [scientific research institute of design and construction], an affiliate of Kiev Institute, was established in Uzhgorod. I became the director and worked there until I retired in 1985. My party membership was expressed through the payment of monthly fees and the attendance of party meetings. I didn't have any responsibilities as a party member and I wasn't eager to have any.

I don't remember much about the trials against the 'cosmopolitans [during the campaign against 'cosmopolitans'] 21 in 1948. They involved scientists and people in the arts. Of course, it was strange to read in newspapers that such honored people happened to be 'enemies of the people', but back then I believed it was true. When articles about doctors being poisoners [Doctors' Plot] 22 were published at the beginning of 1953, I had doubts they were true, but those were just doubts. Some people believed it so much that they refused to consult Jewish doctors.

In March 1953 Stalin died. My wife and I were at work at the alcohol plant. All employees got together in the hallway near a radio. All people were crying. My wife was the only one that had no tears for Stalin. She couldn't forget all the disasters that her family had to go through. Stalin was my idol. I grew up believing in his impeccability. I couldn't imagine life without him. I couldn't imagine what would happen to our country or to each of us.

When Khrushchev 23 denounced the cult of Stalin and spoke about his crimes at the Twentieth Party Congress 24 I couldn't believe it for a long time. It's hard to change one's ideology. I had to break with my inner beliefs to believe Khrushchev. Now I understand that Stalin brought many disasters to the country, but I also know that he achieved victory in the war. It's another question how he did that. Of course, there were frightening times: arrests, famine, Stalin's repression and camps... We didn't understand it at the time. In 1954, before the Twentieth Party Congress, I was on vacation in a recreation center in the Crimea. My neighbor was older than me. He was there with his family. He probably went through hardships himself. He told me that Stalin was a terrible tyrant, that he locked our country from the rest of the world. I argued with him stating that Stalin won the war and that if it hadn't been for him we would become slaves. I still think so. I accepted what was said at the Party Congress, but it took me some time to believe it.

We didn't celebrate any religious holidays at home. Both my wife and me were atheists and didn't feel the need of religion. We celebrated Soviet holidays and our birthdays. We had guests, danced, sang and enjoyed the good food. Our favorite holiday was Victory Day on 9th May. We had survived the war, lost our close people and felt like it was our personal holiday. Most of our friends were Jews that came from the USSR. It just happened so. We spent vacations with friends. Sometimes we went to the Crimea or the Carpathian mountains. On every vacation we visited my father, my brother and my wife's parents. My wife and I have lived a good life together. In 2000 we celebrated the 50th anniversary of our wedding. Unfortunately, we have no children.

In the 1970s Jews began to move to Israel. I didn't blame those people, but we never considered departure. I had a job that I liked and we have a lot of friends. I've never faced any anti-Semitism. Ukraine is my motherland. The history of Ukraine is as close to me as Jewish history. Besides, my wife isn't Jewish and I was afraid of prejudice towards her in Israel. Maybe I was wrong, but it's too late to think about it now. Many of my friends and acquaintances left in the 1970s or sometime later. We've been in touch. They have a good life in Israel. Some of them have passed away already.

In the middle of the 1980s perestroika 25, initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev 26, began in the USSR. I was enthusiastic about it and believed in it. The Iron Curtain 27, separating the Soviet Union from the rest of the world fell, and that was a good sign. I believed that things would keep improving. Unfortunately, life's not always as we want it to be. The good beginning didn't continue. Still, the main achievement of perestroika was glasnost [openness]. We lived under the Soviet regime for 70 years, a whole epoch in history. After the collapse of the USSR in 1991, the Communist Party of the USSR ceased to exist, and I automatically stopped being its member.

Ukraine is different now. It's hard to say how things will develop. The mentality of the people has to change. It's not that easy. Every individual must develop his personality now, while we were always taught that a person is nothing without a collective. Every individual must do his work honestly to have a positive effect. The attitude towards Jews has changed. I think there is no anti-Semitism on a state level. It happens in everyday life, but not as often as it used to happen, and is demonstrated by older people. Young people probably don't know what it is about. Young Jews have no problem entering a higher educational institution or getting a job. It's a person's skills that count and nationality doesn't matter. Jews can openly go to the synagogue and observe Jewish traditions. Young people are proud of their origin. I've seen many such examples among the children or grandchildren of my acquaintances. The Jewish way of life has revived. Young people get closer to religion and Jewish traditions. I think one can see more young people in synagogues nowadays.

Hesed was established in Uzhgorod in 1999. This organization does a lot to revive Jewish life. They also take care of old Jewish people. Unfortunately I'm in no condition to go to the synagogue or Hesed. I would be very interested to meet people and attend various activities. I like reading Jewish newspapers. Volunteers from Hesed bring them to me. I know more about Jewish traditions and holidays now. I wish I had been raised in a family where Yiddish was spoken. My wife and I have had heart attacks and my wife has also had a stroke. Hesed employees clean our apartment, do the laundry and bring food and medication. We have small pensions and this is a big support for us. We are very grateful to them.

Glossary

Basia Gutnik
Kiev
Ukraine
Interviewer: Zhmyr Oksana
 

My family background
Growing up
During the war
Post-war
My husband Vladimir
Our children
Glossary

My family background

My name is Basia Gutnik and I was born in Kiev in 1928.
My maternal grandfather told me that he and my grandmother
came to Kiev from Rakitnoye in 1909. Perhaps they were running away
from pogroms,1 but I don't know for sure. Mama was 5 years old
then. To obtain the right to reside in Kiev, they needed to have
their child study in the grammar school. Jews were only allowed to
reside in Podol2 - this was their residential area3. My
grandfather rented a house in Podol and my mother went to grammar
school. Almost everyone who lived in that house was Jewish. Only
the janitor was Russian. We also had one Russian and one Polish
neighbor.

The family was poor. My grandfather was the only family member
working, and my grandparents had three children to suppport. In
addition, both my grandmother's and grandfather's mothers were also
living with them. I don't remember when they died. Grandfather
managed to provide for his family and pay the rent. His name was
Aaron. He was born in 1880, I believe. He was an educated man. He
knew Hebrew and read the Torah. He worked as a cashier in a bank.
He was a very honest man. My grandmother said that whenever there
was a theft of money in his office, never was suspicion cast on my
grandfather. The idea that he could be a thief was simply
ridiculous. His colleagues would donate money in the amount that
had been stolen from him and return it to the bank.

While my grandfather was alive, the family observed the Jewish
traditions. I remember my mother's brother and sister and their
families visiting us at Pessach. We all assembled and my
grandfather put on his thales and said a prayer. We had matzoh and
wine. My mother's family celebrated many holidays, including the
Sabbath, but I remember only Pessach. My grandfather tried to raise
me as a Jew and told me about the Torah, but I don't remember what
he said. I was too young to take any interest in such subjects. In
the 1930s the practice of any religion, including the Judaism, was
eliminated from our country4. And my mother's parents realized
that their children might be at risk if they insisted on their
religiosity. So, nobody forced us to pray or to observe any of the
Jewish traditions. My grandfather died around 1936. The Jewish
ritual requires that one sit on the floor for six days, and that
the oldest family member read a prayer. My mother's brother,
however, didn't know anything about this ritual, and so my
grandmother and I went to an old man who did, and my grandmother
ordered a prayer. She herself sat on the floor near the tiled stove
for the six required days. My grandfather was buried at the Jewish
cemetery in Lukianovka. It was closed after the war. My mother's
sister Luba moved his grave to the Baikovoye cemetery where my
grandmother was buried.

My maternal grandmother, Sima, was born around 1884. My
grandmother had a great sense of humor. When I asked her about
pogroms, she used to say "Well, the pogroms... they robbed and beat
people... especially Petlura gangs5. But life went on and we had
to go on with our life." I must explain here that the worst curse
one can make in Podol is to call someone a "petlurovets". My
grandmother could write Russian very well. As for her religiosity,
while my grandfather was alive she observed all the traditions
assigned by the Torah. After he died, she occasionally went to the
synagogue. She had no profession. She was a housewife and looked
after her husband and children devotedly. After her husband died,
she dedicated all her time to her children and grandchildren.

My grandmother had three children: my mother, Luba and Matvey.
Matvey was born in 1908. He was very handsome. He finished grammar
school and then received further education at the Kiev Polytechnic
Institute. It was difficult to gain admission into this Institute
in the 1920s. Only the children of workers and peasants could be
admitted. My grandfather was a clerk. The husband of my
grandfather's sister was a veteran of the Great October Socialist
Revolution. He and some Party official helped my grandfather to
obtain a certificate stating that he had participated in the
October Revolution. With this certificate, Matvey was able to study
at the Institute, and he graduated from it very successfully. He
got a job assignment as a shift engineer at the KPP6 and married
a very nice woman named Anian. They led an ordinary life, went to
the cinema and to the theater, and celebrated the Soviet holidays.
When the Great Patriotic War began in 1941 ?.) and the Germans were
approaching Kiev, Matvey evacuated his family, his sister, her baby
and his mother. He remained in Kiev to blast boilers at the KPP.
They completed their task and were going in the direction of the
front when they bumped into German military. The Germans let the
other workers go, but shot Matvey because he was a Jew.

Matvey had two sons. Matvey's eldest son, Rudolf, followed in
his father's footsteps by studying at the Polytechnic Institute.
His grandmother's name was Riva-Gisia, and Rudolf received his name
in her memory: the first letter of their names is the same - such
was the tradition. After the war, Rudolf worked at the heating plat
in the Solomenka district of Kiev. He died of a heart attack when
he was 60.

Matvey's second son, Valentin, was born fatherless. Matvey's
wife, Ania, was in the last moth of her pregnancy when the war
began. Valentin never knew his father. While my aunt was alive we
got along well.

Aunt Luba was born in 1907. She studied at grammar school and
then at the Ukrainian secondary school. She couldn't enjoy her
youth because of the civil war and the devastation which followed
(1917 - 1921). After finishing school she entered Kiev's
Pharmaceutics Institute and then worked at the pharmaceutics
factory. She married in 1933. Her husband's name was Alexandr
Morozov. He was Russian and a very decent man. He came from the
Crimea and was educated at the Kiev Construction Institute, but he
didn't have an apartment, so he rented an apartment from my
grandmother. Before the war, he worked as a construction engineer
in Kiev. In 1934 their son Mara was born. Alexandr was the first to
go to war. On 22 June7 the war began, and he was summoned on 24
June. Luba and all the other tenants of our house went to see him
off to the recruitment office. We heard later that in a few weeks a
splinter hit him on the breast, on the left side, and lodged
underneath his heart. At that time doctors didn't perform surgeries
on the heart and, besides, the splinter was too close to the heart
to be operated on. Alexandr became an invalid. He was treated in a
hospital in the Middle East and then returned to Kiev. He lived
with this splinter in his breast until 1972.
At that time they didn't perform surgeries on the heart
and, besides, the splinter was too close to the heart. Alexandr was
invalid of the 1st grade. He was in hospital in the Middle East and
then he returned to Kiev.

In the summer of 1941 Matvey was supposed to send his family
along with other KPP employees' families on a barge. He sent his
wife and children, and my grandmother was supposed to go with them
while Aunt Luba and her son were to wait for the next barge. But
grandmother refused to go without her daughter. Later, Matvey sent
Luba and Mara and my grandmother to the village of Georgievskoye,
where Luba's husband picked them up and took them to Kokand where
he was staying in the hospital. They all stayed in Kokand until
after the war. Luba worked as a pharmacist in the pharmacy at the
Zaitsev hospital. At first, her family rented an apartment in Lenin
Street, then for a while moved in with us. Then, finally, Alexandr
received an apartment. The address was No. 2, Andreevskiy spusk.

After his father died Luba's son changed her apartment to
the one that was near his house. Aunt Luba's family did not celebrate
religious holidays. Like many other Soviet citizens, they had
parties or went to the cinema. Mara graduated from a Ukrainian
secondary school and then studied at the Geology College.
Afterwards, Mara worked for a year, but realized that his job
wasn't quite what he wanted to do - he liked having comforts in
life. He married a Russian girl whose parents were opposed to her
marriage with a Jew. Before long, they separated. Mara was working
at the Kremechug hydropower plant where met his future wife, a
Jewish girl twelve years his junior. They have two children. In
1996 they emigrated to Germany, although Mara had a good life here
in Kiev. He had his own business and good business contacts in
Kiev. He was known for his decent personality and expertise. I
asked him why he was leaving Kiev. He said his children wanted to
go. He visited Kiev in 1998.... He misses Kiev a lot.

My mother Hana Tabachnik was born in Rakitnoye in 1904. At the
age of five she attended the grammar school in Kiev, but she didn't
understand a wordk of Russian. (Tthere were only Russian grammar
schools in Tsarist Russia, but her family only. spoke Yiddish. She
had a music teacher who came to her home to teach her. My
grandmother was so proud of this. Besides the music teacher, an
Italian teacher also came to give her lessons in how to use her
voice - she could sing well, but was too shy to sing in public.
When my parents were children, they lived in the same street, and
of course, they met. My mother was very pretty and my father was
quite handsome. They were a beautiful couple. Both were 21 when
they married in 1926. My mother told me that they had a Jewish
wedding with the huppah in the bridegroom's yard. Frania, my
father's sister, said to her mother that this was the last Jewish
wedding they would be having, and that her mother would not arrange
anything like that for her. I've also seen once how they installed
the huppah. We had a butcher in the yard and his daughter was
getting married. All the village people came out to look - it was a
big rarity in the 1930s. They installed a tent on four beams in the
middle of the row, and the bride and bridegroom went there and
prayed. Mama and Papa were also wed in this manner.

My father's parents came from Radomyshl. I don't know why they
moved to Kiev. My grandmother Revekka was born in 1885 and my
grandfather Iosif was born in 1882. My paternal grandparents spoke
fluent Yiddish and Russian. My grandfather's name was Iosif-Alter.
My paternal grandmother explained to me that when children died
their parents gave a second name to the surviving child so that the
next one wouldn't die. My grandparents were married in Radomyshl,
Ukraine, when about their lives many times, but they wouldn't
tell me anything. In Kiev my grandfather rented a room in Podol and
they lived there until the end of their lives. My grandfather was a
railroad forwarder in Radomyshl. He worked very hard. They married
on 7 January on the Russian Orthodox Christmas, because it was an
official holiday and my grandparents thought it was good to have
their wedding celebration on this date. I don't know the year of
their marriage, but I remember that they celebrated the 35th
wedding anniversary before the war. My grandmother was moderately
religious and observed some of the Jewish traditions. She was
careful about having separate dishes for dairy and meat products.
My grandfather, however, didn't believe in God. He just loved fried
fat, and my grandmother was very concerned that nobody else should
use the same frying pan, especially the children, and she always
pushed this frying pan to the farthest corner of the stove. Their
children grew up to be atheists.

My grandmother was a heroic woman. She was a support to
her whole family. Whenever they received food during WWII, she
would divide it equally among each member of the family. When there
was sugar she would give everyone their share and keep none for
herself. If one asked, "How about you?" she would answer, "I don't
like sugar." She was a very handy cook. She could make cutlets from
potato peels or flat bread from sunflower waste. Frania told me
that when my grandfather lost his job he was so upset that he kept
repeating in panic, "What do I do now? What do I do," but my
grandmother didn't say anything - she just got some clothes
together to take to the village to exchange for food, walking there
with her older son. And the rest of her family just sat and waited
for her. She could adjust to any circumstance. And she never knew a
life of plenty. Such was her destiny. My grandmother died in 1951.
(Photo3) My aunts told me that when she lay dying, until her last
moments her eyes were gazing at the portraits of her sons. My
grandfather died in Charjou during the evacuation in ? 1942 and
was buried there.

My grandmother had five children. Grigory, my father, was the
oldest, born on 4 October 1904. He died in 1944. Debora (1907 -
1981), Fania (1909 - 1961), Maria (1911 - 1999), and Yan (1913 -
1941) followed.

The oldest daughter, Debora Gutnik, and my father were close
friends as well as siblings. He often wrote her letters... when
they were away from one another, even when he was at the front
during the war. She studied at grammar school in Podol, and in 1931
she and Luba -- they were friends -- graduated from the Kiev
Pharmaceutics Institute. They worked together for some time as
shift chemists at the Lomonosov plant at Kurenyovkar. Debora met
her future husband, a Ukrainian named Leonid, in Kanev. She got a
job assignment there as director of the sanitary and
epidemiological facility. He was a high official, and when mass
arrests began8, he ... ran away from Kharkov to Kanev and worked
there as a turner. He was already married. Debora soon had a son.
It was a scandalous situation for its time. They were living
together when we arrived in Kharkov in 1941. Leonid's wife had died
before that time- she had been ill. In 1942 Debora came to Maria in
Minusinsk with her son, and in 1943 she moved to Kalinin - her
husband had a job there with the hospital since the beginning of
the war. Debora got a position as Deputy Director of the hospital
pharmacy. Debora's family travelled from one town to another along
with the hospital. In 1944 her daughter was born in Rzhev. They
were at Daugavpils, Latvia, at the end of the war. In the spring of
1945, Debora returned to Kiev with her family. Her husband got a
job as a turner at the "Geophyspribor" plant, and Debora went to
work as a pharmacist at the pharmacy. My aunt loved to read
Russian, Ukrainian, and foreign literature. She sang beautifully
and played the piano. She had three myocardial infarctions and led
a very quiet life. She rarely went to the theater, although she
loved it when she was young. Her husband died in December 1958 at
the age of 63. They never observed any Jewish traditions or
celebrated religious holidays. Debora could understand and speak
Yiddish very well, but with her family she spoke Ukrainian and
Russian. Her son Vladimir was educated at the Vassilkov Pilot
School as a mechanic, and her daughter Yanina graduated from thee
Kiev Medical School and became a lab assistant. Debora died in
September 1981.

Another of my father'sisters, Frania Gutnik, who was born in
1909, must have studied at the secondary school, but I don't know
for sure. After school, she took a course in typing. She was
unhappy in her love life. She dated someone in the 1920s, but I
know no details. They say she even had an abortion and that her
lover then married a rich girl. Frania never married. She worked as
a typist before the war at the Vehicle Yard in Kiev. During the
evacuation she worked at a Soviet farm, excavated trenches, and was
involved in the construction of fortifications. When we were in
Inozemtsevo in the Caucasus, Frania went to the front with the
SMERSH units9. She had an affair with a married man at the front,
but terminated their relationships after the war. She didn't want
to destroy his family. The war was still going on when Frania
returned to Kiev and began to work as a typist at the prosecutor
office. She lived with her mother and her sister Debora's family.
There was a horrible famine after the war in 1946-48. There were
endless lines for flour and sometimes people had to stand there for
a whole day. Frania gave everything that she received through her
food ration cards to her mother, sister and nephews. My grandmother
used to exchange something from the package for bread. Frania
suffered a lot when her mother died. But she was a very sociable
person - she always had guests and parties where she and her
friends danced and sang Ukrainian and Soviet songs. She was an
atheist. She dedicated the rest of her life to her sisters'
families. She died from a heart attack in 1961.

Maria Gutnik, my father's younger sister, finished secondary
school in Kiev and met a handsome Jewish young man named Semyon
Kanevskiy who came from Kiev. He worked at the mill like everybody
else in his family. I don't know anything about his parents. Maria
married him in 1932, right when the Podol was flooded. They didn't
have a wedding party, but they sailed to the registry office on a
boat. Semyon went into the army. He completed 7 years of school. He
was goal-oriented and hard working, and he managed to graduate from
the Political Academy in Leningrad. He took part in the Finnish and
Great Patriotic War holding the position of Commissar of a
regiment. After the war, he served in Brest and Kurily. They
returned to Kiev in 1952 and he worked at the Otradny village as a
medical tutor at the military medical school. He retired in the
1970s with the rank of Colonel. He died in 1986. Maria was a very
kind person and she always tried to make everyone feel comfortable.
She worked at the military hospital in Essentuki for a short time,
as a supervisor of a shop in Minusinsk at the Stavropol Theater,
and then was a housewife and followed her husband in his constant
moving around. They didn't observe any Jewish traditions or
celebrate Jewish holidays. They often spoke Yiddish to one another.
They had many friends. Nationality didn't matter to them, and there
were always many people in their apartment on Soviet holidays
getting together to party. Maria had one daughter, Tatiana, who was
born in 1946. She graduated from the Medical School in Kiev.

My father's brother Yan Gutnik (1913 - 1941) graduated from
the rabfak10 , or trade school,) and gained admission to the
Institute of Light Industry. He was single. Yan's co-students used
to get together at our home, my maternal grandfather's place. They
had disputes and discussions and discussed books they had read and
performances they had attended. Sometimes they worked as a troupe
at the Jewish theater, in a building which is now the Brodsky
synagogue. One of Yan's friends was Russian and didn't understand a
word of Yiddish. Yan and a few other young Jewish men taught him a
few words and he shouted them out with everybody else, though he
didn't know what they meant. We were poor, but we had a rich
spiritual life.

Yan went into the army in 1939, along with his co-students.
Their mothers were all missing them and crying after them, but my
grandmother said "Well, what are you crying about? There's no war.
They will serve their term and come back!" But, unfortunately, the
war began when it was time for him to demobilize. I believe he
perished somewhere in the vicinity of Viasma. We received only one
letter from him when during the evacuation. All our neighbors cried
as they read his letter. We were told about it when we returned
after the war. Yan perished in 1941, and we don't know where he was
buried.

Growing up

My father, who was born in 1904, studied at a commercial
school and worked at various places. After their wedding in 1926,
he and mama lived with my maternal grandparents. I was born in
1928. I was the only child in the family. I finished my first year
in the Jewish school at Podol. I was almost 8 years old when I went
to school, but my parents said they would take me back home if I
couldn't cope there. After a year at the Jewish school, I attended
the Ukrainian school which was located directly across the street
from our home. My aunts and uncle and my father's parents lived
within a half block of the school. So after classes I faced a
dilemma about where to go. I liked to go to my aunts' place. I
liked to listen to their discussions about books and performances.
I went to the theater rather often. The Cinema Theater "Oktiabr," a
very posh cinema, was built before the war. My friends and I went
there almost every day. I finished the 7th grade right before the
war. We lived in a four room apartment. My grandmother occupied one
room, my parents and I another. Mara and his mother lived in one
room and the fourth room was a living room. Our family always got
together for dinner. In our room we had two beds. My parents' bed
was nickel-plated. There was a table in the middle of the room and
a huge rubber plant beside it. After my grandfather, died I moved
into my grandmother's room. The furniture included an old leather
sofa, an antique cupboard, a red piano--my mother played the piano--
and my grandmother's bed. There was also a very beautiful tiled
stove. We liked to celebrate the New Year. In 1936 Stalin allowed
Soviet citizens to have New Year trees. My paternal grandmother
used to make all the decorations herself, and my maternal
grandmother always admired how handy she was.

During the famine11 of 1933, Papa worked at the creamery. He
used to bring us butter, soap and sunflower seed husk to burn in
the stove. We exchanged the soap and butter for bread and flour.
Mama didn't work outside the home. She didn't have a profession.
She was a homemaker and a good wife to her husband. At the age of
30 she was diagnosed by doctors as suffering from heart disease.

Papa was a very devoted son. He used to visit his parents
every day. He also supported them. He gave money to my grandmother
to go to Essentuki to cure her liver. Once, grandfather was in a
car accident and was taken to the hospital. When the doctor asked
him whether he needed crutches, he pointed to his sons and replied
proudly "Here are my crutches, one son and another". He was very
proud of his sons. My father and his wife lived with his wife's
parents, and since her father was religious, they observed all the
Jewish traditions and celebrated holidays. But my father didn't do
this due to religious convictions, but in order not hurt his father-
in-law's feelings. He loved to read, and read fiction, scientific
and philosophical literature, and discussed it with his brother and
sisters. My parents and I celebrated the Soviet holidays - on the
1st of May we attended the parade and then went into the woods.

During the war

When the war began my father was not subject to recruitment.
He went to build fortifications in the outskirts of Kiev. When the
Germans were close, he returned home. Frania was working at the
vehicle storage yard. All vehicles were to be mobilized for use by
the army and moved to Kharkov. Frania was allowed to take her
family there. My grandmother was in poor physical condition then
and refused to leave. My grandfather said that the Germans were
decent people and wouldn't do them any harm. Frania said that even
so, she was still going to take them away. We put my grandmother on
a stretcher, loaded it onto a truck, and left: Mama, Papa and I, my
grandparents, Frania, Debora and her son.

Debora's future husband lived in Kharkov in a room in a
communal apartment. We stayed with him, sleeping on the floor.
There were evacuation points in all the large towns and we went
there. Mama, Papa and I and my grandparents were sent to the Soviet
farm "Gorky" in the Kharkov region. Debora and her son stayed in
Kharkov. We lived in a big room that had a stove. We shared this
room with two drivers and their families. They all went to work and
I stayed with my grandmother - by that time her health was
improving. The drivers, Papa and Frania went to work on the
fortifications near Kharkov. Once, when they returned at night, I
heard Papa telling my grandmother to start a fire in the stove so
they could burn their clothes, which were full of lice, and to heat
some water to wash themselves. They also said that the family had
to leave Kharkov. The drivers' wives and their children returned to
Kiev. The drivers went into the army. We went to Aunt Maria's -
Papa's younger sister - in Essentuki. But we were not allowed to
stay in Essentuki, and had to go to Inozemtsevo nearby. We rented a
room and lived there for several months. In 1941 Papa got a job at
a military plant. Then he said he was ashamed to be in the rear any
longer. In 1942 he received a subpoena to appear at the recruitment
office in Mineralniye Vody. Maria and I went to see him off. Mama
and grandmother were hysterical and stayed at home. Papa perished
in Poland in 1944. As for Yan, nobody heard from him for quite a
while.

The four of us, Mama, my grandparents and I stayed in
Inozemtsevo. One day somebody told us that there were no
authorities left in the town, so we packed our backpacks and
prepared to leave. We wanted to go to Aunt Maria in Essentuki. All
around us there was panic and crowds. The patients from the
hospital were walking past our house. The patients caught some
horses and found carts. We threw our luggage onto these carts and
moved on. We spent the nights in the open air and dug up vegetables
from gardens to make something to eat. In this way we reached
Nalchik. The situation there was panicky as well, and we were told
to continue on to Ordjonikidze. When we reached Ordjonikidze the
authorities there summoned whomever possible into the army. The
rest of us boarded the trains heading for Middle Asia. My
grandfather fell ill on the way. His legs swelled up. We reached
Charjou, where we met acquaintances from Kiev. They told us to stay
there. My grandfather had contracted spotted fever. He died within
a month. But how were we supposed to bury him? The Uzbek people do
not have the tradition of burying people in coffins. Mama went to
the factory and explained that grandfather had two sons on the
front. The director of the factory felt sorry for us and gave an
order to make a coffin. But the Uzbek people did not want to carry
this coffin to the cemetery, so Mama and I tried to carry it
ourselves, and somebody helped us along the way. Before he died,
grandfather recalled his sons shouting, "The second front! The
second front!" He was probably hoping that the Americans would open
up a second front and defeat the fascists, so that his son would
return home. We buried my grandfather and our acquaintances from
Kiev even installed a monument on his grave. Mama and I went to
stay with my aunt Luba and my mother's mother in Kokand. But my
mother was suffering from the climate and spent most of the time in
the hospital, all swollen. As soon as she got better, she and I
went to stay with Papa's sisters. Mama got a job there, but I don't
remember what it was. When we got to Stavropol, Mama got a job as a
clerk in the hotel. My paternal grandmother went to stay with
Debora in Minusinsk.

We lived in Kokand for some time and I even went to study
there at the Geological College. In 1943 Mama and I went to
Minusinsk. Maria and Debora were living there. Then the Germans
began to retreat, and the Stavropol Theater moved back to
Stavropol, and we went along with it. Vera and her family stayed in
Minusinsk. Our trip to Stavropol took two weeks and we got lice.
Upon arrival we found accommodation at the hostel of the Stavropol
Theater. The front was nearby and Frania visited us to help us a
little. She used to bring us food. In Stavropol I attended the 9th
grade of the Russian secondary school. In 1943 Kiev was liberated.
We ran to the evacuation point to get permission to go home, but
they wouldn't give it to us. We stayed in Stavropol for another
year.

In 1944 we were allowed to return to Kiev. Neither our
apartment nor my grandmother's was available. Luba and her husband
received an apartment in Lenin Street. There was a public toilet
underneath. Luba and her husband, Mara, my grandmother, Mama, Maria
and I moved in there. We had to go to court to get back my maternal
grandparents' apartment. There were two Russian women and their
families living there. The decision of the court was positive for
our room and my Aunt's room, but we didn't get back my
grandmother's apartment. When we moved back into our rooms in the
apartment those women who were living there ran into the street
screaming, "Help! Zhydy are throwing us out of our apartment!" and
all the invalids attacked us. It was a nightmare.

Post-war

One day after the war my two grandmothers went to the only
functioning synagogue in Kiev on Yom Kippur. It was a memorable
visit. The people there mourned for the deceased and those
exterminated in the Babi Yar12, and people were fainting and
screaming. I said, "Why did you go? What did your God give you?
One of you lost one son, and the other lost two!" Grandmother Sima
replied, "Well, you know, at our age we need to have faith and go
to the synagogue."

Mama got a job at the "Metiz" plant in Kiev which made metal
products. She was a laborer and then got promoted to the department
of ready-made products. I remember she brought home defective
spoons and my grandmother sold them to buy some food at the market.
Later, Mama got a job as a night nurse at the kindergarten.

My husband Vladimir

In 1946 I visited my aunt Maria in Brest, Belarus. My mother
and grandmother stayed in Kiev. I got a job at the pharmaceutics
agency in Brest. I also took a course in English and met my future
husband Vladimir Fadeev there. He was attending an evening school
at the House of Officers. We were meeting at dancing parties,
because the only entertainment in Brest was theater and dancing. We
decided to get married.

Vladimir was Russian and was born in Kiev in 1925 He graduated
from secondary school. His father Ivan --I don't remember any
details of his biography-- worked at a military plant and his wife
was a housewife. Vladimir had a brother named Leonid, who was born
in 1939. Vladimir was like any other boy in his childhood. He went
swimming in the Dnieper River, was fond of the cinema, and was not
particularly fond of reading. He finished the 9th grade before the
war. After the war began, all teenagers and men not subject to
recruitment were taken away from Kiev. I saw them marching when we
were on our way to Kharkov. The men were taken outside Kiev and
told to go anywhere but Kiev. Vladimir decided to go back to look
for his parents, and was captured by the Germans on the way back,
along with some other boys. The Germans gave the order to take them
to Bucha and shoot them. But on the way, the German guard stopped
the truck and told them to get out of his sight. Vladimir ran to
his home, but there was nobody there - his parents and his younger
brother had been evacuated to Gorky. Vladimir got to Gorky on a
flat railcar. When he arrived, he found the house where the
evacuated were staying. His father was a janitor there, but he
didn't recognize his son - he was dirty and lice ridden. Vladimir
stayed with his parents and worked at the mine factory in Sormovo.
He stayed there every night, coming rarely to Gorky. When he did
visit, he brought an additional rationed food package for his
brother. When it was time for him to go into the army, the
management wouldn't let him go. After the war, he gained admission
into the Communications Department of Murom Military College. After
graduating in 1947, he got a job assignment in Brest. He wanted to
continue his studies and attended the Brest evening school at the
House of Officers. The Military College curriculum was the
equivalent of eight years in secondary school, and he needed ten to
gain admittance to the higher military college.

When I wrote mama to tell her that I was going to get married.
I didn't ask her consent. I guess she was opposed to my marrying a
Russian, but later she grew to like him very much. He was very
charming and kind. By the way, my Aunt Maria and her husband did
not oppose my choice. Mama came on a visit to meet him. She
couldn't give me any dowry. She brought me a housecoat made out of
parachute silk hand-painted by one of her acquaintances. This was
in 1947, and we married on 5 May 1948. We just had a civil
registration ceremony and then my husband had to leave for his
military unit. I went on business trip to inspect a pharmacy near
his regiment and he showed me where he lived - in the barracks with
soldiers. His bed was separated from the others by a curtain. Then
he came to Brest. Maria and Semyon were leaving for the Kuril
Islands. I lived with them, and since they were leaving, I was left
with no place to live. But we were lucky and got a room next door.
Our son Grigory was born in 1949.

Our children

We enjoyed life. Although we had a baby and my husband was
finishing the 10th grade, we still found time to go dancing. In
1950 Vladimir got his school certificate and was admitted to the
Electrical Engineering Academy in Leningrad, so we moved there.
This was during the period of the notorious "Doctors' Case13,
but I only read about it in the newspapers. I felt no prejudiced
attitudes by others towards me. We were close friends with some
families of Vladimir's colleagues, and this friendship continues
until the present. We lived in Leningrad for five years. We rented
a part of a room, and shared this room with our landlady. There
were six other rooms and a kitchen in this apartment. There was a
long hallway, a toilet, two stoves in the kitchen and one sink -
all for 22 tenants! But we got along well and my landlady used to
say, "You shall have long memories of this lodging". In 1955 my
husband graduated from the Academy and got a job assignment in
Uzin, a town near Kiev. There were hardly any comforts, and these
were outside, and there were people of all nationalities living
there. But again, we all got along well. We celebrated birthdays
and Soviet holidays together, and neighbors never refused to baby-
sit when we had a chance to go to the cinema or the theater. We
still have few friends in Uzin. Vladimir was there from 1956 till
1965.

Our younger daughter, Ira, was born in 1957. Mama was always
willing to help me and visited us in Brest, Leningrad and Uzin. She
loved her grandson. She always brought him picture books as
presents and read them to him. Sometimes he stayed with her. In
1957 Mama married Miron, a Ukrainian. I don't remember his last
name. He worked as a loader at a store, or something similar.
Later, he was put in jail for something or other and Mama had a
nervous breakdown. I took Mama to the neurological department of
the hospital in Uzin. In 1960 doctors diagnosed cancer. She died
that same year during the surgery.

In 1965 my older son Grigory completed nine years at school
and my daughter finished her first year. Vladimir got an assignment
in Mozdok in Chechnya. I stayed in Uzin until the end of the
academic year. Then Vladimir came to pick us up and we moved to
Mozdok - he had an apartment there. Grigory finished school in this
town and was admitted to the Geology College in Leningrad. After
graduating, he got an assignment in Altai. There he met his future
wife, a Russian girl who is also a geologist. In 1974 their
daughter Elena was born. Later, his former co-students helped him
to find a job in Petrozavodsk. They moved to Petrozavodsk and in
1977 their son Vladimir was born. My grandson and granddaughter are
graduates of the Pedagogical Institute in Petrozavodsk. My
granddaughter lives and works in St. Petersburg and my grandson
lives in Israel. He finished a course of study in design. My
daughter Irina graduated from a Russian school in Kiev in 1974, and
then from Kiev Polytechnic Institute in 1977. She got married and
her family moved to Riga in 1979. Her husband is a pilot. She
works as a manager. They have two sons born in 1980 and 1986. One
of them, Roman, went to Israel in 1997 to study, and stayed there.
Igor studies at school in Riga. My daughter is quite content with
her life in Latvia - she speaks fluent Latvian and English and
finding a good job is no problem for her.

In 1975 my husband retired and we returned to Kiev. He
got a position as senior engineer at the "Vulcan" plant. In 1979
the doctors found out that he had a malignant tumor, but he got
well and found a job in a TV shop. We went to theater performances
and visited our friends in Uzin, or they visited us. We read
newspapers. We often had our four grandchildren staying with us for
quite a while. My husband always spent a lot of time with them. He
died in 1998.

My children do not identify themselves as Jews. Perhaps
it is so because we never celebrated Jewish holidays or observed
any of the Jewish traditions. But if I did want to have it all
done, I do believe that Vladimir wouldn't have had any objections.
I never gave much attention to such things. It's an individual that
is interesting, not his nationality. We had Russian and Ukrainian
friends and there was never an issue of nationality. We spoke
Russian, putting in some Yiddish words that we remembered since we
were young. I feel sorry that I've almost forgotten the language.
My children are very interested in everything related to Jewish
culture and follow the events in Israel. They've always been open
about their Jewish roots. My two grandchildren live in Israel, love
it and are proud of it.

My husband never favored the idea of emigration - he
cared too much about the place he lived, and I was with him in this
regard. Regretfully, I've never been to Israel, but I hope to visit
my grandchildren there some day and see the country of my
ancestors.

Glossary

Henrich Zinger
Uzhgorod
Ukraine
Interviewer: Ella Levitskaya
Date of interview: April 2003

Henrich Zinger lives with his wife and daughter Elena in a private house not far from the center of Uzhgorod. The house is rather old, but well kept and clean. There are a few fruit trees near the house. In spring Elena plants flowers around the house. Henrich Zinger is a short, slim and lively man. He doesn't look his age. He likes walking and until lately he often went fishing to the Uzh River. Herman's wife and daughter stayed with us during the interview and listened to Herman's story with great interest. Henrich speaks with an explicit Hungarian accent. He expresses his thoughts very clearly and finds witty definitions. Of course, these reminiscences were hard for him, but when I suggested coming another time to continue he refused and finished his story. In 1997 Henrich gave an interview to the Spielberg Foundation.

My parents' families came from Subcarpathia 1. Subcarpathia belonged to Austro-Hungary before 1918. Hungarian was the state language and many residents of Subcarpathia can speak it. In 1918 Austro-Hungary gave the Subcarpathia region to the Czech Republic for the term of 20 years. At the time of Austro-Hungary there was no anti-Semitism, and when the Czechs came to power they encouraged Jews to take official posts and develop their businesses. Czechs were very cultured and loyal people and there was no anti-Semitism during their reign. In villages Jews and the indigenous population lived side by side and developed friendly relationships through generations.

The center of Subcarpathia was Uzhgorod [about 800 km from Kiev]. Before World War II it was a small and quiet town with a population of about 40,000 people. It was multinational: there were Hungarians, Czechs, hutsuls - Ukrainian ethnic people -, Jews, Russians and gypsies. Jews constituted one third of the population in Uzhgorod. There were no nationality conflicts. Jews were craftsmen and tradesmen, doctors, attorneys and teachers. Most of the Jewish families were poor. There was a big beautiful synagogue in Uzhgorod built by the French in the 19th century. After Subcarpathia joined the USSR in 1945 the synagogue underwent reconstruction. The Jewish symbols were removed and it became the building of the Philharmonic. There was a cheder and a Jewish school in town. Jews lived in the center of the town. Before 1918 there were mostly one-storied buildings in Uzhgorod. When the Czechs came to power in 1918 they began to build two and three-storied apartment houses in the central part of the town with spacious and comfortable apartments. There were stores on the ground floor. Subcarpathia came to prosper during the Czech rule.

My father's parents were born and lived in the village of Turi Remety in Subcarpathia, about twelve kilometers north of Uzhgorod. I visited this village only once in my childhood and cannot describe it. My paternal grandfather and grandmother were born there in the 1860s. They died long before I was born. My grandfather's name was Yacob. I don't know my grandmother's name.

My father, Kalman Zinger, was born in 1886. I only knew my father's younger sister, born in 1900. I don't know her first name, but her last name in marriage was Klein. Her daughter lives in Israel. My father also had two older brothers, but all I know about them is that they moved to the USA at the beginning of the 20th century. My father corresponded with them for some time, but then they stopped writing for unknown reasons. My father didn't tell me much about his family. They were very poor and lived from hand-to-mouth.

My father's family observed Jewish traditions. The family was religious. At that time all Jewish families were religious. My grandfather and his sons went to the synagogue and prayed at home. My father's family celebrated Sabbath and Jewish holidays and followed the kashrut. My father and his brothers studied at cheder. The children were raised religiously. When the children grew older they went to learn a profession. My father became an apprentice of a stonemason when he turned 13. This stonemason made gravestones. They didn't pay for my father's apprenticeship, my father worked for the stonemason for two years for free. If after finishing their training apprentices stayed to work for their master they got paid for their work.

My mother's family lived in the village of Velikiy Berezny. It was a big village, 40 kilometers north of Uzhgorod. It's a district town now. There were big fairs in the village. The population consisted of Hungarians, Ukrainians and Jews. There were many Jews like in any other village in Subcarpathia. The Jews spoke Yiddish, Hungarian and Ukrainian. The Jews lived side by side with their neighbors of other nationalities and had friendly and supportive relationships with their co-villagers. Nationality didn't matter at that time. There were earthen floors in most houses covered with weaved rugs. There was a synagogue in the center of the village and two cheders: a cheder for boys and a cheder for girls 2. Most of the Jews were craftsmen and tradesmen. All stores in the village were owned by Jews. Some Jews were farmers. All Jews were religious and went to the synagogue on Sabbath and all Jewish holidays. Many Jews attended the synagogue every day. There was a shochet in the village. All Jews followed the kashrut. When a cow was slaughtered Jews could only eat its front part. [Editor's note: This custom was followed in a number of communities, although Jewish law does not forbid eating certain parts of the rear part of a cow.] The rear part was sold to the villagers. Every family had separate utensils for meat and dairy products. They also had special crockery for Pesach.

My mother's father, Yacob Galegrter, and her mother, Zali Galegrter, were born in Velikiy Berezny in the 1860s. My grandmother's maiden name was Ginig. My grandfather was a craftsman and my grandmother was a housewife. My grandmother died in 1907 and my grandfather died in 1914, a few months after I was born. They were buried in the Jewish cemetery in Velikiy Berezny in accordance with Jewish traditions. My mother told me that there were several daughters in the family. I only knew my mother's older sister, but I don't remember her name. My mother, Hana, was born in 1886. My mother's family was religious like all Jewish families at that time. They observed all Jewish traditions.

My parents met with the help of a shadkhan, which was a common way of introducing young people back then. They got married in 1910. They had a traditional Jewish wedding with a rabbi and a chuppah in Velikiy Berezny. My grandmother had died before. The newly-weds settled down in my mother's parents' house where her older sister and her husband lived as well. Her husband was a shoemaker. The house was big and accommodated two families comfortably. My sister Helena was born in 1912. Her Jewish name was Chaya. I was born in 1914. I was named Henrich, my Jewish name was Chaim. My younger brother Leopold was born in 1918. His Jewish name was Leib.

Some time later my father bought a plot of land near my mother's parents' house and built a house with a thatched roof for our family. We lived there until 1944. The house wasn't big. It was built from air bricks made from the mixture of cut straw and clay placed in rectangular containers to dry in the sun. Many houses in Subcarpathia were built from air bricks. Our house was like many other houses in the village and had a room and a kitchen. There was a big stove in the kitchen. My mother cooked on it and in winter this stove was used for heating. The stove was stoked with wood. Wood was inexpensive since there were many woods in Subcarpathia and brushwood was free. There were fruit trees around the house, a big backyard, a kitchen garden and sheds for grain, a chicken-coop and a barn on the right side of the backyard. We didn't keep cattle, but my mother kept chickens. My father made gravestones and engravings on them. These gravestones were kept in the yard. He did this work from spring till fall and in late fall he started making frames for pictures and photographs. My father provided for the family and my mother was a housewife, which was customary in Jewish families. Married women were responsible for the house and raising children.

My parents were religious. They strictly observed the kashrut. There's a number of rules to be followed. There was a special tray with the sides made of twigs in each house. When a shochet slaughtered an animal and let the blood flow down this wasn't kosher meat as yet. He had to remove pellicles and fat, place this meat on the tray and salt it. The tray was put in slant to let the blood with salt flow down into a bowl. Then the meat had to be thoroughly washed to become kosher. Jewish customs and traditions are complex and were transmitted from one generation to the next.

My mother didn't wear a wig since it wasn't customary in the village, but she always wore a kerchief, even at home. We never saw her without a kerchief. She wore casual clothing like all other women in the village. She wore long-sleeved blouses and long dark skirts. She had a long silk dress to wear to the synagogue. This was her only fancy dress. My father wore a kippah at home and a wide-brimmed black hat to go out. On weekdays he wore his work clothes. He had a black woolen suit to wear to the synagogue.

On Friday evening our family got together. We said a prayer, which went like this 'Barukh ata adonay, elohenu melekh ha-olam, asher kidshanu be- mitzotav v-civanu lehadlik ner shel shabat, and my mother lit candles. She said a prayer over the candles with her hands covering her eyes. Then we said a prayer all together, said 'Shabat shalom!' and had dinner. My father blessed the kids. My mother cooked something special for this meal. On Friday morning she usually told me to take a chicken to the shochet. We didn't have chicken on weekdays. We couldn't afford it. From Friday evening till Saturday evening Jews didn't do any work. It wasn't even allowed to strike a match or stoke the stove. On Friday morning my mother cooked food for Sabbath. In winter our Ukrainian neighbor came to stoke the stove on Saturday. He also lit the lamp. There were kerosene lamps. On Saturday morning my father went to the synagogue. Women only went to the synagogue on Jewish holidays. When my brother and I grew older my father took us with him. After he came home from the synagogue he read a special section from the Torah to us. His dream was to have a seat of his own at the synagogue. He couldn't afford to pay for it. I hoped to earn money and pay for my father to have a seat at the synagogue when I grew up. I wanted all Jews in Velikiy Berezny to know that I bought it for my father, but unfortunately, this dream of mine would never come true. Life has its own ways.

We spoke Yiddish at home. We also spoke fluent Hungarian. When Czech became the state language in 1918 our parents had a problem learning it. They spoke Hungarian with their neighbors. We, children, picked it up soon. We also knew 'rusinskiy' - a dialect of the Ukrainian language spoken in Subcarpathia.

We celebrated Jewish holidays at home. On Pesach our neighbors came to our house to make matzah for several families. Women got together at the big table in the kitchen to sieve the flour, make dough and roll it, and my father baked matzah in the oven. I liked sitting beside him. They made a lot of matzah to last throughout the eight days of Pesach.

We went fishing to have fish on holidays. There was a small river in Velikiy Berezny. Fishing was different than it is now. We bought some powder to throw into the river. The fish became drugged and turned up on the surface with their stomach up and we picked it. The powder wasn't hazardous for people.

My mother did a major clean up before Pesach. We moved all furniture to clean every corner. We collected all breadcrumbs in a piece of paper. This chametz was burned in the stove. We kept special crockery for Pesach in the attic. My mother did the cooking in advance. There were lines to the shochet before Pesach: women sent their children to the shochet with chicken and geese. Then the skins were removed along with the fat from the poultry. The skin was cut into small pieces and the fat was melted in big cast iron pots. Food was only cooked in this fat. The children had a chore to crush some matzah in a mortar. This flour was sieved. My mother made chicken broth with pieces of matzah. We always had gefilte fish on Sabbath and Jewish holidays. My mother made pudding from crushed matzah mixed with eggs. She also made chicken necks stuffed with fried flour and onions. She baked honey cakes and strudels with jam and raisins. On the first day of Pesach we went to the synagogue in the morning and in the evening my father conducted the seder. Besides other traditional food there was a plate with bitter greeneries, horseradish and a boiled egg on it and a saucer with salty water. We dipped greeneries into salty water before eating it. We knew that in this way we honored our ancestors' exodus from Egyptian slavery. We drank special wine on Pesach, red and very sweet. There were silver glasses for every member of the family and one extra glass for Elijah the Prophet 3. Everybody had to drink four glasses of wine at seder. Children had water added to their wine. I asked my father the four traditional questions [the mah nishtanah] in Hebrew.

On Sukkot we made a sukkah in our yard. The roof was made from corn stems. We decorated the sukkah with ribbons and flowers, put a table inside and had meals in it throughout the holiday.

Before Rosh Hashanah the shofar played after the morning prayer for the whole month of Tishri and Elul at the synagogue. On the eve of the holiday Jews had to offer an apology to those they hurt even if the hurt was unintentional. On Rosh Hashanah my father put on a white shirt and went to the synagogue with my mother. It was mandatory to wear white clothes. When we grew up we also went to the synagogue with our parents. My father had a special prayer book for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. My mother cooked traditional Jewish food: chicken, chicken broth and gefilte fish. We ate apples dipping them in honey and my mother explained that we did this to express our hope for a year full of sweetness ahead.

The family, including children of over five years of age, fasted on Yom Kippur. The kapores ritual was conducted before Yom Kippur. My mother and sister took a white hen in their right hand and my father, my brother and I took a white rooster, said a prayer and waved them over our heads saying in Hebrew, 'May you be my atonement'. We went to the synagogue. Prayers were long on Yom Kippur and when we returned from the synagogue we sat down at the table. After the 24-hour fast all food seemed particularly delicious.

There were the joyful holidays of Chanukkah and Purim. On Chanukkah children received Chanukkah gelt and painted wooden spinning tops. We spent our Chanukkah money on sweets. We played with spinning tops with other children. There were four Hebrew letters, one on each side of the tops, which stood for the words: 'nes', 'gadol', 'haya, 'po', which means 'a great miracle was here'. Every letter had its price. The letter 'nun', which was the first letter in the word 'nes', was the most expensive. Whose spinning top fell on the letter 'nun' took all stakes: candy wrappings, buttons and colorful pieces of glass.

On Purim my mother made hamantashen. There was a custom to take gifts of food to relatives and acquaintances. It was called shelakhmones. All kinds of sweets were put on a tray, covered with a napkin, and children went to deliver the shelakhmones. In the morning of the first day of Purim my father read the Scroll of Esther to us. Purimshpilers disguised as characters from the Scroll of Esther came to perform in Jewish houses. They were usually children of ten to twelve years of age. They were given money or sweets for their performances. I didn't take part in such performances since I was a shy boy.

There were two cheders in Velikiy Berezny: one for boys and one for girls. Girls studied fewer subjects than boys, but they learned everything a Jewish woman should know: to pray and read in Hebrew. Girls went to cheder at the age of five or six - I can't remember exactly - and studied there for a year. Boys went to cheder at the age of three. We had a melamed teaching us, and his assistant helped him to take care of younger children's needs: he gave us food, took us to the toilet, etc. At the age of four we studied the alphabet and reading in Hebrew since we had previously learned words. We also studied Yiddish, learned to read and write, studied Jewish history, traditions and religion. After finishing cheder at the age of seven we went to a general school.

There was no Jewish school in Velikiy Berezny. We went to the eight- year Ukrainian school. My sister Helena and my brother Leopold also went to this school. Boys and girls studied together. There were many Jewish children in this school and there were also Ukrainian and Hungarian ones. There was no anti-Semitism. We used to fight or argue, but there were never any conflicts about nationality issues. I had Jewish and non-Jewish friends. I studied well at school. I was good at all subjects. When I turned 13 my parents arranged for a bar mitzvah and from then on I was considered to be of age. On Saturday during my bar mitzvah I was told to come to the Torah for the first time in my life. I recited a prayer. The first tallit in my life was put on me. In the evening my parents arranged a dinner party and invited our relatives and friends. I remember that my younger brother felt very jealous about it since I was treated as an adult.

I finished school at the age of 14. My parents offered to send me to study at a garment factory in Czechoslovakia. There was a Zionist organization that organized training for teenagers helping them to get a profession and then go to Palestine. The Zborovitz garment factory belonged to this organization. I don't remember in what town this factory was located. There were other children from Velikiy Berezny and from other towns of Subcarpathia in the factory. We lived in a big building, ten to twelve tenants in one room. There was a canteen downstairs where we had kosher food. We had festive meals on Sabbath and Jewish holidays. We celebrated Sabbath on Friday evening and on Saturday we had a day off. We observed Jewish traditions and laws. We were trained to operate equipment at the factory and studied Hebrew and Yiddish. I worked for two years at the factory. I enjoyed my life there very much. I returned from Czechoslovakia in 1930 and my father sent me for training with a tailor. I studied there for three years. Of course, the training itself didn't take that long, but apprentices used to help their master's wife about the house, too. They fetched water, looked after the children and did what they were told to do.

After finishing my training I began to work at my master's shop. I was a fabric-cutter. I lived with my parents and brother. My best friend was a barber in the village. He wasn't a Jew. He was a very nice person. We didn't care about nationality then. What mattered was whether a person was decent and honest.

My sister Helena got married in 1934. She had a traditional Jewish wedding with a rabbi and a chuppah in Velikiy Berezny. My father bought a house in Uzhgorod for the newly-weds. My younger brother finished school and I began to teach him to be a tailor.

In 1936 I was recruited to the Czech army. I served in an infantry unit in Czechoslovakia. We had military and sport training and studied theory. There were rooms in the barracks, eight to ten tenants in each room. There were beds, tables and chairs, bookshelves and wardrobes in each room. There was a library in our unit and we could read in our spare time. We celebrated the religious holidays of all religions: Jewish, Catholic and Christian, every confession had its holidays. On Jewish holidays Jewish soldiers were invited to the synagogue where festive dinners of traditional Jewish food were arranged for them. Local Jewish families often invited Jewish soldiers to their homes on Sabbath and Jewish holidays. Matzah was delivered for the Jews from the synagogue on Pesach and for Christians Easter bread was made at Easter. The soldiers were allowed to go to the synagogue or church.

We didn't follow the kashrut, but I managed to observe all other Jewish laws. Every morning I put on my tallit and recited a prayer, and on Sabbath and Jewish holidays I went to the synagogue. Religiosity was appreciated. My fellow comrades were of various nationalities. There was one other Jewish soldier. There were Czechs and Hungarians. We never had any conflicts related to our nationality. Officers had a friendly attitude toward young soldiers. There were no brutal attitudes, nothing like what is happening in the Ukrainian army nowadays. We were like a team staying close together.

I returned home in 1939. Subcarpathia belonged to Hungary since 1938. The Hungary of this time was different from the Hungary where my parents lived when they were young. This was a fascist Hungary. There was a war in Poland and the Germans were killing Polish Jews. There were many refugees from Poland. Hungary declared itself an ally of Hitler's Germany. The oppression of Jews in Hungary began. A number of anti-Jewish laws 4 were issued. Jews weren't allowed to own enterprises or stores. They had to give them voluntarily into non-Jewish ownership or they became property of the state. Then Hungarian passports were introduced. All Jews had to prove that they were born in Hungary or they were subject to deportation. I don't know where they were deported. Passports were issued in Budapest, the capital of Hungary. To go there was expensive. Jews had no right to hold official posts. Life became much more difficult.

In 1939 Germany began World War II. Hungary was an ally of Germany during the war. Mobilization to the Hungarian army began. In 1941 Germany attacked the USSR [this was the beginning of the so-called Great Patriotic War] 5 and I was mobilized to a forced labor battalion in the army. At the beginning we had German commanders that were later replaced by Hungarians. We were sent to excavate trenches along the Don River in the USSR [Don is a big river in Central Russia]. Hungarian officers were commanders of the Don front. They behaved brutally. We were ordered to do all kinds of hard work. We had no right to refuse and they shot people for disobedience. Our task was making trenches. All roads were covered with snow and we had to clean the snow for the army troops. Frosts were so severe in January - February 1942 that people froze to death within a few minutes if they fell down. We were given spades and if someone dropped his spade he died. There was a strong wind blowing and it was only possible to walk with a spade. I had a woolen mask that my sister had knitted to cover my head and face. There were only Jews recruited to labor battalions. There were about 1,000 Jews in our unit. I don't know how many survived, but I don't think there were many survivors. I believe, about 1%. Besides inhuman work conditions Jews were shot by Russians while they didn't have any weapons to defend themselves.

In February 1942 our battalion was attacked by the Soviet troops. The Hungarian military ran away. There were nine of us left and we were wandering about not knowing in what direction to go. We bumped into a house at the border of a forest with a kitchen where they cooked meals for Hungarian soldiers. We asked them if they wanted to hire us in exchange for food. We had to chop wood and peel potatoes. Soldiers got some black coffee and rum or cognac to cheer up before combat action. We also got some coffee or rum occasionally. Regretfully, we didn't stay there long. One night some drunken German officers broke into the room where we slept. They yelled, 'Wake up, communists!'. They thought that all Jews were communists for some reason. We couldn't understand what it was all about when we were told to get dressed, take our rucksacks with our belongings and go to the kitchen. When we came there the food stock supervisor began to yell at us, 'You, dirty Jews, communists, drank the cognac and rum that our soldiers need so much!' It was the Germans that drank it, but they blamed us. The officers began to beat us. I bowed down protecting my head and they kept hitting me on my rucksack. They wouldn't have been held responsible if they had killed us. When they got too tired they told us to go into the yard.

The snow around was so deep that we couldn't run away. We were lying in the snow. When we pulled ourselves together we moved on. We were looking for our fellow comrades. We couldn't speak Russian. I spoke Ruthenian, but this was the dialect of Ukrainian hutsul people, the language that we spoke in the village. We finally found our headquarters and were sent back to work. We did the hardest work, but we didn't have a choice. There was no escape from there. People got shot for attempting to run away. So, we would have been shot by the Hungarian, German or Russian military if we had tried to escape and were captured.

There was a frontline in the area where we were working. One night the Soviet troops passed to the offensive and we were ordered to retreat. The nine of us stayed together. We decided to hide in a village. This was the village of Oshurki, as the woman who gave us shelter told us. There were bombs falling all around. My fellow comrades followed the woman into the house, but I stayed outside. I saw a big basket near the front door and got inside. Within some time three German soldiers came to the yard, placed a mortar and started shooting. They were keeping the Russian troops to give their troops an opportunity to retreat. They were very close to where I was hiding. They didn't see me while I could see them through the basket. Then they finally ran away. It became quiet. I got very cold.

Some time after the Germans had left I heard the sound of skis. A Russian officer wearing a white camouflage suit and carrying his machine gun came down the hill to inspect the surroundings. He came into the house and I was still lying in the basket. The Russians were aware that the Hungarians had Jewish labor units. He asked how many of us there were and told us to hurry into the rear, since the army troops might come back, and showed us in what direction to go. It was 2 o'clock in the morning. We still didn't know where to go. We went through some villages. We got thirsty and hungry. Most houses were destroyed. We went into some houses to get warm and get some food. We came to houses like beggars, moving on and on. On the next day we bumped into our fellow comrades lying dead on the road. They had been shot from a plane. There were planes hanging over us, but I remembered from the time when I served in the Czech army that one had to pretend to be dead and walk on after the plane was gone. I don't know whether they were Hungarian or German planes flying over us, but they killed all that didn't follow this rule.

I don't know how many days we roamed about. We were hungry and looking for food. Once we found some pumpkins. We made a fire and fried these pumpkins. They were rotten, but we ate them anyway. Once we found a horse that had frozen to death. We cut pieces from it. We found shelter in abandoned houses. Once we were robbed by some Russians. They were civilians with a gun. They came at night and took away our shoes and clothes. They took my sheepskin vest. They gave us their old clothes.

Finally we bumped into some Russian military. They understood Ukrainian and I asked them whether they needed a tailor or if we could maybe do other work for them. They brought us their clothes and underwear to have them fixed. They gave us some food and when it was time for us to leave they gave us a bag of dried bread. We moved on having no idea where to go. We didn't know the country.

We fell ill with typhoid and some people showed us the way to a hospital. The hospital for patients with typhoid was housed in a school building. Every day dead bodies were taken out of there like logs. The patients were lying on dirty straw on the floor. There were lice that bit patients to death. I don't know where I got the energy, but I didn't sleep at night cleaning my clothes from lice. This probably saved me. There was no water or food. We melted snow to have water. We were so weak that we couldn't walk. We could only move on our fours. Two of my fellow comrades and I survived.

Then some Russian officers and civilians came. There were doctors among them. One doctor asked me where I came from. I replied that I was from Uzhgorod and he happened to come from Uzhgorod, too. He had moved there from the USSR in the 1920s. He asked me more questions and looked around in search of those that could be saved. Those that had a chance to live were taken to another premise. The rest of the patients perished. When we recovered we moved on. We got washed in a sauna and cleaned our clothes.

Then we were sent to Usman [a town in Russia, about 400 km southeast of Moscow], to a camp for prisoners-of-war. There were German, Italian, Romanian, Turkish and other soldiers. There were many military men that surrendered at the front. When we came there we were ordered to take off our clothes, then we were searched by a doctor and allowed to put on clothes again. This was a transit camp where prisoners were examined and sorted out before they were transported to another camp. I was always looking for work to do. I had needles and other sewing accessories. Only my scissors where taken away during the search, although it was my tool. I got a pair of scissors later. I said that I could fix clothes.

At the beginning my clients were inmates of the camp. I did work in exchange for food. Later I opened a shop. There was a storage facility with stocks of food for the army in the Russian military unit where I was. The Italians went there to steal food. They were starving. Those that were captured were shot immediately and I saw this more than once. Later a shoe shop was opened near my shop. The shoemaker was also an inmate of the camp. I stayed a rather long time in this camp. Newcomers arrived constantly to the camp. Once a train full of former SS military arrived. My friend Schwartz from our labor battalion was among them. He had been hiding with Germans in the house of a woman when they were captured. I took him to my shop.

From Usman we moved to Voronezh [Russia, about 500 km southwest of Moscow], where we were taken to the sauna. We had our clothes disinfected and got them back. We were feeling much stronger than before. There was another big camp there. Its inmates were German, Italian, Romanian and Hungarian. We lived in huge wooden barracks. We slept on two-tier plank beds along the wall. We had sufficient food there. They received American food supplies of lentil with chicken meat. America supplied food for prisoners-of-war under an international treaty. The camp in Voronezh was much better than the previous camp. We had sufficient food and a place to wash. There were Jews in the camp, but we didn't observe any Jewish traditions. We didn't eat pork, but this was the only thing we could do in that respect. This was a different world and we were separated from the reality we were used to. I opened a garment shop there, and it was a good shop.

We made uniforms for Russian officers, women's clothes and fixed clothes. There were very skilled German tailors working in the shop. I learned many things from them. I still have notebooks with my notes from this time and albums with patterns. My shop was located near the military unit headquarters, beyond the camp. The colonel, chief of headquarters, lived upstairs and the shoe and garment shops were downstairs. Schwartz and I lived there. I was a tailor and he was a shoemaker. I didn't have to live in the camp for long. I obtained an identity card with my photograph. Schwartz and I lived in the building of the headquarters and moved around. We got food for our work. There were bed bugs that disturbed us in our sleep. We wrapped wet cloth around the legs of our beds to keep bugs from getting onto the bed. However, they got onto the ceiling from where they fell on us. We survived. Every morning I came to the camp to select 20-25 inmates to work in the shop. They weren't going to escape - there was nowhere to go. The local residents thought they were fascists and wouldn't help them. They worked in the shop during the day and in the evening they returned to the camp.

I met my future wife when I was in this camp. There was a house across the street from the building of the headquarters where we lived. I often saw a girl in a window. There was a big family living in that house. Schwartz and I often watched them through the window. It was an episode of peaceful life for us, associated with home. There was a river and a pump nearby where people came for water. We went to swim in the river and often saw this girl, who came with her buckets to get water. Once I took the courage to talk with her. I was wearing a German uniform that Germans had given me for my work. Those Germans didn't know that I was a Jew since I spoke fluent German. I also spoke Russian. I talked with the girl and asked if I could see her in the evening. I longed for talking with someone. I was afraid that she would refuse since she didn't know who I was. She agreed and we met in the evening. I chose a spot where nobody could see us since inmates of the camp weren't allowed to be outside in the evening. We walked and talked. It was like a holiday for me.

We began to see each other more often. I brought her food that we received in the camp. Her name was Sophia Belinskaya. I didn't know who she was. She looked like a gypsy girl. Once she told me that her mother told her to stop seeing me. She thought I was a German and might kill her. We talked more and she told me that she was a Jew. I confessed that I was a Jew, too. Her mother didn't believe it was true. She said there were only German inmates in the camp. I began to come to her home in the evening when nobody could see me. Sophia lived in a big family. There were seven children and Sophia was the oldest. She was born in 1924. Sophia's mother was a housewife. Her father left their family. I tried to support their family as much as I could. We made gowns from white fabric in my shop. We received fabric in rolls. Every night I wrapped some fabric around my body and went to visit them. Sophia's mother sold this fabric at the market and bought food for the family. Once Sophia's mother invited me to lunch. I understood that she wanted to talk to me and find out whether I could speak Yiddish. By the end of my visit she knew that I spoke better Yiddish than she did. After that Sophia's mother wasn't afraid of me any more and I visited them every evening. My friend Schwartz also met a local girl from Voronezh.

In May 1945 we heard that the war was over: the inmates were telling this news to one another. On 9th May 1945 all inmates of the camp were lined up in front of the headquarters of the camp and announced that Germany had capitulated and that the war was over. We felt very happy. People in the streets hugged and kissed each other. I hoped to be able to go home soon. I had no information about my family. Sophia and I decided to get married but postponed it until we came to my home. We wanted to celebrate our wedding with my family. I asked Ptashynskiy, the chief of the camp who was Jewish, to get some information about the situation in Subcarpathia. He sent a request about my family and received a response saying that no member of my family was alive. They perished in Auschwitz where the Germans took them.

Before we were released from the camp we were asked where we wanted to live. I could have gone anywhere, but I only wanted to go back home, even though I knew that nobody was waiting for me there. I was in captivity from the beginning of 1942 till September 1946. In September I obtained the required permits to go home. In 1945, after World War II was over, Subcarpathia joined the USSR, but it didn't scare me away. I remembered that the Soviet army had liberated us from the fascists. I was still hoping that I would find at least some of my relatives when I came home. I left for home alone. I wanted to prepare everything for the arrival of my future wife.

I arrived in Velikiy Berezny where my neighbors confirmed that the Germans had taken my whole family to Auschwitz in 1944 and none of them returned. I went to Uzhgorod to obtain my documents, but I couldn't get any. Some other people lived in the house of my sister Helena. My sister and her family also perished in concentration camp. I stayed in the house of my distant relative and tried to have the house of my sister returned to me. An attorney, who was my cousin's acquaintance, agreed to help me in court. I finally obtained an identity certificate in Velikiy Berezny, on the basis of which I received a passport. The verdict of the court was positive and I got back the house.

I went to Voronezh to take Sophia to our home. We returned to Uzhgorod where Sophia and I got married. We didn't have a Jewish wedding. We had a civil registration ceremony at the district registry office. We still live in this house. When we started repairs of the house in the 1950s I found a gift from my sister. We needed to replace the rotten floors. She must have put an envelope with family photographs under the floor before being deported to the concentration camp with her family. We found this envelope and I was very happy to get it since I didn't have a single photograph of my close ones.

I began to work at a garment shop in the center of the town. My clients mainly wanted to alter their old clothes. I went to work and my wife was a housewife. Our first baby, our son Kalman, named after my father, was born in 1947. He was circumcised according to Jewish traditions. In 1949 our daughter Elena, named after my sister Helena, was born. Her Jewish name is Chaya.

I had to work a lot to provide for the family. This was a hard time. It was difficult to get food. Our shop grew bigger. I worked there for 25 years. I had a crew at the beginning. The procedure was such that I gave a cut to one seamstress and she had a suit or coat completed from beginning to end. I just checked her work. When the shop switched from individual to operational method I quit. I don't think it's good when one employee does only one operation and it takes eight people to have an item completed. I thought it had an impact on the quality of work. My management tried to keep me at work, but I didn't feel like working in this manner.

I went to another shop where an acquaintance of mine worked. They worked as I was used to: one person made an item from beginning to end. There was one fitting with a client, but if a cut was precise the client didn't even need to come to a fitting. There were many clients. Our work was so good that our clients even paid more to encourage us. They were happy with our work and came another time to have another item made for them. I retired when I was over 70. However, I continued working at home. I had many clients. It was impossible to buy good clothes in stores and people had to have their clothes made for them. I earned enough money and we were in no need of anything. I had very little free time that I tried to spend with my family. I took them to the park or to the cinema.

After I returned to Subcarpathia I noticed some demonstrations of anti- Semitism. During the war common hardships made people stick together. There were different values at the front. Shortly after the war life was so hard that people were busy with their own problems and didn't think about nationality issues, but some time later anti-Semitism started to appear. I think one of the reasons was that so many people came to Subcarpathia from the USSR. Many of them were anti-Semites. There was always anti-Semitism and there still is. One can hear, 'Jews, get out to your Israel' in public transport even nowadays. I cannot say that the state persecutes Jews now, but it did before. However, there are demonstrations of anti-Semitism in our everyday life. We are used to anti-Semitism, even though my family or I have never faced it in person. I had clients of many nationalities, but I never heard a rude word from them. They only thanked me for my work.

I didn't suffer during the time of the Doctors' Plot 6 at the beginning of 1953, but I was surprised that so many people sincerely believed this evident lie. Though I wasn't interested in politics. Only idle people discuss politics. In March that same year Stalin died. Those that cried for him were mainly people from the USSR. His death wasn't a calamity for me, but I did think about what was going to happen. I remember how at the Twentieth Party Congress 7 Khrushchev 8 spoke about Stalin's crimes. I never took any interest in politics, but many of my acquaintances were upset that Stalin turned out to be an oppressor of the people instead of being the father of the people like he was called by the propaganda. We hoped that life would change for the better after the Twentieth Party Congress, but there were no significant changes. We lived under various regimes in Subcarpathia. Working class people cannot be interested who has power in their country as long as this power gives them an opportunity to live, work and be able to provide for the family. Of course, I never wished to join the Party. They wouldn't even have admitted me since I had been a soldier of the German side and a prisoner-of-war in a camp. Anyway, I never even considered this.

In 1948 the state of Israel was established. I was happy that our people got their own state, but there was the Jewish state of Palestine that had existed for a long time before. [Editor's note: There was no Jewish state before 1948, Palestine was under British mandate.] Even before I was born, Jews moved there to work in this country. So for me it was like just changing the name of the country.

My wife and I tried to observe Jewish traditions and celebrate Jewish holidays. We followed the kashrut especially during the time when we could buy the food we needed for it without problems. My relative Roujeana, the daughter of my mother's cousin, and her family lived nearby and on Friday Roujeana and my wife cooked together for Sabbath since it's not allowed to cook or stoke a stove on Sabbath. On Friday evening our family got together for dinner. We prayed and my wife lit candles. However, I had to go to work on Saturday. During the Soviet regime Saturday was a working day. Whenever I could I would come home earlier from work. I was a crew leader and couldn't just leave my colleagues to go home. My wife and I spoke Russian at home, since she could hardly understand Yiddish. Her Yiddish wasn't important for me. All I cared about was that we understood each other.

We celebrated all Jewish holidays at home. The synagogue in Uzhgorod operated until the early 1950s. My wife and I went there together only on Jewish holidays. There was a special balcony for women at the synagogue. However, we had small children and my wife couldn't leave them to go to the synagogue on Saturday, so on Saturday I went to the synagogue alone. Later the synagogue was closed and reconstructed to become the building of the Philharmonic. A prayer house opened where only men could go.

My wife and I fasted on Yom Kippur. We still fast regardless of our age. We also celebrate Pesach. We have special crockery and utensils for Pesach. I conducted the seder on Pesach. When my son grew old enough I taught him the traditional questions in Hebrew that a son is supposed to ask his father during the seder. We celebrated all holidays and I told my children the history of all of them. My wife and I raised our children in accordance with Jewish laws. They identified themselves as Jews and never concealed their identity like others at hard times.

We didn't celebrate Soviet holidays; except for Victory Day 9 on 9th May none of them were of significance for us. When our children went to school my wife and I went to concerts at school arranged on Soviet holidays, but it was just another opportunity for us to spend time with our children. We also celebrated family birthdays. We invited friends and relatives. Almost all our friends were Jews. It just happened so, although I don't value a person by his nationality.

I like walking long distances. My wife and I often went for walks with our children. My favorite pastime was fishing. It is only in the last few years that I haven't gone fishing. My family always spent a week with my wife's relatives in Voronezh during summer vacation. Sophia's mother, her sisters and brothers were happy to see us. We spent the rest of our vacation in picturesque Subcarpathia. We rented an apartment and spent our time in the woods or at the river bank.

When our children grew up my wife went to work at the instrument manufacturing plant called Uzhgorodpribor. She worked there for 30 years. She started as an apprentice and finished her career as a crew leader. I provided well for the family, but my wife wanted to work to spend more time among people and, also, to get a pension.

Our children went to school. Our son was very fond of music and learned to play the violin. Later he gave up music. Our daughter also started playing the piano, but she also gave up. After school our son studied to become a photographer and then he began to work as a photographer. He married a nice Jewish girl from Uzhgorod. We made a chuppah for them at home and invited a rabbi. We also organized a wedding party at home. Their son Dmitrii was born in 1982. In 1996 our son and his family emigrated to Israel. His son went to study at school in Israel and then my son and his wife went to visit him there and decided to stay. My wife and I approved of his decision. My son and his wife were young and could start their life anew. Our son works as a driver in Israel. Our grandson finished school and serves in the army. When his service is over he will go to university.

Our daughter Elena went to work at the Uzhgorodpribor Plant where my wife worked. Elena married a Jewish man from Uzhgorod. Elena and her husband also had a Jewish wedding. Her last name in marriage is Goldman. In 1976 their son Edward was born. Our grandson finished school and went to Israel under a program for young people. He lives and works in Israel. He got married in Israel. I have an eight-year-old great-grandson. His name is Daniel. Unfortunately, Elena's marriage failed. Our daughter lives with us now. Elena worked at the plant for 22 years until it was shut down. Since then she has worked with Hesed. She used to deliver hot meals to old people and now she works as a visiting nurse.

Many of our friends and relatives moved to Israel in the 1970s. My wife and I sympathized with them and supported their plans, but we didn't intend to leave. I'm too old to work in Israel and I couldn't think of staying at home receiving a pension. I wanted to work and enjoyed working.

I was enthusiastic about perestroika 10, which began in the 1980s at the initiative of Mikhail Gorbachev 11. I was glad that people got an opportunity to start their business without obstacles and fear. Private businesses were allowed for the first time in the history of the USSR. Of course, private entrepreneurship existed before, but if a person got caught for working for himself he might have been arrested and imprisoned for it. Besides, anti-Semitism mitigated, both on the state and interpersonal level. Relationships with Israel improved at that time. Soviet people got an opportunity to travel abroad, visit their relatives and friends and invite them to their homes. Official Jewish organizations were established and people got an opportunity to read books by Jewish writers and attend Jewish concerts. In the past even the word 'Jew' wasn't officially used. If they talked about Jews that perished during World War II they called them 'Soviet people' and when they mentioned those that were at the front they said 'Russians, Ukrainians, Belarus and representatives of other nationalities of the Soviet Union'. Now they mention Jews, Heroes of the Soviet Union, scientists and use the word 'Jew' to identify the nation.

In 1997 I went to Israel to visit my son and his family, my grandson and see my great-grandson. I toured Israel. It's such a wonderful country! It's a pity there is no peace. I was pleased to see how much Israelis love their country and how patriotic young people are there. My daughter also went to Israel to visit her family. Perhaps it would be better for Elena to live with her son and grandson in Israel, but she is a loving daughter and understands that my wife and I are in great need of her.

In 1991, after the fall of the USSR, Ukraine became independent. Since then Jewish life began to revive. Many Jews dropped their Jewish traditions in the past. There were often fewer than ten people, which is necessary to have a minyan, at prayer houses and we had to go home without praying. Now many of those that didn't even identify themselves as Jews before go to the synagogue with their children and identify themselves as Jews. I go to the synagogue every Saturday. I'm glad that many young people identify themselves as Jews. Many young people attend the synagogue. There's also a Jewish school in Uzhgorod.

In 1999 Hesed was established in Uzhgorod. It's very important for older people and for children. There are many clubs at Hesed where young people learn Jewish traditions, customs, Yiddish and Ivrit, foreign languages and get computer education. There is a choir and dance club for children and adults. We celebrate Sabbath and Jewish holidays at Hesed. Beside spiritual development and communication Hesed supports and provides assistance to old people. They deliver food packages, medications and hot meals to their homes. This is great assistance to people in this hard time.

Glossary

Zoya Lerman
Kiev
Ukraine
Interviewer: Bronia Borodianskaya

My name is Zoya Naumovna Lerman. I was born in Kiev in 1934. My mother's
name is Maria Arkadievna Lerman (maiden name - Gilik) and my father's name
is Naum Borisovich Lerman. My mother was born in 1913. I have no
information about her place of birth. My father was born in 1910. I have no
information about his place of birth.

My family history 
Growing up 
During the War 
After the War 

My family history

I will begin my story from my father's family. My father lost his parents
at an early age. There were two sisters and five brothers in the family and
my father was the youngest child. Boris Lerman, my father's father, died
and my father's mother disappeared. Yes, she just disappeared. She left and
never came back. Nobody knew what happened to her. David, born in 1902, was
the oldest. Their second son was Michael, born in 1904. Then came Semyon,
born in 1906, and Jacob, born in 1908. My father Naum, born in 1910, was
the youngest. I don't remember their sisters' dates of birth. I never met
my father's sisters and know them only from what my father told me. One of
them was called Rachil and another was Bertha. My father told me that Aunt
Rachil was so beautiful that people couldn't help but stare at her in the
street. On September 29, 1941 Rachil and her 4-year old daughter Zinochka
(also a beauty like her mother) perished in the Babi Yar. Aunt Bertha was
also killed there, but her son Boris, a teenaged boy, escaped execution.
When Germans shot his family he rolled down the slopes of the ravine. They
kept shooting but miraculously the bullets didn't hit him. Later, he
crawled out of this pit clutching at some roots and vegetation. Then he got
out of Babi Yar and left Kiev. In the 1950s my mother and father
corresponded with him. He lived in Kuibyshev then. Once he even sent us a
picture of himself and his two children. But then they somehow lost touch
with my family.

When my father was 13 or 14 years old, the children lost their parents. At
that time David, the older brother, lived in Baku. He had a job as a tailor
and he took my father to live with him. Later, my father went to some trade
school (I don't know exactly what kind of school). All five brothers were
educated, but I can't give you a more detailed description. In the late
1920s all five brothers were living in Kiev and I know more about their
life at this period. They all had families, except Uncle Semyon who lived
his life as a single man.

Uncle David was a tailor. He had a wife (I don't remember her name) and a
daughter named Bronia. Uncle Syoma was in charge of an automatic telephone
station which still exists. Uncle Yasha worked at the radio sound recording
office for many years, for almost his whole life. I can't remember what
Uncle Misha did for a living, but I have wonderful memories of his wife
Margarita Evgenievna and his son Dusik.

During WWII my father and his brothers, except for Uncle David who was
beyond recruitment age, went to the front. I will first tell you about my
father's brothers. Misha and his son Dusik went to the front and perished
there. Dusik was killed during the first days of the war. Margarita
Yevgenievna lost her loved ones and went to work at the military college.
The cadets were about the same age as her son, and she worked there for the
rest of her life.

Uncle Semyon worked at the bridge construction team throughout the war. He
survived and returned to his previous job after he returned from the war.
He died at age 93 in 1999. I took care of him during the last years of his
life. Uncle Yasha also went throughout the war and returned. After
suffering shell-shock he was left with a hearing problem. That is all I
know about my father's family. He never told anything else about their
life.

My mother's parents lived in Ivankov. My grandmother on my mother's side,
Leia (Elizaveta) Abramovna Gilik (maiden name Ofman), lost her mother when
she was still a child. My grandmother was born in the late 1880's in
Ivankov. There were many Jews living in Ivankov. But this was not a Jewish
city. Jews and Russians and Ukrainians got along very well and helped each
other. They were good neighbors. There was a synagogue in Ivankov but I had
never been there.

Late in the first decade of the 1900s, my grandmother married Arkadiy
Gilik. I know very little about my grandfather, only what my grandmother
told me. My grandfather was born in 1886 and died in 1926, long before I
was born. I can remember his face dimly from the photo of him that I saw
once. My grandmother told me that he was great at woodcarving. His carving
decorated cupboards and pieces of furniture, etc. My grandmother described
his patterns in every detail to me. He used to carve pheasants or fruit and
climbing vines on the doors. My grandfather died quite young, when he was
about 40 years old. He may have died from cholera or some other disease.

My grandfather and grandmother were religious people. They went to
synagogue, although I don't know how often. They always celebrated the
Sabbath and traditional Jewish holidays at home.
My grandparents had six children: two sons and four daughters. After my
grandfather died my grandmother had to raise their children alone. I knew
both of the brothers, Uncle Grisha and Uncle Motl, and the sisters,
Evgenia, Faina and Raissa. My grandmother never remarried.

The family moved to Kiev around 1918 when my mother was five years old.
Here's how it happened. The gang of Struk, a leader of one of the many
White Guard gangs in Ukraine, came to Ivankov. And this Struk sent his
bandits to steal my grandmother's cow. But my grandmother had to feed her
children. So, she went to see this Struk and told him to give back her cow.
Struk told her to go home and said that everything would be there. My
grandfather came home and told her the story to her neighbor. He was an
older and more experienced Jewish man. He said Leia, are you out of your
mind? They will come and kill you and your children. He advised the two
older boys to go hide somewhere (I don't remember where) through the woods
and brought a horse and a cart to my grandmother in which to hide her
daughters. She piled some hay and rags on top of them and their neighbor
rode them out of Ivankov. He was a nice man. It's a pity that I don't know
his name. He rescued the whole family. He took them to the station and told
them to try and get to Kiev. And my grandmother took her children to Kiev.
I don't know how she managed. She settled down at 12, Mikhailovskaya
Street, Kiev in an apartment on the ground floor. It was very low and the
windows were not higher than one meter above the ground. We lived our whole
life in that apartment. There was one big room facing the street. There was
another room with no windows and a smaller room with one window facing the
yard. Uncle Motl lived in this room for some time after the war. There was
a long hallway in this apartment with a door to the closet in the middle of
it. The hallway led to the kitchen.

When she was a young girl my grandmother was eager to study. She had no
opportunity to study because her mother died, and as my grandmother was the
oldest of the children, she had to take care of all her brothers and
sisters. She sometimes came near the school. She looked and listened. She
learned Russian when she was 60. She learned to read and write and she
wrote her daughters in Lvov and she also wrote my father and mother. My
grandmother's dream was to provide higher education to her children. She
needed money to implement this dream. So, she began to bake rolls at home
and sold them to earn money. She opened one window, made a sort of a
counter on the windowsill and installed a partial wall in the room. She had
very little space, just a few meters long. From this window, she was sold
the rolls that she baked. Sometimes people came at night to buy her rolls.
They were very delicious. My grandmother also made hamentashen pies
(little triangle pies with poppy seeds), strudels and pies. She managed to
educate her children. I don't know exactly what kind of education their
children got, but it was higher education. My mother completed three years
at the cinematography institute and also took a course in shorthand
writing. She became one of the best and fastest stenographers in Kiev.
I don't know how or where my parents met. They married in 1932
in a civil registration ceremony. They settled in the apartment at
Mikhailovskaya Street. Soon after their wedding, my father was summoned to
serve in the army. I believe he served in Petersburg. My mother went there
on the weekends because she missed him so much. This is what my mother told
me. My father wrote poems and dedicated them to my mother. He also painted
very well when he was young.

My mother became an administrator with the Philharmonic. I don't know where
my father worked before the war. My mother's brothers and sisters all lived
in Kiev, except Raissa. Her sisters were already married. Aunt Fania
(Faina) and her husband lived in Kreschatik. She was a seamstress in a
shop. Aunt Zhenia and her family also lived nearby. Aunt Zhenia, she worked
at the Regional Association of Consumers. Aunt Raissa married a military
man and followed him to Moscow. Several years later, her husband was
promoted to the rank of general. Aunt Raya followed him everywhere, as he
had to move from one location to another. I cannot say anything about my
mother's brothers.

Growing up

I was born in 1934. My first memories are associated with
my grandmother. My parents were at work and my grandmother was bringing me
up. I remember the fairy tales that she told me when I was small. She told
me stories from the Bible, but she told them in a fairy tale manner. I
remember her telling me how people were going across a desert and could not
find shelter. A woman gave them some flour and they got some water to make
flat bread. They put these flat breads on their shoulders to dry in the
sun. This was the food of these people. My grandmother also told me that
these travelers came to a gate that was guarded by two lions. They somehow
put these two lions to sleep and managed to go through the gate. Much later
I learned that this was the story about Pesach (editor's note: we are not
sure where the lions fit into the story of Pesach). My grandmother was a
very wise and a very kind person. She resolved all problems in our family
and my mother and father always listened to her advice.

We had neighbors in our apartment. We made a separate entrance door and
walled up the door that connected our rooms and thus had an apartment of
our own. All our neighbors liked and respected my grandmother. All our
neighbors that had a common yard were like one big family. They were all of
different nationalities but they were so close that in summer they rested
on their camp beds in the yard at night. I can't remember how many Jewish
families there were; I didn't quite pay attention to the nationality.
However, I remember one family: Lidia, the mother, her children and her
grandchildren. Lidia was the same age as my grandmother. Later this family
emigrated to Israel. My grandmother always advised those who addressed her
on various matters. She also helped her neighbors to resolve their
problems. She always knew how to save money; she could give advice on
medical treatment or on the upbringing of children. She was a very wise
woman.

My grandmother always made her own clothes and the clothes for her
daughters and me. Before the war my grandmother took me to the ballet
school at the Opera House. I was in the junior group. She made me beautiful
gauze tutus. The war in 1941 put an end to it all.

I often heard Yiddish at home. When my grandmother and my mother wanted to
be secretive, they spoke Yiddish. My grandmother wore long, dark gowns. She
always wore a shawl. Her favorite was a white silk shawl. She always wore
it when she went to pray. My grandmother knew all the Jewish traditions and
holidays, but she observed them all. She was afraid that somebody would
report her to the authorities and that her family would suffer. There were
always big festive dinners on big holidays. My grandmother was a great
cook. I can't remember whether she cooked only traditional Jewish food, but
I know that her cooking was delicious. She wasn't very religious. She went
to synagogue only on holidays. I can't remember whether she prayed at
home. I don't think she had time for that. She was always busy doing
something. She worked from morning till night on weekdays and on Saturday.
I don't remember her ever taking a rest. She had to earn money to provide
for her family. In those years it was not safe to go to synagogue. Those
were the horrific 1930's in the period of struggle against religion. There
was only one synagogue left of the three hundred that existed in Kiev
before the revolution of 1917. Cult structures were removed; rabbis,
Orthodox and Roman Catholic priests disappeared behind KGB (State security
Committee) walls. My grandmother was afraid of it all. I remember one
night. I was in my lower secondary school then. My grandmother got ready to
leave the house and said that she would be back in the morning. I asked her
where she was going, but she told me that I was not supposed to know. Much
later she started telling me that she went to pray. I asked her to take me
with her, but my grandmother would not agree to take me with her. She
explained to me that I would not understand, and that there was a plain
room where people came to pray, and that there was nothing else in this
room.

My grandmother did all the housekeeping. Our family income was very small
but my grandmother managed to cook many delicacies. I remember her
delicious strudels. She always treated our neighbors to her pies. Of
course, my grandmother made apple-poppy seed pies and strudels with jam for
birthdays.

I remember that our apartment was beautiful before the war. My father liked
beautiful antiques. He decorated a very beautiful Christmas tree when I was
small. It might have been a real Christmas tree, or a pine tree, whatever
was available at the market. The Christmas tree was decorated to celebrate
New Year's Eve. I also had beautiful toys. We had a beautiful screen in our
big room. My little bed was behind it. My father and mother slept on the
sofa. I still have our table that we had before the war.

During the War

I remember the beginning of the Great Patriotic War well. It started at
night. My parents woke me up. I saw my father sitting on the sofa ready to
put on his high boots. I asked him "Papa, where are you going?" but he
smiled and didn't say a word. He only said "You will be taken to the
basement." In the next building the basements were very deep and Uncle
Syoma carried me there. My father had already left. There were many
children and older people in that basement. I also remember that there was
only one small lamp turned on when my father was getting ready. I remember
the air raids and the sound of the airplane engines. Later my grandmother
took us out of Kiev. We left on a truck. It was an open vehicle with a
tarpaulin covering it on the rear. My cousin Arkadiy, Aunt Fania's son, was
standing near the edge of the truck body. We four girls (me and my cousins
Sveta, Stella and Natochka), were sitting in the middle to keep safe. We
didn't have time to pack, so we hardly had any clothes with us. The truck
drove us to a village and then went back. My grandmother put us to bed
under a cart and wrapped us up in something to keep warm. We stayed
overnight there. Then we traveled by railroad on some kind of platforms.
They were loaded with steel slabs all covered in black oil (mazut) and we
sat on those slabs. Then again we slept on the ground somewhere and then
got back on trains. We changed trains five or six times and the trip took
us about a month. My grandmother was taking us to Perm, where her older
daughter Raissa lived. Her husband, a general, was in the service there,
and Aunt Raya sent us a message to get to her place immediately.

In Perm we settled down in the clay barracks. It was very long. I think
there were about ten doors on one side of the barracks and about the same
number on another. At the very end there was a little room and we children
stayed there.

Raya and her husband had a small apartment. Aunt Fania and her children,
Natochka and Arkadiy, lived with her. Aunt Fania made men's underwear for
the front. She was spending day and night at the sewing machine. Aunt
Fania's husband was executed in Kiev by the Germans at the very beginning
of the war.

My mother worked as a stenographer through all these years and she had
contacts with Moscow for some reason. But she told me about it many years
after the war. We rarely saw her. My grandmother did all housekeeping
chores and looked after the children.

It was 30 degrees below zero in Perm. My cousin Svetochka's hands became
frostbitten. My own hands and my feet were so frostbitten that I did not
feel any pain when my grandmother and my neighbors pricked them with pins.
We were so miserably dressed. I remember the snow was knee deep. It was
cold in the barracks, less cold than outside, but still very cold.

There was not enough food. Once a local woman gave us a carton full of
peas. But these peas were so old that my grandmother had to beat them with
a hammer and soak them in water for a long time before she could cook them.
Those peas lasted for some time. Later, when my mother went to work she
received one pound of sugar that she had to divide between all of us. My
cousins were the first to eat a lump of sugar, each sipping their boiling
water. And I put my little bit into the cup and sat there waiting. They all
pushed me, telling me to sip because it would melt! My grandmother also
got potato and beet peels, ground them up and made something like pancakes.
In spring we also picked up ashberries.

All the tenants of the barracks supported each other. They all had to share
one common kitchen, but there were no conflicts.

All of us lived in one room. Planks were put between two iron beds and my
grandmother covered them with whatever she had for us to sleep on
overnight.

There were also things to enjoy. I remember an opera theater
during the evacuation in Perm. There was a wonderful ballet group; there
were world-reknowned ballerinas Ulanova and Palladina. Our friend's mother
worked in this theater. She took us backstage from where we watched all the
ballet performances.

I also remember that our grandmother took us girls--only Stella
didn't go--to a music teacher. We were auditioned and the teacher told me
and little Alla to stay. I don't remember the teacher's name or her
nationality. My grandmother took me to music classes for quite a while. I
had classes every night. Sometimes when I had a class later at night I
felt sleepy but I still enjoyed playing music.

Now I will tell you about my father. At the beginning of the war my mother
received a notification stating that my father was missing. My mother tore
up this paper and said, He is alive! I don't believe this! He is alive! And
she was right, he returned after all.

Here is what happened. In case of war, my father had to report to a
certain office, which he did. There he received false documents bearing a
typical Russian name--Nikolai Vassilievich Svistun. He was sent to a
partisan unit. I can't remember all details. Well, at first he was in this
partisan unit. Later, he was sent to the town of Chipovichi. My father was
to support communications between two partisan units in the woods on both
sides of Chipovichi. My father had to think of a profession he could
perform when visited by the high-ranking German military, so my father
became a barber. He lived with a family of Baptists in Chipovichi. There
was a father and two sons in this family. But since they were Baptists,
they did not have to serve in the army. A local Komsomol member reported to
the Gestapo that my father was a partisan and a Jew. I don't know how he
found out. Perhaps he knew my father before the war, or maybe somebody who
worked with my father told him. This informer was a Komsomol member, so
nobody suspected that he was working for the Germans and that he was a
traitor. The Gestapo captured my father and tortured him. The members of
the Baptist family my father had been living with came to the Gestapo every
day to demand that they release my father. The mother of the family brought
food to him every day. The Gestapo military threatened to shoot her and her
sons, but she answered that they wouldn't do anything to them or to my
father. And then the Germans let my father go. But they told him that if
they caught him again they would shoot him. After the war these Baptists
often visited us.

My father was on the edge of death again when the Germans
wanted to check on whether he was a Jew. My father was circumcised
according to the tradition, and an inspection would probably have resulted
in my father's execution or his being sent to a concentration camp. But the
doctor who worked in Chipovichi took my father to the barracks for typhoid
patients, which the Germans wouldn't enter. She saved his life. Her name
was Nina but I don't know her last name. She also visited us after the war.
She was a slim middle-aged woman.

People saved my father's life many times. Once, a policeman came and told
my father that at three o'clock the Germans would come to arrest him. My
father didn't know whether this was true or just a provocation so that they
could follow him to his hiding place, and so he was afraid to go to the
partisans in the woods. Instead, he stayed put and the Germans captured him
and took him to a place of execution. They shot my father and a whole group
of other people. My father lay under the bodies of the dead. He was only
slightly wounded, but was covered in the blood of the others who were
murdered. Later, my father crawled out of the pit. Another time, he was
again captured and was about to be shot. It was afternoon. There was bright
sunshine. There were two military escorts, and four people who were to be
killed. My father and the three others were taken to a sandy spot. The
military escorts gave them spades and told them to dig their own graves.
While they were digging, the oldest of the intended victims told the others
to throw sand into their guards' eyes and run. The moment the escort sat
down for a cigarette break, they threw sand into their eyes and ran away,
all in different directions. My father told me that he didn't know if the
rest of the escapees survived. He was running and bullets were whistling
around him. He ran for a long time and then fell, exhausted, into a pit. He
woke up in the morning and didn't know where to go. He returned to the
partisans in the woods and stayed with them until November 1943, until the
end of occupation. He didn't work as a barber in that town any more.

My mother always believed that my father was alive, and she told all his
friends that he was still living. In 1943 Semyon, my father's brother who
worked in a bridge construction team, somehow learned that my father was
alive. He wrote to us in Perm about it. We received a card from him. He
wrote in small letters, but in the middle of it he wrote "Nyuma lives!" in
big letters. I was just learning to read and read these two words to my
Grandma. My grandmother clasped her hands and ran into the corridor. She
knocked on our neighbors' doors shouting "Nyuma is alive! Nyuma is alive!"
When my mother came home from work my grandmother declared, "You know,
Manechka, Nyuma is alive!" and my mother replied "Yes, I knew that he was
alive." In 1944 we received letters from my father and looked forward to
his coming back. He demobilized from the army in 1946 and returned home. My
father worked as a barber after the war. He worked at the central barber's
shop.

After the War

At the beginning of 1944 my grandmother took us all to Kiev. Aunt Raissa
and her husband stayed in Perm and later they moved to Moscow. I would like
to tell you about my cousins who were in the evacuation with me. They were
very dear to me. Stella (maiden name Feldman), the daughter of my mother's
sister Evgenia, was educated at the Institute of Literature. She married a
Russian doctor named Victor Averin. Victor worked at the maternity home.
Although it was an ordinary district hospital, all high officials brought
their wives to Victor. He worked so hard day and night, that it resulted in
the severe disease of his legs. He couldn't work any more, and he was in
despair. Stella decided to take him to America. Victor lived for two more
years and then died. He didn't reach the age of 60. Their son Peter lives
and works in the USA.

Natochka Miliavskaya (married name - Roiter), the daughter of my mother's
sister Faina, lived in Kiev almost all her life. She worked as Chief of a
shop at the knitwear factory. Her son, Boris Krasnov, a theatrical artist,
moved to Moscow. He is popular in Russia and abroad. He works for the most
famous performers. He often gets job offers from foreign companies.
Natochka and her husband moved to join their son in Moscow. She sometimes
visits us in Kiev.

Svetlana Feldman, Evgenia's daughter, studied at the mathematics and
Physics Department of Kiev University. She was married and worked as a
teacher of Physics and mathematics at school. Her son married, and his
wife's family decided to move to Israel. Svetochka didn't want to go but
she was afraid to remain here alone. So, she left, with her son's family in
the 1970's to live in Israel. Later, they moved to the USA, but we never
heard from then after that. I have no information about what they did for a
living there, or how they lived.

Allochka Lev (married name - Uhlina), Raissa's daughter, lived in Moscow.
She learned Italian, French and German languages. She works as
translator/interpreter.

I don't remember any details of our return from evacuation. We returned to
our former apartment in Mikhailovskaya Street. We were lucky that it was
not occupied. Although it was almost empty, there was only one chair left.
My father was offered another apartment but he said he preferred to live in
his old apartment. We often had our parents' acquaintances staying with us
when they returned and found their houses in ruins. They slept on the
floor, it was as simple as that. After we returned to Kiev my mother was
offered the position of stenographer at the Ministry of Culture.

In 1944 I went to school. I was admitted to the 3rd grade. It was a Russian
school for boys and girls. We had a wonderful teacher, a very intelligent
person. I studied only two years at this school. There were quite a few
Jewish children at this school. There was no anti-Semitism at school. We
didn't have a bell at school. There was a rail and they banged on it when
the lesson was over. Our teacher, Anna Romanovna, always let me go some
time before the end of the class, and I went and banged on this rail. Later
Anna Romanovna paid attention to my drawings. I was in the 4th grade when
she asked me to help senior students to make a wall newspaper. I was to
help them draw Lenin. The senior children brought me a book with a
portrait of Lenin and I made a rather big portrait of him for their
newspaper. I also paint pictures for Anna Romanovna for her classes. She
told me that I had to go to Kiev Art School. My mother and I went to this
school. Its deputy Director looked through my pictures and I was admitted
at this school.

There were up to 10 children in a class at the art school. Of course, my
favorite subject was drawing. But I was fond of other subjects too. Our
French teacher, Louise Edmond, came from France. She always had her hair
done so beautifully. My French was good and I was all right in mathematics.

I became a pioneer and then a Komsomol member at the art school. But we
were not required to be involved in any political activities; we didn't
even have a political information class. Creativity was of the utmost
significance at this school, and the main evaluation criteria were based on
talent and humanity. Therefore my pioneer and Komsomol years passed by
almost unnoticed. Children from other Ukrainian towns studied at the art
school. I can't remember whether there were Jewish children at this school.
We took no notice whatsoever of our nationality; that is why I can't
remember. I met my best friends at this school. One is Ukrainian and
another is Russian. We still see each other every now and then.

I have very dim memories of the period of persecution of the
cosmopolites in 1953. There were no discussions or any meetings at school
related to this subject. My parents didn't have any discussions of this
subject at home either, at least in my presence. But I remember the
"doctors' case." My parents talked about it at home. Of course, nobody in
our family believed that these doctors were guilty. I think Stalin's death
saved many lives. We didn't have any meetings at school when Stalin died.
The only thing I remember was a crepe flag on our building. Then I heard
that Stalin died. None of us felt any sorrow or grief in this regard.

My parents and my grandmother were happy to hear that Israel was
established in 1948. My father often told me about the people who put so
much effort into turning a desert into a blooming oasis. We admired them.
But we never considered emigration to that country.

My father could draw, and he was happy that I studied at the art school. He
began a collection of books on art. He was saving money to buy these books.
When he had a day off he always went to bookstores to get a couple of
books. We all loved to read. He would always bring me an interesting book,
and later, he would always have one for my husband as well. This collection
of books that I have is my father's. My mother always, when I was pupil,
had to tell me to go to bed in the evening, but I still waited up until
everybody else went to sleep to continue my reading.

My grandmother always helped me with my studies at art school. I had to
draw many portraits, and my grandmother never refused to pose for me.

My grandmother didn't go to synagogue after the war. She could hardly walk
so far. I don't remember her praying at home. My grandmother died in
October 1960. It was a big tragedy for me. My grandmother had been with me
since I was a baby. It was very hard for me to learn to live my life
without her.

After finishing school in 1953, I wanted to continue my studies in Riga,
but my mother convinced me to enter an art institute in Kiev. I had no
trouble passing my entrance exams. Sergei Alexeevich Grigoriev, director of
the Institute, often came by our school. He knew me and selected me and
three other pupils to become students at his institute. Then came the day
when they posted the lists of students that were admitted, but my name was
not there. About a week after that, Sergei Alexeevich called me and asked
me to come immediately. I replied that I wouldn't come, because my name
was not on the list. Sergei Alexeevich called me several times and sent
messengers to me, but I still didn't go. Then he sent two of my close
friends to drag me there if necessary. I went there and he explained that
he had to admit two students and that this was the only way for them to get
in. He also told me that he had submitted a request to Moscow authorities
to approve my admission as an additional student. Their approval was issued
in a week's time after our meeting, but I was so hurt that I didn't attend
classes for another month.

I met my husband Yuriy Lutskevich at school. He came from Kirovograd where
his family lived. I don't remember who his father was, but his mother was a
pianist at the town Philharmonic. He had an older sister named Nina. Yuriy
and I are the same age, both were born in 1934. Yuriy is not a Jew, but
this was of no significance.

In Kirovograd, Yura was acquainted with an artist who became his teacher,
and later gave him some money to go to study in Kiev. Yura came to the 10th
grade in our school. We met and got married when we were 3rd year students
at the Institute. We often went to concerts together. We both loved
symphonic music. Also, Yura was very fond of fishing. He took a boat and
sailed far away to a lake because there were few lakes in the vicinity. I used to
meet him when he was coming back home. Once, I remember, he brought back a
backpack full of big pikes. He shared them with his friends and our
neighbors.

I was a graduate when our son Alexandr was born. There was too little space
in our apartment for all of us. I was assigned to work at school and I
received a one-room apartment from this school. Yura also worked. I was
raising our son and kept working. We worked at school at first and then at
the Art Institute. But soon we quit teaching, as we both took to creative
work. The authorities provided us with an art shop and my son spent a lot
of his time there when he grew older. Of course, he took to drawing as
well. He graduated from the Art school in Kiev and then studied at the Art
Institute. He had several exhibitions. He worked in Denmark and then,
recently, in London. He painted landscapes and portraits. He often goes on
tours. Alexandr speaks fluent English and a little bit of Danish and
German.  My son is married to a Jew, and they have a son named
Zhenechka who goes to primary school. He is 8 years old. He doesn't want to
draw yet. He liked to draw when he was younger, and we have kept some of
his paintings from that time.

My parents continued working until they were very old. My father was a
barber and my mother was a stenographer. My mother had many students and
they have very warm memories of her. My father died in 1982 and my mother
died in 1983.

In 2001 my husband died. It was a tragedy for me. I haven't recovered from
it yet.

I knew about anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, but I never faced
any. All the people I knew treated me nicely. Perhaps, because the people
in my surroundings consisted of educated and intelligent people, artists
and sculptors etc.

I am still working. I have exhibitions. Many of my pictures have been sold
abroad. Some of them I gave away as presents. I recently got an offer to
work in Germany and then organize an exhibition of my pictures there. I
lived there for over two months. I had some of my works with me, and I
painted while I lived there. The exhibition was held at the palace where
one of the Russian tsars once resided. It was beautiful. Sometimes I go to
the house of artists in the outskirts of Moscow where I work for 2 or 3
months of the year. I have many friends there. My work is very important
for me. I haven't traveled much. I've only been in Poland and France, but I
hope I will have an opportunity to visit other countries.

But now I find time to study Jewish history and religion, as well as Jewish
traditions. I get more and more interested in these studies. I visited
Israel recently. I liked it there very much. But one can live a life and be
creative only where one was born. Many things are possible now thanks to
Hesed and the Jewish Community Center. I used to go there with my friend,
but her physical condition is worse and she cannot do it any more. I attend
lectures and meetings. I have new friends and we often celebrate Jewish
holidays. I read Jewish newspapers and magazines. There are so many
interesting things around. I feel that by gaining all this knowledge I'm
getting closer to my grandmother. She was the first to open this striking
world to me.
 

Tomasz Miedzinski
Warsaw
Poland
Interviewer: Anka Grupinska
Date of interview: December 2003; January, February 2004

I met Mr. Miedzinski in Grzybowo, contemporary Warsaw's mini Jewish quarter. (Grzybowo is home to most of the Jewish organizations, the synagogue, a theater, a kosher shop, and a restaurant run by Israelis.) We spent many hours talking in the welcoming Schorr Foundation library. Mr. Miedzinski agreed to the interview because he considers it his duty to tell others.

My name is Tomasz Miedzinski and I come from Horodenka, a small town in eastern Galicia 1. Once I was called Tewie Szwach. The name in my papers was Tobiasz. Before the war all my immediate family lived in that town, both my paternal grandparents and my maternal grandparents. I was born in 1928.

I don't remember my grandma, my father's mother; she died in the early 1930s. I don't even know what her name was. My grandfather - my father's father - was called Abram Szwach. Granddad Awrum, that's what we called him, was a tailor by trade. I know that for some time after World War I my grandparents lived in Zaleszczyki [Zalishchyky, present-day Ukraine]. I remember my grandfather as a very old man: hunched and hardly able to walk. I suspect that in 1937-1938 he might already have been 87 or 88. Granddad Awrum lived with his youngest son, who was called Kopel Szwach. Kopel had his own house, you see. Kopel was a carpenter, like almost all the men in the family, in fact. Kopel was about four to six years younger than my father. My father was born in 1898. He was called Josef Szlojme, Jozef Salomon [the second is a Polish version of the names]. There were at least six children in my father's family. But the only ones I knew were the eldest, Uncle Icek, who ran a fruit stall at the bazaar with his wife; Uncle Kopel; an aunt who lived in Zaleszczyki, but I can't remember her name, and Aunt Estera, the wife of Chaim Frajer - they lived in Horodenka.

I remember my grandparents on my mother's side very well, because until I was six I was brought up by them. My granddad was called Berl Kupferman. Kupferman is like Miedzinski [the stem of both the Jewish and the Polish names means copper]. Berl Kupferman came from a village called Kolanki, between Horodenka and Zaleszczyki. He was a furrier. He was short, with a beard, a man of exceptional goodness and very proud - that's how I remember him. My grandmother's brother, Hersz, also lived in Kolanki. Grandma was called Menia. Her maiden name was Gutman. I think she was born in the 1870s, and I think she was from Horodenka. Granddad married into Horodenka, you see. They had six children: two sons and four daughters.

Granddad Berl took part in World War I; he was a soldier in the Austrian army [see KuK (Kaiserlich und Koeniglich) army] 2. He was on the Italian front 3 when they used gas bombs, and he partially lost his sight. And then after the war he got diabetes and went blind altogether. But that didn't stop him being a shammash in a prayer house. Mama always told us how at 5.00 or 5.30 in the morning, winter or summer, he would walk the several hundred meters with his stick to the prayer house and clean and tidy up there. And he would walk past our windows, and my mother, who on Fridays always got up in the early morning hours to bake bread for the whole week, would look out of the window and by the light of the streetlamp would see Granddad trudging, often through the snow, and feeling the way with his stick. Sometimes he would fall into the ditch somewhere along the way - there were ditches in our town because there wasn't a sewage system - and then Mama would have to dash out to help him out of the ditch and show him the way.

Granddad Berl lived with Grandma Menia and their youngest daughter, who was called Frajda. Frajda was born in 1914. She was a tailor. She got married in 1939 or 1940, I think, to Hersz Wajcman. Aunt Frydzia, that's what we called her, had her own Singer sewing machine. Their middle daughter, Sara, born in 1902 or 1903, emigrated in the early 1920s to the United States. There she married Natan Oxhorn, and they basically spent their whole lives there, had children, and grandchildren - an American family. My mama, Chaja Klara, was born in 1900. And then there was a fourth daughter, called Cypora, who some time in the mid-1920s emigrated to Uruguay. We kept in touch with her and Aunt Sara during the war. The oldest son was called Frojm and was a tailor, and the youngest son, the youngest child in the family, was called Szlojme and was a tailor too. Frojm and Szlojme lived in Horodenka with their families. I knew them all personally; we saw each other every day.

Tailors, furriers and carpenters, those were the trades in our family. Grandma Menia helped out with the furs too. She mended peasants' sheepskins and did it very neatly; that was her contribution to the family income. The peasants would bring us a sack of potatoes for the winter, or sometimes a few pence. I helped Grandma with that a little. Sometimes I would tar the coarse threads - rub them with tar to make them harder and impregnated. We used tar for black sheepskins and paraffin for light-colored ones. I threaded the needles, because Grandma's eyes were bad by then.

Father was tall, Mama was of medium height. Mama was pretty; she had black hair cut short. For me there was no woman more beautiful. In the winter she would always put a woolen shawl on her head. Father wore a peaked cap, and a gray hat with a brim on holidays. Father was slim - he'd worked very hard since the age of 14, so he was muscular and a very strong man. I think he was handsome. At home they used to tell us that my mom was supposed to go the States, and she got the affidavit [papers enabling emigration], but then she fell in love with my father and passed up the trip in favor of her sister Sara. They didn't get married by shidduch. Times had moved on by then. Perhaps they met in a club or something.

Mama completed elementary school. And during World War I she spent a year in Austria, because Granddad was in the army at the time and Grandma was escaping from the Cossacks 4 with small children. When the Germans came, Mama always said that it was impossible, that the Germans, with their culture, with their history, Goethe, Heine... [commit all the crime they did]. And so we didn't escape. When the Germans attacked the Soviet Union, they reached us, Horodenka, within a few days. And then my parents said that no, we were staying, but that Rywka, the eldest, she should escape with the Wajcmans. If something were to happen to us, then at least she would survive.

Our mom was so gifted at sewing that she could patch up anything. If any of our clothes were handed down from older children to younger ones, they were always neatly patched. I remember one of our mistresses, called Liebster, who taught us religion in 1938. And there was this son of a horse-food merchant, who always came to school ragged, all dirty. And Mrs. Liebster would often shout at him: 'How can you come to school in such a state!? Come here, Tobiasz,' - that's what they called me at the Polish school - 'come here, show us what you look like.' And she would show all the children my carefully patched clothes. And I was very embarrassed, I felt humiliated.

Father made everything a carpenter could make: furniture, window frames, doors, coffins. He would sell it on Tuesdays at the market. The Ukrainian peasants would bring their produce to sell, and then they would wander round and buy tables, chests, chairs, benches or coffins. We helped Father. I remember that we used to walk to Ofenberger's wood yard, for instance, two kilometers or so away, and carry one or two planks back on our own backs. That way we saved on the price of the cart.

There were five of us children, and our house - my parents' house - took many years to build. I never hide the fact that ours was a poor family; there was often not enough food to feed five children and two adults. I was the middle son; there were a sister and a brother before me and two brothers after me. I was Grandma's favorite. I was a chatterbox, and always ready to help, and Grandma all but adopted me - I even slept in the same bed as her until I was six, until our house was finished and my parents took me back. When I was seven I started going to school; I went to the first grade in 1935, and then I left Grandma's home for good. In fact, it was really she who brought me up.

Do you know when a poor Jew eats meat? Either when the chicken is sick or when the Jew is sick. I think our parents tried very hard to make sure there was always food in the house. It wasn't fancy food, but we didn't go hungry. Mama baked the bread herself. In the new house, Mama made the dough on Thursday, and on Friday she got up at dawn to bake the seven loaves, large, two kilo ones. On the whole, wheat flour wasn't really used much; it was a mixture of wheat and rye, or rye - black bread. And one of those loaves lasted a day. We took a slice of bread and lard to school. Meat was the best, of course: chicken, or cold minced patties on Saturdays, these flat meatballs made from beef. Veal and poultry were very expensive. Under Soviet rule we started eating pork.

Mama cooked on the hob, on a brick stove. That stove heated the whole house, and when it was very cold Father put a cast-iron stove in. On the large cast-iron hob there were hotplates. Metal rings covered the fire, which never went out. Mama baked bread in the oven on stone slabs. First she put the dough into straw molds and then put them into the oven on a paddle. I was very fond of that brick stove, because you could climb up a little ladder onto the stove-corner and sleep there cozily in the warm.

For the midday meal we ate ayntopf [one course meal]: mostly potatoes, carrots and beans. It was so thick that the spoon stood straight up in it. On Saturdays there was always clear chicken soup with noodles, some kind of meat, mince. We rarely had fish, only at holidays, really. One dish was very popular - mamaliga. Mama always cooked mamaliga in a metal pot: a little salt, a little fat of some sort, sunflower oil, and then you very slowly tipped corn-flour into the boiling water, stirring all the time, until the soup was very thick. When it had cooled, you turned the pot upside-down onto a slat and it came out in a single lump. And you could eat it in one of two ways. Either you cut it into little cubes and ate it with milk, usually for breakfast or supper, and then it was called mamaliga with milk. Or you made slices using a special utensil, a kind of guillotine: two wooden handles attached to a thin steel wire, and you cut the block into slices using the wire. In Ukrainian it was called kulesha. We loved mamaliga with white beet jam, also made by Mama. Sugar beets were very popular because there was a sugar factory in Horodenka, and in fall when the peasants brought them in from the fields on their carts, we would gather the ones that fell off. And we used them to make jam, which lasted the whole winter.

My parents were very keen that my elder brother, Mojsze Mendel, should get an education. He was born in 1926. He was an unusually gifted boy. Then, of course, we still didn't have electricity. We had kerosene lamps at home. Mojsze Mendel, for instance, could make an electric bell using a battery and a few bits of some electric wire. And that caused a stir on the whole street. He was very talented mathematically. We went to a boys' school; there weren't any co-educational schools. There were Polish and Ukrainian grammar schools. Our arithmetic teacher, Lejb Rajf, also taught math at the Polish grammar school. And once there was this incident, in 1938, when my brother was in the 4th or 5th grade, when Rajf sent a trap from the Polish grammar school for my brother, so that he could show the grammar school kids how to solve a particular problem. He wanted to shame them by showing them that a 5th-grader could do things like that. Well, two or three days later, the boys from the grammar school lay in wait for him as we were coming back from cheder in the evening; they threw a coat over his head and beat him up terribly. And that was the price of solving a math problem.

Szmulek, my younger brother, was born in 1932, and Mordechaj in 1934. I can't say much about Szmulek and Mordechaj; they were just small children. Szmulek went to cheder with me, but the youngest didn't have the chance. My oldest sister was called Rywka. She was born in 1924. Before the war she went to the Polish elementary girls' school. There wasn't really a Jewish school, just a semi-private Hebrew school and we couldn't afford it. After the Germans attacked the Soviet Union in 1941 [the beginning of the so- called Great Patriotic War] 5 Rywka didn't go to grammar school; she went to nursing school. Shortly afterwards she escaped to the Soviet Union with Aunt Frydzia and her husband Herman Wajcman. Only Rywka and I survived the war. She lives in Israel today.

I remember Grandma Menia's house from my earliest childhood. It was probably built either before World War I or just afterwards. It was a two- story house and it had three rooms. One was rented out to a poor family with two children, and another to another family with children. As well as Grandma, Granddad and Frydzia, who lived on the second floor, my family lived downstairs; we had a room with a veranda which overlooked the garden. And then there was the carpentry bench as well, because Father worked at home.

So we lived in this one room. Try to picture it: a room of about 16 square meters, a kerosene lamp hanging in the middle. True to the adage that the cobbler's children are the worst shod, some rickety old sticks of furniture. Off to one side there was this peasant stove, which we cooked on winter and summer. There was hardly room to turn round in there really. Everybody slept together - the boys with Father in one bed, one older brother slept on a fold-down bed on the floor - my sister slept with Mama - and sometimes there wasn't room for the fourth, so they'd roll a straw mattress out on the floor. I was with Grandma. And the youngest, Mordechaj, was born in that dark room. There's a joke: why do poor people have so many children? Because wherever Dad goes, Mom is right there. There weren't any windows, just the door straight out onto the yard, and another door into the other room where the tenants lived. It was very cramped.

The lavatory, made with planks, was down the garden. Once a year at night a cleaner came who took the excrement out and scattered it in a field somewhere. I remember that, because for two or three days afterwards the smell hung over the whole street. And so the lavatory cleanout was moved to the winter, so it could be hacked out with something metal, a rod, rather than scooped out with a spade.

Sometime in the mid-1930s my parents came to the conclusion that they needed their own place, and they started working towards building their own house. And they bought a site at 60 Rynek Street - either in installments, or perhaps my father was to pay it off in carpentry. That didn't mean my parents had got rich. No. But a house was a must; they had to make the effort. So there in Granddad's yard, my parents and Granddad Berl, my blind grandfather, made the bricks themselves. There was earth, sand, clay and horse manure. All that was mixed together in a pit and made into shapes, these rectangular blocks. And I remember that the yard was always full of those bricks. They dried in the sun. And that was the material used to build our house. The foundations were built of stones brought from all over the neighborhood. The peasants that did business with Father, who ordered carpentry work from him, had carts and collected the stones. That type of cooperation was called sharvark. And then the walls were built on top of those foundations with our bricks, and a few furnace-fired bricks were used as well.

When Pilsudski 6 died, in 1935, we were already living in that unfinished house. My parents were very keen that the house should have a tin roof, and not a shingle or tiled roof, and they were successful. The first story and the second story were finished: two rooms and makeshift stairs. There were two rooms upstairs too. The most beautiful room, because it was sunny, was occupied by a more distant aunt, Sara, and her husband. They were to live there free for the rest of their lives, because she had lent $50 for the building of the house. We moved into the one room where there was a bread oven; there was a stove with hotplates on which meals were cooked, and then under the window was the carpentry bench and Father worked at that bench. Two rooms were rented out to some paupers. It wasn't much of an improvement, but we felt somehow more sure of ourselves, because we were in our own house. Just before the war Father even had a helper and bought new tools. Mama had a Singer sewing machine. The sub-tenant freed up a room and our situation improved. This was just before the war.

Our house looked sturdy and good, although it might have seemed a flimsy technology. It is no longer there. It was taken down by the neighbors when the Germans made our town Judenfrei 7, when we were driven out. The Ukrainians took the building materials and the tin from the roof. And I saw the stones and bricks scattered around when I went back to Horodenko in 1944. There was just a pile of rubble in the place where our house had stood.

I remember Horodenka well. Rynek Street was in the center. It was a street of single-story detached and semi-detached houses. There were fewer two- story houses and so ours stood out a little. It was a typical Jewish street. The only non-Jewish resident, Mr Dylewski, a Ukrainian, had a restaurant three doors down from us. The street ran along one side of a large square down to the town bathhouse. Jewish artisans lived and worked on Rynek Street. Most of them were carpenters. Here and there was a cobbler or a little shop where you could buy all sorts of small things. There was a baker, too, and a butcher's shop run by Catholics. They had non-kosher meat and cold cuts: sausage, blood pudding, scraps.

The main street in Horodenka was cobbled. That road was on the route from Kolomyja to Zaleszczyki. There were a few detached houses - one of the people who lived there was the rov, who had a house with a garden and an orchard. And a little further on was the elementary school that we went to before the war. That was a large, several-story building with a large yard where we could play during the breaks. Further on were detached houses; lawyers and doctors lived there. The court and the prison were nearby. On the right was the Ukrainian grammar school, which was converted into a boys' ten-grade school in the Soviet period, and further on, outside town, was the sports stadium, and there football matches and some festivities were held. Three bridges linked the town to its suburbs. The river flowed under the bridges and there were even two mills along the way. In the area around the stadium lived the majority of the Jewish poor in wooden or tin huts. That was stinking squalor - the streets didn't have drains. You didn't even want to walk that way. I had two friends there, brothers; they studied very hard at school. They lived in terrible poverty. Their father traded in old bric-a-brac, he bought old pots, alte zachen. They were killed in the first Aktion [first liquidation of the ghetto]. One of them was called Mojsze, but I can't remember their surname.

On the whole the houses in Horodenka were made of brick or stone, though some, in the suburbs, were mixed, stone and wooden blocks, but most of them were houses with tin roofs. Some of them, like our neighbor's, who was a cattle-food merchant, had shingle roofs. Only very occasionally were the roofs tiled, because that was a material that was unknown then. The street itself was graveled. There were some streets that were so muddy and full of puddles after rain that they were hard to cross.

At the beginning of the 1930s there was no street-lighting, but just before Pilsudski's death [1935] electric lamps started to go up. I remember that once there were electrical wires on the streets, on 1 May we children had fun tying red rags to string and throwing them up onto the wires, and then later the police or the fire brigade had trouble getting the red rags down.

In Horodenka there was a cinema, and it was there that I saw my first film on the big screen. Aunt Frydzia took me with her fiance, who was called Szpilfogel; he was the goalkeeper in the Jewish football team. He was tall and hid me under his coat to go in, because I was too young for that film. The film was called 'Prosecutor Andreyev', Russian. That was 1936, or maybe 1935. And during the Soviet occupation there were barracks in that cinema hall. In the cellars they stored barrels of cabbage, gherkins in brine and tomatoes, and when the Russians escaped and the Hungarians occupied the town, the people brought the food out, and I took home a bucket of green tomatoes in brine, which was something that had never been on our menu before.

I think that in Horodenka and on the outskirts of the town there must have been between 4,000 and 4,500 Jews. Not all of them were artisans; there were a few farmers and petty merchants, who didn't live on the Jewish streets. The whole town numbered 10,000-12,000 citizens. About 3,000-3,500 Ukrainians lived on the outskirts; only the Ukrainian intelligentsia lived in the town itself - doctors, teachers and lawyers. And there were more or less 2,500-3,000 Poles: all the administrative posts, schools, all the civil servants.

There were a lot of Zionist organizations, in fact all the parties were represented in the town. Hashomer Hatzair 8 was strong. I don't remember Betar 9. There was Left Poalei Zion 10 and Keren Kayemet 11. Not far from our house a Bund 12 club was under construction for many years, a huge building where the Jewish school, Yidishe Shul, was later. During the period of Soviet rule the Bund was disbanded, and its activists arrested, deported, and never heard of again. And the school was converted into the town club. I remember that there was a small Jewish hotel in our town, run by a real dragon. Miserable rooms, they were. All that was on the main street. And not far away was the Orthodox church and the Hebrew school.

In the run-up to 1st May the artisans and workers held illegal demonstrations, but there was never an official one - that was banned. Even the Polish socialists, I mean the members of the Polish Socialist Party, if they went out on a demonstration, were only given permission on a certain street. On the whole the Jews didn't get involved. The Bundists avoided demonstrations too, because they knew that the Endeks 13 or the anti- Semites would attack them. There were various incidents. Some people, the Jewish youths from Zukunft, for instance, or from the Zionist parties, would put stones into old tights and whirl them around like a club. That was how they defended themselves against the Endek hit squads. In any case, the police always arrested the leading activists before 1st May.

If 3rd May celebrations were held [the anniversary of the signing of the Polish constitution in 1793], we children, Jewish, Polish and Ukrainian, went on marches with our schools. Our teacher, Smiechowski, was the leader of a branch of the Riflemen. He always walked at the head, with his saber, and we admired him, because he looked wonderful in his uniform. But Endek groups would attack the Jews. So the Jewish youths began to organize vigilante groups and there were often skirmishes and arrests.

In Horodenka there was a synagogue, which it took many years to build, one of the most beautiful in southern Galicia. It was finished sometime in the mid-1930s, and had a beautiful portal. It could hold several hundred people easily. There were few Hasidim in the town, but there were Orthodox Jews, and there was their rov, with sidelocks, and he wore the streimel. They prayed in the large synagogue.

Our house was very secular, a socialist artisan household. My father was a Bund sympathizer. Before the war we spoke Yiddish, both inside and outside the home, although we did know Polish and Ukrainian as well. There were many homes like ours at that time. Granddad Berl, the shammash, wasn't an Orthodox Jew either. There were no Orthodox Jews in our family. Of course we observed the holidays, every Saturday. Granddad Awrum would put his prayer shawl on then. On our street lived carpenters and other artisans. The Torah was kept in one of their houses and Saturday prayers were always held there. But on more important festivals, Yom Kippur, or Sukkot, for example, we would go to the big synagogue, or to Beyt [Bet] Hamidrash. The prayer house where Granddad Berl was the shammash was called aklous, or aklois [stibl]. The smallest type of prayer house. It was a small, single- story building. Everyone had their own place there, their own shtender: these book stands with drawers for prayer books. That was where the artisan poor prayed. When I went with Father to prayers, it wasn't really to pray - I was still small; I never had my bar mitzvah - but to meet my friends. My brother had his bar mitzvah, and the ceremony was held there in that artisan aklois.

Neither Mama nor Grandma wore a wig. Before the high holidays a few women got together and went to the mikveh, which was in a separate building near the synagogue. The mikveh was for women, and there was a bathhouse, or rather a sauna, perhaps, for the men. We had hot steam baths there. There were steps up to the very ceiling, and in the back there was a stove and glowing coals. You went there once a week, on Friday afternoons, to bathe and relax in the steam, and afterwards, for fun, some people would go into the mikveh. I went there with the men and thrashed myself with the switches. That was the only way to have a decent bath. But it wasn't the most hygienic of places. The mikveh was the same one for men and women, but they had different times. Our Jewish shtetl wasn't very religious.

There was one mohel in the town. I remember the circumcision of my brother Mordechaj very well. The ceremony was held in Grandma's house on Zeromskiego Street. All the closest family took part: uncles, aunts, their children, and some friends of my father, artisans. I think that was in 1932, I was four. I remember a shiny box and a razor-sharp knife that the mohel's assistant took out of the box. It was a shock for me, despite the fact that we had all been through the same thing, of course. My brother screamed, but the mohel said that it was very good that he was screaming, that he would be strong. And then there was some kind of refreshment: cake, and a glass of wine, homemade, probably. Grandma made apple wine, this kind of fermented apple drink, because there weren't any grapes in Horodenka, grapes grew in Zaleszczyki.

I had a kind of semi-legal bar mitzvah, because by then the Russians were already in the town. At that time we weren't officially allowed to celebrate Jewish festivals. The synagogues were closed. Some of the rabbinate intelligentsia had been deported along with the Polish civil servants and officers somewhere way out east. So we had a family get- together and Granddad gave me a pocket watch called an 'onion' [a kind of watch that you put into your pocket and do not wear on your wrist. It is still called an onion in Polish]. In fact, it was that watch that saved my life later on. By then I was a member of the pioneers, a communist children's organization [see All-Union pioneer organization] 14. I was far from religious.

We kept a kosher kitchen until the mid-1930s, and after that only at festivals. It was getting harder and harder to find kosher food. There were indications of the later famous Prystor decrees 15. That was after the death of Pilsudski, in 1936, 1937 and 1938. The Jews were being denied more and more privileges. We had kosher chicken and other birds [poultry], because there was still a shochet, a ritual slaughterer, in the town. I even used to be sent to the shochet myself.

Pesach, I remember, we celebrated. On the first and last day of the holidays, my father didn't work, of course. We tidied the workshop and there was a festive atmosphere. We cleaned the house of chumetz [chametz], so that there wasn't a trace of bread; we even had to empty out our pockets to shake out all the crumbs. The evening was solemn, though, and we read the Haggadah. I remember that there was always liver with egg and onions, and matzah. There was goose dripping. Every year Mama kept a goose, fattened it up for three weeks before the holidays, and then the goose was slaughtered in the kosher fashion, and the feathers were used for pillows. There was fish, carp Jewish style, sweet, with raisins. I remember that quilts were arranged all round the table where we sat, and we sat on the quilts. I don't know why, whether that was part of the tradition. And it was very cramped, because with our parents there were seven of us. We celebrated the holidays right up until the Russians came.

I went to cheder from 1933, maybe 1934, until 1939, because when the Russians came they closed down the cheders. And in 1935 I started in the first grade of elementary school. In the mornings we went to elementary school, in the afternoon we had something quick to eat at home and dashed off to study the Torah and the language [Hebrew]. It wasn't a pleasure for us, more a duty, but those were the rules and we had to abide by them. When the Russians came the school system was changed, because they had one ten- year school, and we had elementary school, grammar school and high school. So they gave us a ten-year school and put everyone back a year, because they considered their standard of teaching to be much higher. And in June 1941 our education came to an end. I completed the 5th grade. There was a Hebrew school in Horodenka as well, but it was elitist, not within our reach. It was mostly children of Zionists that went there, or of people who were planning to emigrate to Palestine in the future. And those were wealthier people than us. Those children had little in common with us, the poor.

Berl Gefner, my melamed, was an important figure in Horodenka, because his appearance alone set him apart from the Jews. He was tall, must have been about 1 meter 90 centimeters, sturdily built, with a beard, and full of verve. He wasn't among the most Orthodox, but he was probably paid by the kehila or the board of the Jewish community. His little school was called Talmud Toyre. He really did devote an awful lot of time to working with children. The cheder was outside the town, quite a way, towards the [Christian] Orthodox and Jewish cemeteries. We went there on foot, of course.

Gefner had one son, and he very much wanted to give him an education, wanted to send him to Lublin, to the yeshivah. And our cheder was a large room with desks that you could keep a Gemara or prayer book in. There was a blackboard that stood on a stand. There were at least 25 or 30 of us. I don't remember there being any pictures on the walls. In 1936 and 1937 we were given tea, and I remember that the baker would bring us fresh rolls in a basket, and everyone got one for tea. During the liquidation of Horodenka's Jewry, just before he was shot, Gefner said: 'Es vet kimen di royte armey, zi vet rakhnemen far ins,' that the Red Army would return and avenge our deaths. He got a shot in the head, of course, and fell into the pit.

Between 1939 and 1941 we were under Soviet rule, because in 1939 after the famous Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact 16, our lands, Western Ukraine, were occupied by the Soviet army. To be honest, that pleased a lot of Jews, many of whom then believed in the famous slogans about equality and elimination of unemployment, and above all we believed that there would be no more nationalism and racial discrimination. I was an 11-year-old child then, at elementary school.

In 1939 Father worked as usual. Guilds were being set up, but my father put off joining. Jewish life had changed. Places of prayer had closed down voluntarily, because there was no official ban on religious practices. There was discrimination against the Polish intelligentsia, who were often arrested and exiled, as were well-known Zionist and Bundist activists. Only later did we find out that these were deportations deep inside Russia. They took our teacher, who before the war had been a civil servant at the Town Hall, a man of exceptional distinction and integrity; I remember that we were very sorry to lose him.

On 1st July 1941 Hungarian troops entered Horodenka. Hungary was a German satellite, and at that point it was easier for them to occupy southern Ukraine from Subcarpathia 17. There was an armed skirmish in Horodenka - some quite heavy fire, and a dozen or so Hungarian soldiers and seven Soviet soldiers were killed. The Hungarians were taken away at once, but the bodies of the Soviet soldiers lay in the streets despite the fact that it was terribly hot all day and all night, and only the next day was the order given to bury them. Some of the Hungarian units advanced further, in the direction of the Dniester, Horodenka was left with an interregnum, and then previously little-known groups of Ukrainian nationalists sprang into action. They created their own system of authority, and Engineer Zybczyn, an anti-Semite, was made chief official.

Before the war the Ukrainians had had their own schools, cultural center and labor cooperative. When the Soviet army pulled out, the first persecutions of the Jews began. My grandfather Berl was also imprisoned, in the stead of his son-in-law Herman Wajcman, who had been in the Soviet authorities in 1939-1941, but had managed to flee the Germans. On 4th or 5th July [1941] horrifying news reached us from the villages outside Horodenka. The Ukrainians had organized a pogrom of the Jewish population. The Jews were rounded up - they were mainly peasants, owners of little shops, and cattle traders - and transported to the banks of the Dniester. The adults were bound together in groups with barbed wire, the children had stones tied around their necks, they were marched onto a raft, and from that raft thrown into the river. They drowned all of them that way. Scores of people. Two women survived; they were washed up wounded somewhere a long way off, and some good person, a Ukrainian, hid them. A few days later the women came to Horodenka and told their story. After that bodies started to be washed up. Some of them even in Zaleszczyki.

The Ukrainians in Horodenka were preparing their first pogrom of the Jews. It was first and foremost the communists and Jewish intelligentsia that they wanted to remove; but the pogrom never took place. The Hungarians arrested and executed the Ukrainians' ringleader, Waskula; he was the Ukrainian police commandant. I remember when they found his body and brought it back to Horodenka. That funeral was a demonstration of power by the Ukrainian nationalists. I stood behind a fence with a few friends and watched it in terror. The funeral column cortege processed for hours in absolute silence. Activists from Ukrainian organizations had come from all over Stanislawow province to show the Germans and the Hungarians their power. That was August 1941.

After that the Jews' position eased slightly: the Hungarian authorities released all the prisoners, among them our Granddad Berl. My father had more work, because the Hungarian soldiers started going to carpenters to order crates in which they would send their families food and items bought from rich Jews. I remember those crates, they were called 'lada' in Hungarian. In exchange they brought bread, tins of smoked meat and tobacco. It was our job, the children's, to find food. At that time we could go out; there wasn't yet a ghetto, just the Jewish quarter. But that all lasted a short time, because the Hungarian authorities were not in power there long.

Already in early October 1941 the Hungarian unit was withdrawn from the town and sent east, and the Germans took over the town. There was an SS man, Sturmbahnfuehrer Fritz Dopler, an incredible sadist, who had one leg slightly shorter. On his initiative, terrible persecutions of the Jews began. As police commandant an Austrian captain was appointed, called Reuter. It turned out that my father had served in the same regiment as him in the Austro-Hungarian army. Thanks to him Father was employed in the police workshops. Father had access to the military casino and collected the leftovers from the tables there and brought them home in pans. We were still living in our own house. Captain Reuter would warn Father of 'Aktions'; he would say: 'Jozef, it would be better if you stayed in the workshop for the night tonight', and Father always found a way of letting us know. Whenever there was an 'Aktion' we would always hide in shelters: every carpenter had a stock of planks and these were stood up around the walls. It happened fairly frequently, but at first they were looking for specific people. The first general round-up wasn't until December 1941.

They began to transport Hungarian Jews through Horodenka eastwards. We managed to get an awful lot of them out of the trains and they stayed in Horodenka. The ghetto was bounded by barbed wire. A Jewish auxiliary police was set up. Over 3,500, up to 4,000 Jews lived in the Judenviertel [Jewish quarter] in Horodenka. Horodenka had a hospital, where injured German soldiers were brought to convalesce. In the first weeks of the German occupation the following episode took place: about ten or twelve convalescing pilots went out onto the street to have some fun. They rounded up some Orthodox Jews, with their dayan at the fore, locked them in the big synagogue and ordered them to light a bonfire. Into that bonfire they threw the Torah, and they ordered the Jews to gather round it and dance round the bonfire, and then they pulled out their bayonets and ordered them to cut each others' beards off. A large group of onlookers gathered, and, well, we children wanted to see it close up as well. Nobody was killed that time. That was the start. Similar incidents took place in Kuty, Obertyn and Sniatyn.

Rumors were going round that something was being prepared. On 3rd December a decree was issued by the chief official that on the morning of 4th December at 7.00, all the Jews, old and young, with their children, were to gather on the square outside our house, the market square, because there were to be injections against typhus. Tables were set up at certain points, and there were Jewish doctors and Jewish nurses. Around 7.30 there were already about 2,500 people on the square. Among them we saw from our window Grandma Menia leading Granddad Berl by the hand; we saw many of our relatives, friends and neighbors from our windows. Everybody was going for those injections. People said that after the injections young, strong people were going to be transported east, to forced labor camps. Suddenly, around 7.30-8.00 lorries drew up from all sides, and out of them jumped Germans and Ukrainian policemen. The whole of that huge square was fenced in, because during the period of the Soviet rule they had been planning to make it into a park, and that park was surrounded by police. And with shouts and yells and beatings they began to herd the Jews into the big synagogue through a single entrance. Because we could see what was happening through the window, Mama said to Father and to us: 'You' - meaning Father, Mojsze Mendel and me - 'go up into the loft, and the little ones' - meaning Szmulek and Mordechaj - 'and I will stay here, because they won't do anything to us.'

A moment after we had obeyed Mama, gone up into the loft and hidden under the planks, we heard the familiar voice of a Petliurist [see Petliura, Simon] 18. He was called Vasil Chepurda, a man who made a living chopping wood, bringing water from the well, lighting the stove on Saturdays - a shabesgoy. And Chepurda started shouting at our Mama, 'You so-and-so, get out there at once!' And Mama said to him, 'But Vasil, you know us, why are you acting like this?' But he drove Mama and the children out of the house. It turned out that the Germans had a lot of Chepurdas. In that way they herded several hundred people out of their homes and into the synagogue. And we lay up there in the loft for over 24 hours, and then suddenly, through a chink in the wall we saw our uncle Froim Kupferman, the tailor, my mom's eldest brother, running towards the house from the direction of the synagogue.

What happened in the synagogue we only found out a few days later. Some Germans had got 'their' Jews out with the permission of the Gestapo. Beside Uncle Froim, a dozen or so locksmiths, carpenters, glaziers, people they still needed, were released. By all accounts Dantesque scenes took place in that synagogue. Over 2,600 people had been rounded up, it was cramped, packed, the stench - they relieved themselves where they were standing - the screams and cries of the Jews: 'What are you doing? This is a holy place!', beating, without food or water... In any case, a lot of people died, suffocated there. That lasted all day on the 4th and all night. Not until 5.00 or 5.30 in the morning did lorries draw up outside the synagogue and they started to load people onto them. They were taken about a dozen kilometers to the village of Siemakowce, where huge pits had been dug the day before. There they were undressed, made to walk another 50 meters or so through the snow, and with a shot, usually in the back of the head, they were killed on the spot. Out of that whole mass of humans murdered there, seven people managed to survive; they climbed out of the pit in the night and found their way back to Horodenka.

They were six adults and one child. For ten days later, our uncle, Hersz Gutman, from the village of Kolanki, brought back our eleven-year-old brother Szmulek on a cart. He was still in shock, but we managed to get out of him the story of what had happened there. Our Mama had thrown the children into the pit, jumped in herself and covered both brothers with her own body. She was killed. Mordechaj too. Szmulek, lying underneath her, was only grazed slightly. He had lain among the corpses all day, and in the evening, when the shooting had stopped, he got out of the pit. There was a lot of clothing there, because some of them had undressed in the designated place and gone on almost naked, some had shed their clothes as they went; in any case he found some rags there, put them on, found some shoes, and went in the direction of the village in search of human settlements. He reached a farm, climbed inside a haystack and was detected early in the morning by a dog and found by a good farmer. He took the child home, washed and fed him and gave him some hot milk, and kept him there for three days. After three days he extracted from him the information that our uncle Hersz Gutman, my Grandma Menia's brother, ought to be living in the village of Kolanki. The peasant drove him to our uncle in his cart. Uncle Hersz kept Szmulek at his home for a few days and in the end after about ten days brought him - his horses had not yet been confiscated - to us in Horodenka, and we couldn't believe the miracle.

A couple of weeks later a group of Germans from Kolomyja came to Horodenka and caught five of the adults who had survived the synagogue and took them to Kolomyja and executed them there by firing squad, so that there would be no trace. Only one woman remained, the wife of the ritual slaughterer, a very beautiful woman. And my little brother. The Jews who remained - there were perhaps 500, maybe 600 of them - were still living in their homes. My father was working in the town police station under the same Reuter. The ghetto was reduced in size. There were quarries in Horodenka and the Germans decided to pave the road from those quarries to the sugar factory, which was a few kilometers outside the town. Ukrainians who owned carts received some sort of payment for it, but the Jews were forced to work from twelve years of age. I became a carter's helper and my elder brother shoveled broken stone. We worked ten to eleven hours a day and got 200 grams of clay-like bread and some kind of grain soup. We left the Judenviertel in a group at 7am and returned in the evening.

At the beginning of August they took several dozen people somewhere outside Horodenka and shot them there. And in September 1942 came the next, third and last liquidation. We had a real shelter, in which eleven people could hide, and we hid in it in August and September. Chaim Frajer, my uncle, who had moved in with us, helped to build it. Chaim escaped, he crossed over onto the other side of the Dniester and survived for some time. He was a cobbler and had a very sharp rasp in his pocket. He said he wouldn't give in; he looked like a Catholic. During an 'Aktion' in the town of Tluste [Tovste, today Ukraine] a Ukrainian policeman recognized him and Chaim pulled out his rasp and jabbed him between the eyes, grabbed his machine gun and ran away. But some other policemen shot him. Those who were caught in Horodenka in September were taken to the cemetery and shot, others were taken to Lwow, to the Janowska Camp 19. Those who survived that, like us, were ordered to report to the Kolomyja ghetto, which was about 45, 46 kilometers away, within 48 hours, and they could take only one suitcase. And so Horodenka was declared 'Judenfrei'.

To get to Kolomyja some people hired carts. Our neighbors let us put our luggage on their cart. We walked. There was no chance of hiding. We didn't know anybody who would have been willing to risk their life to hide us; we didn't have any property to buy ourselves free. We were among those who were doomed to extermination.

And we reached Kolomyja. The ghetto there was already sealed, we had no stocks of food and we weren't prepared for the approaching winter. Fortunately for us, our mother's cousin lived there. I think he was called Zalman, but we called him Ziama, Ziama Gutman. He was a jeweler and was employed by the Germans. I suspect that he was employed to melt down teeth. He had managed to win the Germans over to him. He had this house where two families lived. In the yard was a little wooden recess with a loft, and he put us up in that loft. Our uncle Hersz Gutman from Kolanki was already there, with his elder daughter; his son had already been murdered by Ukrainian nationalists. There were a few thousand people in the ghetto. They were living everywhere: in the ritual slaughterhouse, in the cheder, in the Jewish school. Typhoid fever and typhus were rife; incredible starvation everywhere. There wasn't a nettle to be seen, because people cooked nettles. The bark had been stripped from the trees. By some miracle my father again found employment as a carpenter in the municipal offices, and received his ration - a pot of soup. My older brother was in contact with a group of youths; he was 16 by then. They resolved to try their luck in Romania. One night, a little group of four or five of them slipped out of the ghetto and disappeared without trace. I suspect that they were caught somewhere on the border and murdered.

And on a single day, a Sunday at the beginning of October 1942, we called it Bloody Sunday, an 'Aktion' was organized in all the ghettoes that were still in existence from Kolomyja to Lvov. Because Sunday was not a working day there were always a lot of people around, always crowds on the streets, the Jews, as usual, would be politicking; people checking who was left alive. But that Sunday there was a hollow kind of silence. And through a chink in our recess we saw that transports of Jews were already being led away. People were walking in a column, downcast, distraught, swollen, stupefied, they were going without protest. We were dragged out of our recess by Ukrainian policemen and made to join the column.

On a square where before the war had been a wood yard, perhaps 5,000 people had been gathered. Something that I find incredibly hard to talk about, because I still dream about it at night: a baby was lying wrapped in a swaddle and no-one was claiming it. A young Gestapo went up to the baby, picked it up by its legs, and smashed its head against a fence pole. The wail, the cry of those standing nearest - even his fellow soldiers looked at him with distaste, but of course there could be no reaction from us. A few dozen specialists were kept back at the last minute, among them our father, and the rest of us were herded to the station, where cattle wagons were waiting. Those who tried to escape were shot on the spot. My brother Szmulek and I got separated.

After some time the train set off. Every third wagon had a watchtower in which a German with an automatic pistol stood guard. We didn't know which direction we were being taken in. At one point we managed to dismantle the grille at the little window hole and people started to elbow each other out of the way to get at least a little fresh air. Children were trampled, bodies were trampled, all in feces... That went on for many hours. People started jumping out one by one, shots rang out.

I resolved that I would rather die from a bullet or under the wheels of the train than suffocate alive. I pushed my way to the window over the backs of all the other people. Suddenly I saw a light; we were nearing a large illuminated station. I didn't want to jump at that point, but I was pushed forcibly out of the window and fell onto the embankment, luckily without doing myself any damage. It turned out that we were in Stanislawow. The Germans were rounding up Jews there, and I was noticed and of course joined onto another column. And there, in that misfortune, a miracle occurred. Because there was no space left in the Stanislawow wagons, some of the Kolomyja wagons were opened up and they started pushing more people in them. And as I stood in the lights of the station I suddenly heard my name being called. It was Szmulek.

The train moved off. They were all being transported to Belzec 20, but we didn't know that then. Because we were together again, we resolved to escape. A plank next to the door was pulled out and two by two people started jumping out. I agreed with Szmulek: 'You jump out first and start walking forward; I'll jump out after you and walk towards you.' I pushed him out, though he was very frightened, a twelve-year-old kid, and he disappeared into the dark night. I was pushed out forcibly. I hit my head on a tree trunk, but a few minutes later I came to my senses somehow. I remembered that Szmulek had jumped out, too, of course, and that we were supposed to be walking towards each other. As I jumped I had lost my cap. Ten minutes or so later, as I was walking in Szmulek's direction, I tripped over something soft, and it turned out to be my cap, and I had 300 zloty sewn into that cap; you could survive for a whole day on 10 zloty. I also still had the watch from my grandfather. That was all I possessed. Ten minutes later I saw what looked like a giant walking towards me. And it was my little brother. What now? We knew that the train had been traveling in the direction of Lwow, so we decided to go that way.

We wandered around in the woods for hours. Just before evening the next day we heard the thud of horses' hooves. Two peasants on horseback had ridden into the wood in search of escapees. For each Jew caught there was a reward: a kilo of salt and a bar of soap. We hid amongst the leaves, chilled to the bone, and stayed alive on sugar beets. Later we met a woman who took pity on us and gave us a piece of bread and some soft white cheese - such delicacies after so many months. Further on our way we heard someone chopping wood in the distance, so we approached him, a lumberjack. 'Aaah,' he said, 'Little Jews. What have you got?' he asked. 'I haven't got anything.' 'Well, you must have something.' 'Well, I've got a watch.' And when I showed him my watch his eyes lit up. 'If you give me that watch, I'll let you go.' And so my bar mitzvah watch saved our lives.

Two days later we reached Lwow. We knew there was still a ghetto there. Who is a Jew always drawn to? To other Jews. Well, but how to get in there? In the end, somewhere near the railway station we saw a Jewish policeman leading a group of a few dozen Jews with armbands on to work, and we asked them the way to the ghetto. That was probably sometime during the last ten days of October 1942. The ghetto had not been totally fenced off by then. We decided to go to the Jewish police, as we didn't have anywhere to go. They took us in and gave us a piece of bread. We had to tell them everything that had happened in Kolomyja. From there we sent a telegram to our father: 'We are well, in Lwow.' And the telegram arrived in the ghetto, but Father was no longer there.

We found out that in the cellars of 28 Zamarstynowska Street, there was a young man from Kolomyja, he was called Nachman Nusbaum, and that he took in stray boys of our age, 12-17, and looked after them. There were twelve of us kids, and we had our shakedown there, and we would go out looking for food; some of the older ones hired themselves out to work. Nachman was an interesting figure. He was maybe 20, 22 years old. He was passionate about literature by Korczak 21 and Antoni Makarenko 22. He had resolved that if he survived the war he would do what Korczak had done in Warsaw and open an orphanage in Galicia. Nachman had found a wooden milk pail from somewhere, and he would always take the older boys to the soup kitchen, bring back half a pail of soup and share it out very fairly among the kids in the cellar.

One day I went out to work in the city in a group of 20, and all of a sudden some Germans rounded us up and took us off to the concentration camp on Janowska Street [Janowska Camp]. There were about 3,000 people in those barracks. I met some of the older residents of Horodenka there. After more or less two weeks I went out with a gang to load coal at the railway station in Lwow. After work I hid in a heap of planks under some coal. At night I got back into the ghetto and went back to the cellars on Zamarstynowska Street. I found Szmulek there, but Nachman wasn't there any longer. One day he had gone out into the town, that is the ghetto, and never came back.

Szmulek and I resolved to try and get back to Kolomyja, with the thought that our father had stayed behind there. I think it must have been in mid- November 1942 when we took the train, pretending to be Poles, back to the ghetto in Kolomyja. Gutman, our distant relative, was still alive, with his wife, but their two small children had died in one of the transports. We moved back into our recess, but this time we really had very good conditions, because we were alone. Our father was no longer there. He had gone out to work one day and never come back. Ziama suspected that they had been taken to a village called Szeperowce, several dozen kilometers from Kolomyja. There are the graves of more than 70,000 people murdered from all over the Stanislawow and Kolomyja districts there. Towards the end of November or at the beginning of December my brother left the recess in search of food and never came back. I was left alone. I decided to escape again, onto the eastern bank of the Dniester, to the area of Czortkow, Buczacz [Chortkiv, Buchach, today Ukraine]; we knew that there were still Jewish settlements there. Thanks to Gutman, who bribed the policeman at the gate, and dressed as a Hucul [Carpathian peasant], in a sheepskin waistcoat, I got out of the ghetto. I could speak Ukrainian well and looked the part. By train, without a ticket, I reached Czortkow.

In Czortkow I spent a few days, and then I set off for Tluste, because I had heard that in the Tluste ghetto there were still a few Jews from Horodenka. There, the mother of a boy who had been murdered, who had worked for a rich Ukrainian before he died, got me a job as a farm-hand. From there I ended up in Rozanowka, in a labor camp. That was fall 1943. I escaped from the camp and in the next village was taken on in the service of the local chief administrative official. But before the holidays I had to take a bath in a big tub in the barn, and the official's daughter noticed that I was circumcised. The Ukrainian didn't want a Jew murdered in his backyard, so he gave me something to eat and told me to be on my way.

I got into a forced labor camp in the village of Lisowce, between the Dniester and Zbruch rivers. It was a camp for the Jews that had survived the liquidation of the ghettoes in the Tarnopol region. There were several of these camps: Kamionka, Borki Wielkie, Lisowce, Rozanowka, Holowczynce. After a few weeks, three of us escaped from the camp. My two companions were murdered by Banderovtsy [see Bandera] 23. I was alone. I heard that there were partisan units. And I started to search for them. I met two divisions that didn't want to take me on, because 'Jews are cowards'. In the end I wound up in a group of partisans that was all that was left of the scattered army of Sydir Kovpak. He was the leader of a huge partisan group that had made it as far as the Carpathians and only there been smashed. It was with that group that I saw liberation.

One day we got news that Horodenka had been occupied by Soviet troops. So a few of us decided to cross the Dniester, either on foot or with the Soviet soldiers, who were traveling in motor vehicles or on carts. We were a few dozen kilometers from Horodenka, and we wanted to see if anyone had survived there. I had had no contact with anyone from Horodenka since fall 1942, when I escaped from there. I had tended to avoid such contacts so that no-one should recognize me, God forbid, and denounce me.

I returned to Horodenka in mid-1944. A group of Jews who had survived collected; Jews who had been hidden by Ukrainian families, some of them had come back from the front. My cousin Josel the son of Icek, my father's eldest brother, came back to Horodenka wounded. He had nobody left either, and we lived together. Now he lives in Israel.

In fall 1944 I got in touch with my sister, who was in the Urals, in the Soviet Union. She, like many other residents of Horodenka, in fact, had written to the town council asking whether they knew what had happened to such-and-such a family. And I had a good friend at the post office, with whom I arranged that if there were any letters from Jews to Jews or about Jews, she would give me those letters. And I was the first person to take charge of that whole Jewish pseudo-office thing. Many of Horodenka's Jews received information about the fate of their family from me. Those letters were these little war-time triangles, folded like clown's hats. And they reached the addressees without franking. There were no envelopes then, sometimes people would even write in the margins of newspapers. And one day I got my sister's letter asking whether the authorities knew what had happened to the Szwach family.

Towards the end of 1944 the Komsomol 24 secretary invited me to see him. And he offered me a secondment to the naval officers' school in Cherson, near Odessa and the Black Sea. For me, the war ended then. That was at the time when the First Kosciuszko Division was still in existence, and Anders had led the Polish army east through Persia. As it happened, I didn't pass my practical exams in the naval college and they fired me.

By then my sister had moved from the Urals nearer to Poland, to Ukraine, and she was living in a place called Snigirevka, near Mykolayv. My brother- in-law, Majer Lichtensztajn, worked in a mechanics workshop; he was a good wood-turner. The Wajcmans were there too, with their twins. I went to visit them; it was the first time we had seen each other for many years. I spent some time there, I met Jewish families who had come back from evacuation way out in Asia or the Urals. And I started training as a metalworker and wood-turner in the same workshop.

As soon as military operations ended we were able to go back to Poland. We left in January 1946, and arrived in Klodzko in February. Our repatriation journey took almost four weeks, in very primitive conditions, in cattle wagons. When we first arrived we were in a little village called Gieszcze Puste, and then we went to Klodzko. A Committee of Polish Jews was set up and Wajcman became its chairman. A fairly large group of Jews settled in Klodzko after the war. A number of artisan cooperatives were founded: a tailors' cooperative, a cobblers' cooperative, and there was a branch of the ORT 25. Joint 26 began to send us some aid, food and other necessities, and some people started to work. We were all given some apartments that had belonged to Germans, that were more or less furnished. And there in Klodzko I started work for the Jewish Committee as head of the youth division. We organized events for young people: various types of events, festivals, ghetto ceremonies; there was a coordination commission for Jewish organizations. That was 1946. [In 1948 Jewish organizations were to be abolished.]

I was a member of the ZWM - the Fighting Youth Union 27, and I was made an instructor with the municipal board. And, if you please, I - a Jew - was elected chairman of a branch of the ZWM numbering over 180 members. In the summer of 1947 I went to Wroclaw and lived in the Korczak Memorial Boarding House at 30 Krasinskiego Street. There were about 120-125 of us there. Most of us were Jewish orphans. The young people who lived in that house attended Polish schools, the ORT, or the artisan school run by the Jewish Committee. I was working, a little in a wagon factory and a little helping to rebuild the city. And I was studying. We did the whole of the grammar school program in one year and the whole of the high school program in the second year. After two years' study, in 1948, I sat my school-leaving exam. And of course I was also active in the community. I was appointed to the committee organizing the Uniting Congress of Youth Organizations in Poland. And in 1948, on 22 July, in the Slask cinema auditorium, the Uniting Congress of Youth Organizations was held, and the Polish Youth Union was created. On Saturdays and Sundays we organized 'Sobotniki': these were voluntary work programs; we were rebuilding important buildings in Wroclaw, including the main building of Wroclaw University, the Polytechnic on Kosciuszkowski Bank, part of the wagon factory, and other public facilities in Wroclaw.

In 1948 I was offered a move to Warsaw, to a school for officers involved in training and political affairs. I graduated from that school in 1949. It was an accelerated, six-month course; at the time they were looking for people of a similar class who had a future as officers. On graduation we received the rank of ensign and I was sent to work on the Training Board at the Ministry of National Defense. I organized educational courses for young recruits, chiefly literacy courses. I went on several further training and pedagogical courses myself.

In 1950 I started a degree course at the Academy of Political Sciences, and after my first year I was told that I was suitable material for a inspector of schools for Polish emigre children in France. I moved to France in 1951 and was made attache at the Consulate General, responsible for areas including education and culture, for the Paris region. And it was then, just before that move, that I was given the hint that my name wasn't very suitable for an inspector of schools, because I was called Szwach, which means 'weak' [in Yiddish]. And the powers-that-be found that inappropriate. And they said to me: 'After all, Comrade, your mother's maiden name is a perfectly good name: Kupferman - all you need to do is Polonize it and there you are! You shall be Miedzinski. I thought that they were right, that Szwach - Weak - could not be responsible for educating young Polish emigrants, but Miedzinski certainly could.

When I was offered the job of inspector of Polish schools in the Paris region, I had a fiancee. I was still studying at the Academy of Political Sciences but I was living with a friend in one room, so there was no chance of my starting a family. I was supposed to go to France a married man, those were the rules at the ministry, but for various reasons I had to make the decision to go within 48 hours. My fiancee was a modest girl, her name was Jadwiga Podlewska and she came from a working-class family in Czestochowa. She was born in 1931. She was Polish. After a few months in Paris I came back to Poland, we got married, and in early 1952 we left Poland together. Our son Zbigniew Jozef was born in Paris in 1953. Our second child, Elzbieta Klara, was born in Warsaw in 1956. My wife worked as a civil servant in the archives department and brought up the children. Later on she worked as a knitter. She died suddenly, unexpectedly. I came home one evening after some meeting and she was sitting in a chair. That was in 1986.

I always been a regular at the Jewish Theater. I remember it from the post- war years on Marshal Pilsudski Square, when Ida Kaminska 28 acted there. I also used to read Folksztyme 29. I think it was after 1968 that one of my students, Szmulek Tenenblat, became editor-in-chief of Folksztyme. That was a boy I brought to Wroclaw from Klodzko. A very clever boy, he went to the Jewish school in Wroclaw and then to Warsaw University. Here, on Grzybowski Square, at the Jewish Theater, I met Jolanta Kaczkowska, a widow. Three years after the death of my first wife we got married. Jolanta trained as a surveying engineer and worked in the Jewish Theater for a few years; now she is retired. My present wife is Jewish; she was born in the Warsaw ghetto in 1941.

In the 1950s the diplomatic service was looking for confident people with a solid class background who wouldn't betray the Polish People's Republic. And in my case they were certainly not mistaken. After two years the French decided that I was far too active, that I wanted to build socialism in France, and they said 'Take that Miedzinski away.' At the time it so happened that my wife was on vacation in Poland with our small child, so I packed my bags and in two weeks I was back in Poland. I was in France until 1953.

We lived in Warsaw, in very difficult conditions. I didn't want to stay in the Foreign Ministry, and decided that I would go back to the army. And I stayed there until 1960, and managed to make the rank of captain. I worked in the education and training department, I was involved with political education and the repolonization of young people from France who had come back to Poland and gone into the army. I also organized literacy classes. In 1960 intensive purges began in the army, and they offered me a move to a border garrison, knowing that I would refuse. I did refuse, and within practically two months I was demobilized, and in 1961 I was possibly the youngest retired officer in the Polish army. I was 33.

I started work as a civilian. I worked for some time in the GDR Cultural Center. I worked there for barely a year and a half, because I came to the conclusion that I had had bad Germans for four or five years, good Germans for a year and a half, and that was enough Germans to last me a lifetime. And overnight, in February 1963 I was taken on at the Ministry of Higher Education, and I worked there for nearly 15 years. Until 1976. In 1976 I was offered the post of director of the office organizing the World Congress of Russian Studies Graduates, and then I became full-time secretary of the Central Board of the newly established Polish Russian Studies Society, and I worked there until I retired.

In 1956 my family moved abroad. Herman Wajcman lost his job in the Ministry of Agriculture and Central Buying, in fact he was even arrested on charges of cooperation with Israel. He left alone, because they said to him, 'If you leave the country we will forget all this and end the matter.' They gave him a one-way passport very quickly, and it wasn't until a few months later that they let his wife and children go.

In 1968 I was at the Ministry of Higher Education and in charge of a department that organized academic cooperation with other socialist countries. I traveled a lot to those countries, even accompanying ministers on their travels. In 1968 purges began in the ministry. The xenophobic, nationalistic and anti-Semitic atmosphere got worse. True, some directorial posts were held by people of Jewish origin, departmental directors and assistant directors, but they were specialists in their field. The Party got these primitive activists to give critical speeches about some Jewish employee of the ministry. Meetings like that could go on for 23 hours. They had material like that on me, too. But they couldn't have anything against me: I had brought up my children so that until 1967 they didn't even know they had Jewish blood. It was only when it all started that I decided to tell the children about their background, because I didn't want their school or people on the street to do it for me. My son accepted it calmly, and only now, 35 years later, during a visit to Horodenka, did he tell me that he did experience several times people shouting at him: 'You Jew!' I personally have never been the victim of anti-Semitism. Nobody has ever suggested in the least that they have anything against it..., I've never been made to feel like that directly.

It never affected me directly, although I still feel uncomfortable about it. I was clean, I never gave them any grounds to come out and remind me that I have a few millimeters missing in my pants. I didn't stay long in that department after that, only a few months, and then I decided that I ought not to give them any chance to accuse me of having contacts with other countries, even though they were socialist countries, and I asked the minister to transfer me to a domestic department. About ten or twelve people in my ministry lost their jobs.

In 1988 I went to Israel for the first time. I hadn't seen my sister for decades, since probably 1956, I can't remember exactly, when they emigrated. I wasn't allowed a passport for a long time; because I was professionally active the powers-that-be ruled that I didn't have time to go abroad, although I had a completely civilian job. I didn't get a passport until I retired. It was a very emotional reunion with the whole family: my sister's children and her grandchildren. And I found my cousin, the only one of the whole family who survived, Mojsze Frajer. His mother and my father were brother and sister. They had escaped when the Soviet army retreated... Chaim Frajer and Estera Frajer, who was my father's sister, had three children and she was pregnant with the fourth. They were all killed, only Mojsze got lost during a bombardment and survived. He was ten or eleven then, and some Soviet soldiers took him way out to near Stalingrad and left him in a children's home there. He survived the war in Kazakhstan. After the war he left the children's home and went to Israel. We are still in touch to this day. Israel was a great surprise to me: that Jews walk around with their heads held high, no-one makes a secret of their background - they are at home in their own country. I liked the fact that mothers were proud that their children were going into the army. And it was always said that Jews were weapon-shy, uniform-shy. I didn't see much of the country that time, because I wanted to spend all the free time I had with my family. I stayed in Petach Tikwie. I was there two weeks. After that I went back several times.

In 1991, together with Arnold Mostowicz, a doctor from the Lodz ghetto, we founded the Association of Jewish Combatants. In 1993 I went to Israel as the vice-president of the Association, because we had minted a medal to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising 30, and for the first time with the assistance of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Polish embassy in Tel Aviv we organized a meeting with the participants of the rising who were in Israel. In 1996 I went to the Jewish World Congress in Jerusalem. But I never thought of leaving. I have always felt that my life is linked to Poland; I had my family here and we lived happily side-by-side here; I've never had any negative experiences beside 1968. I'm still active in the Association, I'm the vice-president. Somebody has to be here to tend the graves of our murdered nation!

Glossary

Leon Solowiejczyk
Lodz
Poland
Interviewer: Marek Czekalski, Judyta Hajduk
Date of interview: September 2005

Mr. Leon Solowiejczyk is 82 years old. He comes from the eastern part of prewar Poland, the area of the city of Vilnius (today Lithuania), from a relatively well-to-do small town family of orthodox Jews. We talked in his apartment, which he hardly ever leaves. He suffers from serious asthma, which made our conversation difficult. He tires easily and uses an oxygen tank. Mr. Solowiejczyk is a warm and cordial man. He told his story willingly, without reservations and our meetings seemed to please him considerably.

I was born on 25th March 1923 in a small town called Dzisna [the town of Dzisna is located on the river Dzisna, a tributary of Dzwina], in the Vilnius district. I knew my grandparents from my father's side better, because we lived together. They were born in the times of Tsar Nicolaus I [Nicolaus I Romanov (1796-1855)]. The grandparents spoke Yiddish at home and Russian when there was company.

My grandfather from Father's side - Mojzesz Solowiejczyk -came from a town called Glebokie [near Vilnius, today Lithuania, a city located on the junction of the route from Polock to Vilnius, on the Wielkie Lake]. He had five brothers. They were: Izaak, Bauman, Abram... I don't remember the names of the other two. Those three were fishermen; they had their own lakes, equipment. They were quite well off.

Just before the war [World War I] Grandpa married, he was an older man by then. The family was large, so he separated from his brothers. He got some money from them and he dealt with fishing as well, he leased some lakes, fished, sold the fish and that's how my grandparents made money. When World War I broke out my grandfather was in the Russian army. During the war of 1920 1 the Polish-Russian border was set on the Dzwina [River]. Grandpa remained on the Polish side, with his children, Father, Mother. The remaining ones [Abraham, Izaak, Bauman, Jankiel] were on the Russian side. Grandpa's brothers owned two lakes and were well-to-do. They had no problems making ends meet; they traded horses on the Polish side from time to time too.

Grandpa Mojzesz was a religious man. He dressed like a Hasid 2; he wore a cloak, a beard. In 1924 he gave Torah scrolls to the synagogue together with a few other people. Such a scroll cost a lot. It was a big thing. It was as if there was a wedding - people danced, congratulated one another. Grandpa went to the synagogue to pray as long as he lived. He also took us, the grandchildren, to all the ceremonies. I remember I was four years old then. My younger brother, Misza, when they were reciting the Kaddish for the dead - he had this sweet voice like a bell - when they reached 'Amen,' he'd pronounce it 'Aaaaaaamen.' And later, on a Friday, after Grandpa sold all the fish at the market, he would give us 20 groszy each, but he gave him 50, because he could say 'Amen' the loudest.

Grandma [Father's mother] was called Miriam, nee Dworman. She came from Dzisna. They met through a matchmaker. Grandpa was a tall, handsome man, while Grandma was short, a bit of a hunchback. They said if she's a hunchback, she must be rich. Grandma was very wise; she could read and write, she could pray too. She was very pious. She knew all the commandments. When she saw a young couple walking too closely to each other, she'd tap them on the shoulder and tell it to them, so they wouldn't forget themselves. She also made sure that no woman went to the mikveh before her period. It was a public bathhouse. Before the wedding the bride had to go to the mikveh and get a certificate that she had been there.

Grandma made sure that all rituals were observed. I remember that there was a 'kruzhka' [Russian: a vase or small pot] with water in the house and you had to wash your hands early in the morning. The 'kruzhka' could be made of clay or iron. There were different ones. It was this ritual pot, with two handles. I mean when a woman got up and she hadn't washed her hands yet, she'd take hold of one handle of the pot and pour water on the dirty hand. That washing was called 'negl waser.' 'Negl' means nail, that is, the idea was that you had to wash off all the dirt. And later, because one hand was still dirty, you'd hold the clean handle with the clean hand and pour water over the dirty hand. Yes, those were rituals. You also had to wash your eyes. When I was a child I had to recite these prayers. In the morning. When you're still in bed, you say this prayer called 'Ani' and you have to wash your hands in order to say it. So Grandma made sure we did all this, because she was pious.

She was also a good housewife. Preserves were fried in the yard from spring to fall - there was this custom. All the housewives would gather in the evening. There was this large table, a samovar, a tray. All of them would bring their preserves, they tried each one. They chose who made the best one. Grandma also dried all kinds of herbs on the stove, for medicines. Also blackberries, raspberries, so it would be available if a child fell ill. She died in 1938.

Grandma had one brother. His name was Dawid. He was older than she was, he was a musician, a choirmaster, I mean a conductor. In Jewish that's 'klezmer.' There were more of them in our town, they were his students. He was self-taught, very talented. He even made his own violin. He had his own band. It was called 'Chaim Dowid der Klezmer.' He played in the town, at weddings, wherever they invited him and also when there was some national holiday, some celebration in the park [outdoor], he was always invited there. They treated him with respect. He was good at it.

My grandparents had two sons and one daughter. The older one was Abraham, the younger one - some 20 years younger - that was my father, Szlome, he was born in 1890, in Dzisna and the daughter, Chaja, was born between the sons. Abram was a horse trader. He had a family - a wife, son and daughter. They died in the ghetto in Dzisna 3, only the son saved himself, because he had run away to Russia. He died in 1990 in Oszmiana [in the Vilnius district]. Father's sister, Chaja, was older than him. Her husband, Mordechaj Szuszkowicz, was a merchant. They had five children, four daughters: Ester, Chana, Cypa, Margola and one son - Sioma. Only Ester survived the war, because she had left for Palestine before the war broke out. The rest were murdered in the ghetto in Dzisna.

Grandpa died before World War II when I was four years old. He died of a hernia, there was no surgeon, he couldn't be saved. I remember how, after his death, everything, stools, were turned upside down, water was poured out of buckets. All pictures, all mirrors were taken down or turned to face the wall. And they all sat there. The closest family members were there: the children, wife, brothers. There had to be someone there to help. They couldn't greet anyone; they couldn't go out on the street for a week, so they wouldn't meet anyone. It was a ritual. All these were signs of mourning. For a year they would all say prayers at home, three times a day. We would gather for prayers. There had to be ten people, to form a minyan. There's even a saying among Jews: ten rabbis don't make a minyan, but ten scoundrels do. So there had to be ten people, so we'd always be looking for the 10th one. When I came and said that we needed a 10th one, no one would ever refuse.

My grandparents from Mother's side were from the country. They lived somewhere in the countryside when they were young, but I don't know exactly where. Later, when Grandma got married, they were in the city. They had some land, they had some mills. Grandpa's name was Mendel Szenkman, he bought and sold cattle and was in agriculture too. That's how it was that every squire had his Jew, whom he used. Grandpa Mendel was younger than the other one, Mojzesz. He had two brothers - Jankiel and Gotlieb. They died even before the war. Grandpa died in 1942, in the ghetto, in Dzisna. He died alone.

Grandma, his wife, her name was Sara, nee Judin; she was really from the country [that is, born in the countryside]. She was the same age as Grandpa; she mostly took care of the house. She also died in the ghetto. The grandparents from Mother's side were also a Hasidic family, but not as pious as Father's parents. Because, for example, when Father was coming back home on Friday evening and he was late, he wouldn't drive into town in a horse-drawn wagon, because it would have been shameful. He'd leave the horse in the nearest village. It was the same on Friday evening, a Jew wouldn't go to bathe in the mikveh, because the rabbi could come and check on him. My mother's parents also spoke Jewish [Yiddish] at home.

My mother, Chaja Pesia, nee Szenkman, was born in 1900 in Dzisna. She had two brothers: Icchak and Abraham and two sisters: they were Choda and Roza. Mother was the oldest one; Icchak was some two or three years younger. He was a cattle trader; he had a wife, children. He also died in the ghetto with his family. Then there was Choda, she was married to Matys Rusin, they had two children. They also died in the ghetto. Just like Mother's second sister, Roza, with the husband and child. The youngest one was Abraham; he had a wife and three children. He survived, because he had escaped to Russia. After the war he was in Lodz for a while and then went to Israel.

They all went to school, they could read and write. So could my parents. My father, this was still in tsarist times, he had what they called 'gorodkoye uchylyshche' [Russian: municipal school], I think it was an elementary education. I'm sure Mother must have had at least four grades of school too.

My parents met on their own, without a matchmaker, in Dzisna, it was a local love affair, they were neighbors. They got married in 1922. They had three sons. I was the oldest one. Then there was Izrael. He died in 1945 near Kielce, on the front, in the Russian army. The youngest one was Mojzesz - named after Grandpa. He's now living in Vilnius.

My parents were more or less religious. They celebrated all the holidays, all the rituals, Sabbath. Lard and other things like that - that was out of the question. The house was kept kosher - there was a spoon for meat, a spoon for milk, a milk pan, a meat pan, all that was observed.

Mother was always at home, she was very resourceful; she had to take care of things on her own, because Father was never there, always on the road. The entire family was very close. I was the oldest one, I sometimes scolded my brothers. The middle brother, he was often naughty, so I'd hit him. For example when he once took another boy's bike. The boy was the landowner's son, who came to visit us.

When Father came back home, he had to tell Mother about everything, he had to report it all. When Father was about to come home from work - and Mother didn't know exactly when he'd be back, in the morning or in the evening - she'd get everything ready, keep the stove hot, so there'd be hot food for Father when he arrived. Father was a very calm man. I take after him in being calm and responsible. He was very traditional, he didn't drink, didn't play cards. But when there was some celebration, they'd all gather around him, because he could sing, he knew Yiddish and Russian songs. He slapped me once on the face and I remember this until today. And he was right. Well, how old could I have been? Five years, I don't think I was even six yet.

This was at my Aunt Choda's wedding, she was Mother's sister. Father was at this wedding. Father knew all the Jewish rituals, all those songs; he was also very funny and entertained all those wedding guests. I always liked sitting next to Daddy and he'd take me with him, as the oldest son. And according to the Jewish ritual, the guests from the groom's side feel more like guests and need to be tended to. Father felt he was from the bride's side, so he had a task there at that wedding. He sang to those guests, entertained them. And I don't know why this happened, maybe he had a lot to do, but he didn't take me with him to the table. I felt so sorry for myself I didn't want to sit at the table at all. I was waiting for Daddy to come and get me. Well, those aunts, it was a large family, started telling me: 'Come here, here...' If they hadn't said anything, then I would have just sat down in some corner, but they must have known that I was feeling sorry for myself. And because of that, I was fed up with them taking care of me like that, so I went away.

This wedding was at my grandmother Sara's house, where the bride was living, so I went home. There was no one there. It was locked up, everyone was at the wedding. And Mommy must have asked Father to go and get me: 'Go and bring him. He went home. Everything's locked up there, nobody's home.' I heard Daddy calling, I thought: 'Well, if Daddy's calling for me, I have to go.' And when I approached him, he didn't say a word, but slapped me on the face and turned back. He didn't hit me at any other time, he'd always hug me. He turned back and went to that wedding. And it was horrible for me. No one had ever hit me before, why now? And I cried and didn't go back to my house. I understood I had to go with him. And I went to that wedding crying. I sat where they told me to sit. That was only once. I still remember this, because it's such a special memory.

We were living in Dzisna with the grandparents from my father's side and when Grandpa died, then with Grandma Meri [Miriam]. Grandpa died earlier and, according to Jewish tradition, parents stay with the youngest son or daughter. And because Father was the youngest, Grandma lived with us. I guess you can look at it differently; it was, after all, her house and she was the host. It was a wooden house, there was a garden and vegetables, fruit in that garden. There were three rooms. And there were also these rooms in the back. The kitchen, the pantry, a hallway. It was a farm, there was a stable, a cow, there was everything, hens, some sheep. The house was near the river.

I remember that in the springtime, there'd be some ice brought in and put in this hole, which would then be covered with straw and that's where meat was stored in the summer. There were these holes in the garden, where potatoes were stored; they were deep, round, some two meters deep. I never saw any potatoes rot there. Other vegetables were stored like that too, turnips, carrots. My parents also had cows. But the main income was from trade. Father had horses; he distributed goods, to restaurants, wine, vodka. Mother helped Father collect the orders; she had contacts with Poles often. She knew how to live well with them. She would always take some tasty food to them on Jewish holidays.

Grandma didn't work, but she had her hands full at home. She had to burn wood in the stove in the mornings. She baked bread each week. Grandma used to say that there were four bakeries on our street, where there were 20 houses in all, and each one baked bread better than the others to sell it. There was this 'dzieza' [Polish: a special bowl for making bread], it was passed from neighbor to neighbor; several neighbors would use the same one to bake bread. Ours was used by four families. It was dark rye bread. Sometimes there'd already be new bread before the old one was eaten. Grandma used to say that if we had to buy bread, we'd go bankrupt. The bread was good and it was cheap, because a pound [pound = 16.5 kg] of rye cost 1.5 zloty. Some 25 kg of bread could be made from this, so a kilo of bread cost 0.25 grosz [1 grosz = 1/100 of 1 zloty].

Dzisna itself was a town close to the border, there were two rivers. In the fall there was always mud. We, the kids, used to walk on these stilts. There were floods in the spring; the largest one was in 1931. On the street you could smell horse manure and so on, because there were horses and cows in every house. There were hills, rivers, lakes, valleys and forests in the area. But mostly it was flat. The area was quite swampy. There was moss, there were swamps, mud. Yes, like it is in Polesie. When someone 'went to the mosses,' there was no point in looking for him. [Editor's note: Mr. Solowiejczyk uses the phrase 'go to the mosses' in the sense of 'take one's life']. Only locals knew how to pass between those mosses, no one else would come back.

Supposedly, during the war partisans would hide in the swamps and when the Germans went looking for them the partisans were sitting in these holes which they had dug for themselves. When they had dug those holes there was water in them, but they took some pine branches and covered the holes with them. They could see those Germans looking for them, but the Germans couldn't see them.

There was no industry in Dzisna, no factories. There was a city hall, a church, eight synagogues, schools, a post office. There was a hospital, stores and restaurants. There was electricity in the town, from this turbine; lights would be turned on after it turned dark. The central area in the town was the market square. There, next to the market square, there was the 'birzha' [Russian: bazaar]. It was something like a bazaar. It was this place higher up, at the intersection of the streets and you could get everything done there. If you didn't have work, you'd go there in the morning, because everything was private, so all those without work went looking there. They'd find out where they could get a job and when there was nothing, if you came before 10am you could get a piece of bread and some cold water: you'd dip it in salt and eat it.

You could also marry your son or daughter off there, buy a horse, a cow, everything... There were these people there, they were called 'maklery' [incorrect Polish: stockbroker] and they could do anything. This 'makler' could marry a daughter off, he'd say: 'Well, this is such a nice girl, rich, she's got this and that...' that's how he'd describe her. He had these glasses, monocles. He'd drive around all the neighboring towns in a horse-drawn cart, he could do anything. You could borrow money from him, buy or lease an orchard, or land from the squire - 20, 30 hectares of land for 10, 15 years.

There were restaurants at the market. Father would often supply wine and vodka to them. They mostly had wine and vodka in those restaurants. You'd often see drunk people. Mostly Belarusians. There were some fights there from time to time, but they were mostly... friendly. And there were some stores. With fish and meat. Usually people would buy on credit in those stores, they'd put your name down in the book. Sometimes for a month. When the first day of the month came, they'd pay back. But I heard that sometimes they wouldn't return the money. But the merchants somehow prospered. There had to be a trusted butcher from whom you'd take meat.

There was this one Sara there, in Russian they called her Sarochka. Her last name was Sorocka. She was the owner of a private butchery. She had this butchery and she sold meat. She was very honest, a very honest woman. And there were all kinds of people in the town. There was this stupid loony man [mentally ill]. He had fits [epilepsy] and came to her store [to ask] for money. And the best customers bought meat from her. Each store owner wanted to make as much as possible, so she'd give this man 20 or 50 groszy, so he'd leave her alone and not scare off the customers. So it was quite a lot just for him going away and not falling down [that is, having an epilepsy fit] in the store.

There were 6 thousand people in Dzisna. Some 60 percent were Jews. Or 50-60 percent. The remaining ones were Poles and Belarusians. The community was strong. There were merchants, tailors, local officials, doctors. The Poles had the better jobs, in the magistrate, in the offices, there weren't many Poles, less than Jews. We always lived in harmony. But we lived separately.

There were only Hasidim in our town. [Mr. Solowiejczyk is simply referring to religious Jews]. They were carpenters and tailors, shoemakers, merchants, those who made the pavement and built houses, normal people. Yes, they were pious, when the time came they went to the synagogue to pray or prayed at home. But they were not loonies, those who walk around in the summer wearing fur caps, with sidelocks, or who only wear socks, they weren't excessively pious. They were normal pious Jews, moderate, reformed. There were eight synagogues. They were normal synagogues, orthodox, Hasidic. Hasidim prayed there. There was no reformed synagogue.

There was this one where, how to put it, the rich ones went and another one where the poorer people went. There were all classes of people in the town. One synagogue on the market square, that's where the butchers went. No one financed these synagogues, only the community, the people would chip in. There were also those immigrant elements, Misnagdim [Hebrew: Misnagdim - opponents of Hasidim], but they got kind of watered down, assimilated to the environment. There are quarrels among them even to this day 4. So much that when you were walking in Glebokie [approx. 70km from Dzisna] and you met some Russian [a person of the Eastern Orthodox faith] and he asked you: 'Is this the moon or is this the sun?', you'd have to answer 'I'm not from around here' if you didn't want to get beaten up.

The Hasidim always had their tzaddik. He was a Lubavitch [a tzaddik of the Lubavitch dynasty, Joseph Isaac Shneerson from Lubavitch (1880-1950), since 1920 the rebbe of the dynasty]. Lubavitch the Hasidic rebbe, that's how it was called then. Lubavitch Hasidim 5. He used to live in Lubavitch [near Smolensk], that's in Belarus.

There was also a Jewish religious community in Dzisna, there was a rabbi. The rabbi had huge rights. The rabbi wrote out birth certificates, baptism and marriage certificates and they were accepted everywhere, in all kinds of offices. There were also rabbinical courts. In our Jewish community such a court is the most important one. The Gypsies [Roma] have that as well, that they acknowledge the civic court, but it's not sufficient for them, they have to have their own courts.

So there was this rabbinical court, they used to call for people to testify, one spoke for the one side, the second one for the other side, the third one was neutral. It was a court of one's peers, I guess you can say that. The Jews would usually not want any case to go outside [of the community]. If someone was stubborn and wanted to go to a regular civic court, so it would be. But this rabbinical court was respected the most.

Let's assume that you and I have some misunderstanding, so I take my so- called juror and you take yours, someone you trust. Like a member of the jury. You could also call the rabbi, but usually it wasn't necessary. Usually they'd settle for some compromise, because there were all kinds of cases there, disputed wills or commercial issues. And everything had to be done, whatever they would say. There was no appeal.

It was called 'dintojra' [Hebrew: Din Torah - religious court]. But those 'dintojras' were different than in the city. What was dintojra there, was the rule of the Torah here. If one side didn't agree [to carrying out the verdict], they were doomed in that community. If he didn't do what the court told him to do, if he didn't submit to the verdict, no one would trade with him, no one would shake his hand, no one would want to talk to him. It was different in a [civic] court, but in the community it was sacred.

In a Jewish community, the rich members were also important, not just the rabbi. There was this Bimbat, a wealthy man. He came from a poor family, but became rich selling forests. There were also some doctors, members of the intelligentsia in the community, they had their own banks and trade unions, all of them Jewish. The chairman of the bank was the community leader. There were some butchers, three rabbis, there was one appointed by the government and there were schoolteachers. Candidates would take part in the local magistrate elections. There were parties - the Bundists 6, the Zionists 7, the Hashomer Hatzair 8, leftist, rightist... There were Chalucinim [HaHalutz] 9, they were mostly young people who wanted to go to Israel. The strongest party was the Bytarym [Betar] 10. That was a rightist party. There [in Dzisna] there were no workers, they all lived from commerce or agriculture. Well, there were lots of poor people, lots of them.

Sometimes those poor people would walk across the [frozen] water in the wintertime and run away to the other side, to Russia. They ran away, because there was such unemployment, no industry, nothing. They didn't know that it was even worse on their side. The Russians treated those who crossed the border like spies, many of them died in prisons there, others were sent back. Because when someone got there and they asked him why he came, he'd say: 'Because I'm a communist.' 'A communist? Why would we need you? We have many communists. If you're really a communist go back and show them that you're a communist.' No, they didn't need people like them there, they had lots of their own poor people. So they'd put them on trial and they had to stay in jail until the trial. And the punishment was later that he couldn't live closer than 120 km from the border [on the Polish side]. He also had to go to the police station once a month or once a week and show up there.

There were Polish, municipal and Jewish schools. There was a Jewish religious school - Talmud Torah, then there was 'Jidysze Folks Szul' [Yiddish: Jewish Folk School], that is a public Jewish municipal elementary school, then there were cheders, where we studied for five years. Talmud Torah was a private school, supported by donations. It existed until 1931.

I began my education in cheder, later in a public school. I started going to cheder when I was five years old. And later to 'Jidysze Folks Szul.' I was there for two or three years, because the school was later closed down, there was no money to keep it up. There was one Polish lesson in that 'Jidysze Folks Szul.' When that school was closed down, I went to a public, municipal school. And there everything was in Polish. I'm glad they taught us at cheder like they did. Because now in this community [the Jewish Religious Community in Lodz] I am an expert. I know all those holidays, the celebrations, everything. And I've known the Jewish [Yiddish] language since childhood.

At the public school there was religious education, Jewish and other. And we would all stand up to pray in the morning, the entire class would sing 'Boze cos Polske' [Polish, 'God, You Protect Poland'] or 'Kiedy ranne wstaja zorze' [Polish: 'When the sun rises in the morning,' both songs are Polish religious songs]. I liked Mathematics and History the best. There were many Polish teachers in the school, I had different relationships with them, because I had problems with the Polish language.

It's difficult to learn a language well if you don't use it. I only learned it later, mostly in the army. But there were also other situations. My name is Leon - Leon is Lejba. So, when she said Leon, I rebelled, because why did she call me that if my name was Lejba?! And I told her that her name was Rachela or something like that. [Editor's note: The teacher was Polonizing Jewish names. This was an expression of assimilation tendencies, which Mr. Solowiejczyk opposed.]

When I was 13 years old I had my bar mitzvah. I remember they summoned me to the synagogue, asked me to read a verse from the Torah. It was called aliyah [Hebrew: ascension]. And since that time I was counted as a man. Well, it was pleasant that you counted for a minyan.

I had lots of friends. We played normally, like boys do, we didn't look who was who. There were two rivers in Dzisna [Dzisna and Dzwina]. In the summer and in the winter we played interesting games. We played by the river. We would tie up the cane that was growing there. We'd tie it up into bunches, make a raft, put it on the water and float like that for some 8 or 10 kilometers. We passed some neighbors' farms, orchards. The river turned a lot. When we'd stop we'd pick some apples in one place, some pears in another. We'd bake potatoes. Or go get some milk. One river joined the other and it was the most fun when the two rivers joined, because there were rocks there. In the winter we'd also play by the river. The land was hilly, when we went sledding on the hills, we'd slide over onto the other side of the river. We'd play both with Jewish and Polish boys. We were close, we wouldn't tell on one another.

I remember once when I picked some pears [without permission] from a neighbor's orchard, he went to my father and told on me. So my father punished me, I couldn't leave the house. So my friends, because we were such good buddies, played a trick on that neighbor. That neighbor had a large family. There were outhouses in the garden, wooden ones. So, as punishment, the guys went there at night, pushed the outhouse over on its side and all that [the liquid waste] spilled out into the yard. And the next morning, the neighbor wakes up and sees that the outhouse is gone. So he had to make a new one quickly. These guys were great. We could steal horses together. Speaking of horses, at night the guys would ride on horseback to the meadow. So the horses could eat some grass. It was so much fun there at night. Sometimes someone would get tied to a horse's tail and dragged through the mud. We played like that all night long on that meadow.

Political events... I remember these elections and voting for [list] number 1: 'Vote for number one. You will eat sausage and ham.' There were other [such election rhymes] as well: 'Sugar, vodka are good, but chocolate is better' or something like that. I don't remember exactly when those elections were and what they were about just this list number 1. And also Pilsudski's death 11. Everyone cried. There was this kind of 'trauer' [from Yiddish: sadness] at schools. I remember this song: '(...) you wear a dark robe, you are so dear to us, like a king in his majesty. On your name day, your holiday, you are so dear to us, Mr. President.' [Editor's note: a song for Jozef Pilsudski's name day, 19th March].

My parents didn't have any political preference. They were loyal to the authorities. We didn't talk about going to Palestine at our house. But there were Jewish organizations in the town, they gave out loans for moving to Palestine 12. You can say that everyone supported moving there wholeheartedly. But most were too poor. Although there were people, wealthy townspeople, who left.

Even one person from our family left. It was Ester, the daughter of Father's sister Chaja. She wasn't very wealthy, but she didn't have to go to a kibbutz. She left her family and worked as a servant [physical laborer] in the kibbutz. Because she wanted to obtain permission to go to Israel [then Palestine], she had to work here first. There were such kibbutzim 13 in Poland where young people had to stay for several years to get used to this kind of work. It was somewhere near Vilnius, or maybe in Lomza, I don't remember exactly. She scrubbed floors, did whatever she had to. She had to show them that she would be able to live in a collective. She took care of the children and the elders. If a lady needed to have her windows cleaned, she'd go to a kibbutz and they'd send a girl to help her. She simply had to work hard, so she would get used to hard work. There was some patriotism in this. And there, in those kibbutzim, they'd live on their own. They were like those Russian kolkhozes 14.

There were no anti-Semitic incidents in Dzisna really. It was like this. There was the gymnasium, so usually all kinds of anti-Semitic moods would come from there, they had these organizations. But the community was strong, there were self-defense groups. There were firefighters and there were also some, so-called strong boys. And when they knew something was going on, they'd try to calm everyone down. So there were no real pogroms.

There were incidents, for example when they were conscripting boys into the army, the village boys [Poles and Belarusians] would get drunk and get into trouble. And they were dangerous. But those who did not want to go to the army and who were starving, they were peaceful. And nobody wanted to go to the army. Jews didn't want to either. Before the war, it was like this, they'd choose whom they wanted in the army. You had to be tall enough, weigh enough, you had to be healthy. The boys had to be healthy and fit. And those who didn't want to go, would starve themselves on purpose, so they would weigh less.

We also mostly had a good relationship with the parish priest. Well, when we were passing the church, we'd have to take off our hats, because [otherwise] you could encounter some... [problems]. But that was obvious, whenever you were in some office or at school, you'd have to take off your hat. I remember that when the bishop came, each community would welcome him in their own way. The Poles would put up altars, the Jews put up this gate, where the rabbi greeted the guests, the Byelorussians did something as well, but I don't remember what.

Later, in the late 1930s there was some fear, maybe not as visible. There were anti-Semitic articles in newspapers, there were these anti-Semitic leaflets, all kinds of various calendars, there was this witch hunt for the Jews, this 'Bij Zydow' [Polish: 'Get the Jews!'], but nobody paid much attention. Somehow you'd survive. And there was news from Germany. There they knew what Nazi ideology 15 was.

With regards to the Soviet Union, it was like this. That world was closed. No one knew what it was like there. Since 1920 there was the new border [the new border, set on the basis of the Peace of Riga, which ended the Polish-Bolshevik War 1919-1920] and a part of the city was on the other side of the Dzwina and we didn't know what was happening there. We only heard some songs, once a day some guard on horseback would come by. We heard all kinds of songs, on their national holidays they'd walk by with their flags, but we didn't know anything about that world. The river was peaceful, when rafts were passing by, they'd sometimes moor on the other shore. Sometimes a cow or some geese, or a horse would swim across the river to the other side, but they would always give it back. They'd go to the Batory Island and give it back. Well, because there were many islands on the River Dzwina. When Batory was marching on Pskow [Battle of Pskow 1582; approx. 550 km from Riga], he rested on that island. There were fortifications there. You couldn't live there, nothing. From the Polish side, you could go there on a boat and go fishing, but it was all under Russian control. And there was another island, named after Bronislaw Piracki [correctly: Bronislaw Pieracki (1895 Gorlice - 1934 Warsaw), a colonel of the Polish Army, politician]. The border patrol guarded those islands. There was a watch-tower there every few kilometers, a regular border.

I turned 16 before the war broke out. My aunt, my family, they all gathered and discussed what they should do with me. And they decided I would distribute salt, in a wagon. The shopkeepers were to come and buy their salt from me. But this didn't work out, because the war broke out. Earlier Uncle Mordche Zelig, gave me a job watching his orchard, because that's what he did. He leased orchards from local squires and he picked the apples. Well, people did whatever they could. It was Poles who owned those orchards, but they leased them, mostly to Jews and they knew how to go about it - sorting those apples, packing them and shipping them to Warsaw, Vilnius and Katowice.

Uncle's orchard had to be minded in the fall. We minded that orchard at night, so that no one would make any trouble, steal the apples. In the daytime we made boxes. Later the apples had to be picked and packed into those boxes and they were sent to Lodz, to Warsaw. I remember that I was supposed to get 20 zloty for two months of work. That was quite a lot of money. I would have become independent. It would have been my first real cash. But the war broke out...

I remember the beginning of the war like this: 1st September [1939] I was out of town, some 5 kilometers away, at that uncle's. We were in the orchard. There was a medic there and a female doctor - they had a radio. And I found out that the war had broken out, that there was this attack on Poland 16. At first nothing much was happening in the town. We were picking fruit. But the Russians marched in later. There was a shooting in the town. My younger brother went to let the horses out and he said that he was on the border and that there must be some military maneuvers or something. Later, around 10am some Russians arrived. They had crossed the border and reached us, they came into our yard. I don't know if they were the new authorities or what. They started chasing [catching] horses. The horses were good [strong], they wanted to catch them and they chased them into our yard. But one Russian saved them, didn't let them take the horses.

And it all began. I mean, there used to be private stores in the town, but all of them closed down immediately, you couldn't buy anything in the stores. [Especially] after the Russians marched in, the Russians were crossing rivers, all the private stores were closed, there was nothing. Well, those first days were good for us, we made money selling things. We took those apples to the station, we had lots of them.

However, I didn't make any money then, they'd pay me in apples. When the war broke out money lost its value, so Uncle paid me in apples for my work. I took those apples home. Daddy came with a cart and loaded up en entire cart, even two carts full of apples. We were up to our ears in apples. We didn't know what to do with them, so my brother would stand by the river and sell those apples. Well, he didn't really sell them, he would give them to the soldiers. He didn't take any money for them, because money wasn't worth anything, but he asked for some tobacco, a piece of soap, after all there was nothing available.

When the Russians came there was no joyful atmosphere. There were some greetings. It was mostly those leftist organizations greeting them: 'Long live the Soviet Union!' For the young people it was a novelty. Something new. An interesting thing, but usually it was horrible. We felt it was war, because by then we knew what war was. When the Russians came, on the first day we hid in the basement all day long.

Later, after Father went to the other side of the river, he saw all that chaos. Until that time people didn't know what was happening there. On the first day Father said that this song which they were singing, this 'Katyusha' was very nice, used to be very nice when we heard it from the other side of the river [Mr. Solowiejczyk means that when the Russians were singing the popular Russian folk song 'Katyusha' before the war it was a simple and nice song. After they invaded Poland, the song became a symbol of the presence of the occupant.] And he found out then, he found out about the hunger, the terror, everything.

Then the deportations began. First they started deporting all the members of the intelligentsia, teachers. Arrests began. The first from among our friends to be arrested were Pawel Skolysz and others, who had restaurants. We were nervous, perhaps not as much as the Poles, but still, you couldn't be sure of anything. They could come and get you, point their fingers at you. There were no differences, Pole, or Russian, or Jew. They deported lots of our friends. There was general chaos, general 'trauer.' A general insecurity about tomorrow. So it was a tragedy.

I wasn't working then, because there was no work. I was helping my father. We had horses, so we transported goods. We needed to have special permits to go to the other side of the river. At first, when those deportations started, Father would help people get their things. He was friends with a lot of people in the town and they were grateful, because he had good horses and they could pack a lot of things.

Then June 1941 came. There was chaos in the city. People started running away from the city 17. And we needed to run away from the town, because the town was wooden and there was only one bridge. When they started bombing, the city caught fire and we had to run away, because there was no place to stay. Father had left earlier, he was a horse-driver, he was mobilized to take some doctor closer to the front. And we stayed. They took Father early in the morning. Some activity began in the city around 10am. People started running away. We were left alone, so our neighbor, Mrs. Gram [Chawa Ester], a close friend of the family, said she'd take us, that she was going in the same direction as our father. Her mother had a tavern along the way, if Father was coming back, he'd surely stop there. We were hopeful.

But they started bombing out in the fields. They killed a boy who was minding the cows, our cow came running from the field. So we - me, my two younger brothers [Izrael and Mojzesz] and our mother, together with our neighbor, went across the bridge, because it was the only way out of the town. As soon as we crossed the bridge, we hadn't even gotten off the bridge completely, a plane came along and bombed the other end of the bridge. And we had to run away. Our neighbor said we'd go to Polock [at the mouth of the Polota River, on the bank of the Dzwina], because her sister Basia was in Polock. So we turned left with her towards Polock, but we only went for one or two kilometers when we started wondering what it would be like if Father came back and didn't find us.

We had some packages with us, pillows, all the valuables we could carry. It wasn't much, but it was something. And there was one cow walking with us. Mother decided to stay with the middle brother [Izrael] and wait for Father and we went to Polock. It is 35 kilometers from Dzisna [correctly: approx. 60 km from Dzisna], but it is closer if you walk along the Dzwina River. We didn't have to take a ferry, because we had managed to cross that bridge which was later bombed, so we were in Polock by nighttime. We found the house of the neighbor's sister and found a place to stay there.

Meanwhile, Daddy came back. He had taken that medic to the front. The Germans were probably already in Dzisna. The bridge was damaged, no one knew how to cross it and take the rest of our things from the house. Uncle Mates gave Father a bag of flour and some bread. And my parents set out with my brother to join us in Polock. There is a large forest between Dzisna and Polock. It was a wild forest, it wasn't used in Polish times, no trees were chopped down, it was more than 20 kilometers in length. And they somehow turned into that forest, there were Germans on one side and Russians on the other side. And they were in the middle. Some shooting broke out, trees were falling down, they couldn't get out. But my mother was a resourceful woman, she went to those Russians, they drove a tank, cleared the way and in the morning Father managed to pass with the family.

I should mention that those Jews who stayed in Dzisna were all killed by the Germans. 3,800 Jews, buried in two long graves, somewhere on the border of the town. Germans later planted trees there. They thought it would mask it, there's still a forest growing there. The first victims were two rivals, photographers. One was called Epsztejn, the other one Kandakiewicz. Kandakiewicz, as it later turned out, was some kind of a Soviet spy. And Epsztejn had a dog that he called Hitler. And this Kandakiewicz, as soon as the Germans entered, went there and told them this and this Epsztejn was killed first with his family. Some 20 people from our family died in the ghetto. Mostly the uncles and their families, later some more distant relatives, some cousins. We survived only because we ran away with that neighbor.

We kept on going northeast of Polock, towards Newel. That neighbor's brother-in-law showed us that direction. It turned out that wherever we arrived, the Germans had already arrived there before us. As we were walking, the Russians forced us to move a herd of cattle to a train station. Some planes came by in the morning and bombed the station. Some of the animals were killed, others ran away into the forest. That's how we got rid of the cattle and we were free. But we had to keep on moving. If we stayed put, the Germans would be there. Finally those Germans were in front of us. We managed to get all the way to Starobielsk, Ostaszkowo and Staropiesk [approx. 600 km from Moscow] where the camps 18 were. The Russian army was there and they didn't let you go into the forest. That's when we heard about those Polish camps. It was a secret. Nobody said this out loud.

Later on, slowly, we finally made it to Rzew [approx. 450 km from Moscow]. It was a train junction. We didn't have the strength to go any further. We were exhausted. The horse was heavy, it had to be fed. We didn't have any grain. But the horse went through a lot. Lice were eating us alive. We didn't have any food. There was a train station in Rzew, trains full of soldiers would arrive there. They were taking them to the front. Wherever we arrived, the Germans were already there, but not there. We found out that those cattle wagons they were bringing the soldiers in would be empty after they got off and we could get in and go deeper into Russia. It was organized like that, they gave you some bread, some food. So we decided to go.

We also sold the cow in one of the villages we were passing through. The woman gave us a few rubles, a basket of eggs, she wanted to give us a hen, but we didn't take it, because we wouldn't have been able to cook it. We left the horse at the train station in Rzew. Father went to this office and was issued a receipt for the horse. We boarded the train together with others. We didn't go straight, but kept turning. Northwest to Balagoje [approx. 500 km from Vilnius]. The tracks must have been busy. Balagoje was a train junction, but we didn't reach it, because there was an air raid. They bombed the station, lots of damaged trains and tracks. They would only let us pass in the evening, after they had cleaned it up. They wanted us to pretend that the wagons were empty. We opened the doors, the windows, the wagons looked empty and we hid in the forest. German planes were flying back and forth.

We kept going, via Kalinin [approx. 300 km from Moscow], Rybinsk [approx. 550 km from Moscow], Jaroslaw [approx. 500 km from Moscow]. We passed Moscow and stopped somewhere at some small station. They asked us to unload the wagons. And some farmers from the kolkhoz showed up there and took us to a kolkhoz. Not by force, if you didn't want to, you didn't have to go with them. We looked. We were not alone, there was also one more man from our town with us with his family. Szuchman. We saw that there was great poverty there, the horses were weak, we decided not to go [to the kolkhoz], because we were afraid we'd die of hunger in the winter. We decided to wait. We had some flour, so Mother went to the bakery, asked for some yeast, they gave it to her and we baked bread. We were hoping the train would go to Niznij Nowgorod [a city in the European part of Russia, near the junction of the Oka and Volga Rivers, approx. 800 km from Moscow].

And we reached Niznij Nowgorod. It's a large city on the Volga River, a harbor. There were repatriation points there at every station. So we showed up there. They said that on some day a ship would start along the Volga River towards the cities: Kazan [approx. 1350 km from Moscow], Samara [approx. 1650 km from Moscow], Saratow [approx. 1400 km from Moscow]. There was hope we'd stop there in one of those larger cities, port cities, where we could make a living. They loaded us on that ship, on the lower deck. Our clothes were dirty, there were rats everywhere, mice. The parents cooked some meals. We had boiled water, they gave us some groats. They'd also sometimes give us some bread.

We were approaching Saratow, we wanted to get off. Oh no! No way. We needed to have special permits. You could get them from the Soviet authorities. Because they wouldn't let you off wherever you wanted to. Some people had those permits, but we didn't have anything. No money, no resources. We didn't know those Soviet rules well. And they didn't trust us. We had only been under Soviet rule for two years. We were second-class citizens. And they didn't let us go deeper into Russia. So we had problems because of those passports.

We lived from what we got helping those who were getting off the ship. We would carry packages ashore. They'd always give us a little bit of money. It was warm and there we'd buy some pumpkins, these sweet pears, we'd stuff ourselves. And what else did we - kids - need? So we stayed on that ship, because they didn't want to let us off until we reached Stalingrad [approx. 1,800 km from Moscow].

They unloaded us in Stalingrad. In the harbor. This entire journey took about one month. We wanted to stay there, because one of those who arrived with us said it would be good there. He was there before 1920, he knew there was fish and groats. But they wouldn't let us. They said they'd get us on another boat and take us to Astrachan. So we waited. There were children with us - my two younger brothers [Izrael and Mojzesz] and our acquaintances [the Szuchmans] had children too. They told us there was a zoo there. So Daddy went to the zoo with all the children. We got there and there was a bombing. The Germans bombed the zoo. All the animals, the lions, were dead. But the children were pleased anyway, because they got to see lions. But Mommy didn't let Daddy go anywhere with the children after that.

The boat finally arrived and they loaded us on the lower deck again. They gave us boiled groats, but the lice were eating us, it was horrible. So they took us to Astrachan [approx. 75 km from Moscow], but they didn't want to let us off in Atrachan either. And from Atrachan they took us to the village Siedlistoje. The kolkhoz Siedlistoje. It was 1941. It was the end of our journey. We settled there. They unloaded us, gave us some flats.

It turned out that there were mostly people like us there, who had been deported. From Upper Volga. They used to be farmers, wealthy people. They welcomed us. It was summer, we had a place to sleep. The next day they told us to go to the kolkhoz square. There they gave us jobs. Daddy and my brothers were collecting hay and I had to go to the army.

They told me to go to the voyenkomat, because Siedlistoje was a larger village and there was a voyenkomat there. It was a kind of army office, where they conscripted men into the army. And since that time I was a recruit. There were a few others like me and they sent us to take a course. It was supposed to be a minesweeping course, but it was more of a firefighting course. They taught us how to maintain fire hydrants. We completed that course, there were a few of us. They divided us up. The Volga River split up into little deltas and there were islands there and 'Lager' [forced labor camps] on these islands. There were lots of prisoners there. They could send you to a camp for everything. There were people there, sentenced to 20, 15 years. There were these fire-safety boards there, hydrants, buckets, brooms, these metal hooks. There were also water reservoirs there. And we had to make sure all this was functioning. I was assigned to one camp.

There were these booths along the Volga, these wooden houses, with cane growing all around them. These booths were set up every 500 meters or so. That's where we slept. I was in one booth and then there'd be another guy in the next booth. This camp of mine was an entire city. There was a bakery there, a school. There were lots of prisoners there, they had to be guarded. They mostly dealt with fishing. And they supplied to these 'shalandas.' A 'shalanda' is a factory, a fish processing plant. Several thousand prisoners processed fish in these factories. From time to time they'd go out to sea. The family stayed, some of them had families there, they had children.

I was living there in that little house and my parents were in Siedlistoje. They later moved them to another kolkhoz. It was called Mielstroy. A village, with a lake nearby. Father worked there in a fish processing plant. Mielstroy means breeding fish. Miel is these tiny fish. There was a water reservoir there and that's where they kept the fish. And they had to dig ditches, so there'd be water [flowing from the lake to the reservoir].

I had everything there in that 'Lager:' they gave me bread, they had their own vegetables, watermelons, tomatoes, so I lived normally. They even gave us underclothes. I was there as a soldier, I wore a uniform. I had interesting acquaintances. There were these prisoners who were better [educated]. One was really intelligent, he was the director of some large plant. He had a 15-year sentence, for overlooking something. Then there was the director of a bakery, he also had a 15-year sentence. I didn't look for them, they contacted me. What kind of contact? They met twice a week in that cane. The director of the bakery would bring some bread, the gardener would bring some tomatoes, another one some fish. And this director, he had a permit, so he could go to Astrachan when he needed to. And he would bring things from Astrachan.

Then this baker, when he was baking bread, when he closed the oven hermetically, he had these pipes form the back of the oven where the steam went out and for one load of bread he'd get half a liter of spirit. I don't know how he did it, but that's what I heard. And they all brought it to me. They played cards at night.

I was pleased, because I had something to eat. I always did what my father told me to do: 'Always mind your elders and do whatever they're doing.' I was really comfortable there. They would come in the evening, I'd go somewhere, usually in that cane, cover myself with something, because the mosquitoes were biting. And I was pleased, because when that engineer came from Astrachan, he'd always bring a present for me. And that's how it went for several months.

I was re-stationed in Ikranoje [approx. 20 km rom Astrachan]. It was in the fall [1941]. I was there at the voyenkomat, serving there. But they [Russians] didn't trust us. It was a kind of second rate army. We didn't know what was going on around us. We were in Ikranoje for some time. Well, maybe a month. We later went to Astrachan, to the army unit. I felt better there, because there were more boys like me there, from the other side of the River Bug, from Ukraine, from Lwow. I felt fine there. They trained us in building bridges, fortifications. We built bunkers there.

Then they sent us to the Kalmen Steppes. It was the end of 1941, early 1942. The Kalmen Steppe is a desert, near Stalingrad. And there we dug those ditches, bunkers, anti-tank fortifications, all kinds of holes in the earth for the command. But there were some problems with water. There was sand there, so when water appeared, it would all collapse. You'd dig a half- meter hole there and there'd already be water there.

We stayed there until the Germans arrived. When the Germans got there, our unit was moved to the Volga River. There were temporary bridges there. We were helping to build a river crossing. I couldn't find a dry place all winter long, so I fell ill. I got sick, because of that cold water and had to spend some time in the sick ward.

Since 1942 I was in the Soviet army. But it wasn't a regular army. They didn't trust us. Well, they didn't trust us, because we were Polish citizens. We were always supervised, because they didn't trust us. There were NKVD 19 officers all around us and we were simply discriminated by them. We would set up mine fields, that's what we specialized in. We served the bridge over the Volga. Some also worked in factories. I didn't feel like it.

A bomb fell on one of the temporary bridges in Dubowka [approx. 8 km from Stalingrad]. I was injured, I had to spend some two months in hospital, in Krasnoarmiejsk [Krasnoarmiejskij, approx. 55 km from Stalingrad]. My teeth were knocked out, I could later take them from my mouth like sunflower seeds. But I somehow pulled through. I still have these scars, but the accident mostly damaged my airways. When I got out of hospital, I went back to the unit, to the minesweepers.

We mostly worked the mines. We had to set up and clear mine fields. Because at first you had to set the mine field up and, after they had surrounded the Germans, then you had to clear it. We reached the Volga River. The town of Kolacz [Kalacz, approx. 15 km from Stalingrad]. When we were walking from Kolacz, I think it was on New Year's Eve, we encountered the French squad Volga-Niemen [Normandie-Niemen]. The French were hospitable - they gave us tea. We got there after they had already liquidated the Germans, this Paulus's army, the Russians surrounded them from both sides. And the second German unit, they were chased all the way to Ukraine, to Rostow. Our task was to clear the mine fields and pick up the dead bodies. There were lots of corpses there. German, Russian and Romanian. There was great hunger. We ate horses, as long as they weren't stinking yet, we didn't care if they had been killed or died on their own. And that's how we made it until, I think, March [1942].

There were these valleys near Stalingrad. The Germans were roaming in the valleys. At first, when the Russians caught them, they'd kill them. And then there was an order that you couldn't. That you had to take them to the headquarters. Once they caught three Germans and three of us had to take them to the headquarters. We took them there and, when we were coming back, we went into one of those valleys. We saw that there was some smoke coming from a hut. Six guys, German. They were armed. They were cooking something. They had something from those packages and some warm coffee. Because the Germans would drop packages there, these canvas bags with food. They had better food than we did. Sometimes we also found these packages.

Once we were sitting in a hut, there was snow, a plane came by, we thought: bomb! We got down on the ground. We waited for the explosion, but there was none, just this canvas bag dropped down. One of those Germans could speak Russian and he told us not to be afraid, that they wouldn't hurt us, that they wanted us to take them to the headquarters. They surrendered. They were armed, but they were afraid!

There was this one corporal in my unit, his name was Strug. He was just like me, they didn't trust him too. He took the locks out of their automatic guns, ordered them to get up. We searched them. We took their grenades, everything. We left the automatic guns, but took the locks with us. We took them to the Russian headquarters. There were officers there, or whoever, they admitted us and confirmed receiving those Germans. We left the headquarters as heroes. We got three days off for that deed, so that we could go somewhere, get ourselves cleaned up.

There was this town called Bikietowka near Stalingrad. It was a larger settlement, really. There weren't many civilians there, everything was military. But there were some civilians. We found out that there was a small market there. Well, if there's a market, we've got to see it. We had to dress up a bit. There was everything in those valleys, whatever you wanted. We took the best things off those corpses, leather bags. Leather shoulder bags. Soldiers usually carry maps in these. We cut out pieces of leather from them. We needed that for [shoe] soles, because it was war. Money didn't mean anything and leather would be used for shoe soles or something. We took blankets, sheets and went to this Bikietowka. We wanted to exchange it for something to eat. We were hungry like dogs.

We reached Bikietowka and we saw some woman standing on the street selling pierogis. Pierogis are these large pancakes. Where she got them from, I don't know, but we gave her a blanket or something and she gave us five pierogi each. They were so bitter we couldn't stand it, but we ate them. It turned out that a barge with barley had sunk there, on the Volga. They dried the barley, ground it and that's why it was so bitter. We ate it. We kept going.

We reached the house of an elderly couple, this grandma and grandpa. They told us that we could find a place to sleep there and they gave us shelter. We spent two days there. There was dry wood out there in the backyard, so we chopped it up, heated the oven. The grandpa had some barley, so we found a hand-mill, ground the barley and we had some barley groats. That was our feast. We didn't pay anything for sleeping there. Well, what could we have paid, what could a soldier have given them? Some long johns, a piece of soap, some underclothes, German pants, we gave that to the grandpa. After three days we returned to the unit.

In early May we went to the front, on the Orlow-Kursk Axis [Orlow, approx. 65 km from Moscow, Kursk, approx. 85 km from Moscow]. It was 1943, after Stalingrad. They loaded us on trains and let us out in a village called Kapuscino. It was still a second-class unit. It was a minesweeping division. We built bridges, trenches, fortifications, these ditches that are used on the front. We set up mine fields, masked roads, we would move an entire forest. The road to Rostow and Kursk was constantly under fire. From their side of the Oka [River], where the Germans were sitting, they could see open space. And they'd shoot. So there were several kilometers of a road they could shoot at and we had to mask that road, so they wouldn't see it. We had to move an entire forest in one night. We chopped up these trees, branches and set up these green fences, along the road. From a distance it would look like a forest. NKVD soldiers guarded us and shook their guns at us.

I was wounded by the time the Kursk battle 20 began. And here's how it happened. There was a river there on the Orlow-Kursk Axis, a tributary of the Oka. I knew we would finish setting this fence up at night and we were supposed to start preparing the river crossing. The river wasn't deep, I was curious, I wanted to check out what the shore looked like in the morning. So I left the forest. It was a sandy shore. I looked around a bit, I figured out what the crossing should look like. I also wanted to get cleaned up, so I approached the water. It was still dark. And then, suddenly, a plane appeared out of nowhere. But those scout planes never had bombs. Everyone knew that. So I was sure this plane wouldn't have any bombs. I got out and the plane dropped a bomb. I fell down. I was hit in the leg.

I didn't lose consciousness, I somehow managed to get ashore, out into the open. I crawled to the bomb hole, there was a rule that if a bomb hole was fresh, you could find shelter there, because they would never hit the same place twice. So I crawled in there. And by the time I managed to get in there, the bone was sticking out of my wounded leg. My leg was like a bow. I had a belt with me, a canvas belt, so I tied it around the leg, above the knee. My leg was getting numb. Only in the afternoon did some soldiers who were distributing food and water find me there.

They took me to this village, Kapuscino. There was this village chamber there [a field hospital], there was a nurse and she tended wounds there. She put in some splints. This kind of wire bed and she put some bandage around my leg, so it wouldn't bend. And I stayed there until evening. I had to be taken to the 'sanbat' [sanitary battalion]. It was a serious wound. I had to lie down for seven months because of that leg!

There were cars there [on the Orlowsk-Kursk Axis], which were used for taking ammunition to the front. They were preparing for that battle. The famous Orlowsk-Kursk battle, an armored battle. Those cars would come back empty. So they took me in one of those cars to a sanitary point. The Sanitary Battalion. There was no special transport. There was no bed in that car, it wasn't comfortable, because they used it for ammunition. And the road was very bumpy. It was very uncomfortable. I couldn't stand the pain and I cried horribly. So the driver stopped and left me in the ditch by the road.

A nurse was taking me there and she stayed with me. I couldn't stand it. I was in the ditch, there were planes flying overhead. She went to get some grass, because there was some freshly cut grass nearby. She wanted to put it under my head. So she took a handful of this grass and put her hand on a mine. The blast took her hand off. So we were both wounded. We were there in that ditch until nighttime. A driver was driving by at night and took mercy on us. He took us in his car. Over those bumps. He let some air out of his tires and he took us. He didn't take us to the 'sanbat,' but to some village in the forest, I don't remember the name. But there were civilians there, kolkhoz workers.

They took us on a wagon then. There was hay in those wagons and they took us to some forest. There was the so-called Medsanbat there. A medical battalion. And here's what it looked like: there used to be stables there, cattle, cows, horses. Those stables had been bleached a bit, there were makeshift beds there. There were lots of us there. They collected wounded soldiers from all over until there were enough to fill a train. Then they'd be loaded up on a train and taken somewhere.

That's when I had surgery done on my leg. They took off those splints, stretched the leg out and put a cast on it. I asked them to shave the hair off my leg, because I knew it would hurt when they were taking the cast off. But they told me they wouldn't, because they were getting me ready for transport and the cast would stay on better with the hair. The cast started drying at night. Those hairs were getting pulled, it hurt like hell. It was such horrible pain, I was crying out from pain, yelling. I couldn't stand it and nobody would help me. I hadn't eaten for two days, my body was getting healthy, regenerating, I had to eat something. There were lots of patients there and all of them were complaining. I called the nurse, but she wouldn't come.

And that's where I met a kindred spirit. I didn't know him well, I only found out here in Lodz, in the 1970s, who he was, but it was too late, because I couldn't meet him there. His name was Kielerman. He was also wounded. This man with a cast on his arm showed up unexpectedly and asked, 'What's wrong with you?' So I told him. He knew who I was, because it takes one to know one.

He was also a Jew, from Poland, central Poland. I was from the Vilnius area and Jews used a different dialect there, a different accent. They used this jargon in my home town. He spoke differently, he had an accent resembling Russian. He went to get the nurse, brought her there. Then he'd keep coming to see me and asking, 'How are you doing? Better?' He also brought me water and something to eat, because I hadn't eaten for two days. He went and brought back this large biscuit. A black one. I can still see that biscuit. I dipped it in water as if he'd brought me the best meal ever. He was my guardian angel, as it turned out. I don't know how he knew it, but whenever I needed help, he'd show up. He saved me so many times, did so much for me. Even after the war, here in Lodz, he also took my side more than once. It was always something nice, unexpected.

After some two, three days there were enough of us and they brought in the train cars. Those were those Russian sanitary cars, with these stretchers attached to the sides. Those stretchers I was on got dislodged and fell down. I fell down on the wounded leg and those who were above me, fell down on me. But the cast was strong and nothing happened. They brought us to the station at night, loaded us up into the train cars. It was all very fast and we were off. We went east, towards Moscow. To Mozajsk [approx. 20 km from Moscow]. There was a hospital there. And some planes came flying by when we were on our way there. Those who wouldn't be able to get out by themselves in an emergency were up on the top bunk. Those who had good arms and legs were down on the bottom bunks.

So when the planes appeared, they stopped the train in the forest and those who could got out of the train and hid in the forest. I stayed up there on the top bunk. We could see, from the window, those planes dropping bombs. There were a few more men there and we decided to get down from the top bunk. But my cast got caught up in something, there were these chains there, and I found myself upside down on that bunk. And who came to my rescue? Kielerman. He was in that transport, found me, helped get me free from those chains and went to the forest himself. They unloaded us in Mozajsk, took us to the hospital, started shaving us. These young women came. And there was Kielerman again.

The way this hospital was organized was like this. If they hoped to cure someone within a month, they'd keep him in Mozajsk. And those who had to be treated for longer than a month were transported. They took us all the way to the Ural. The town was called Gorod Otmulinsk. In the direction of Komsomolsk. There was a hospital there, which had been evacuated from Charkow. There was a Jewess there, Pertka Aronowna, this 'gyeroy' [Russian: hero] woman. Everyone was afraid of her.

There were different people there. One man had been wounded near Charkow, in his heel. He stepped on a mine and his entire heel was blown off and the nails from his shoe got imbedded in his foot. He spent the entire war in that hospital and didn't let them amputate that leg. They wanted to amputate my leg too, but finally those bones mended, they were set well, so they mended. They wanted to cut it off, because it was the easiest for them. They cut off your leg and sent you home after two weeks. But they didn't amputate the leg after all. I had no home to go back to.

I was there in Otmulinsk for four months. It was the end of 1943. November, December. When I got out of hospital, they sent me to Kiev [approx. 800 km from Moscow] and from there to Gorki [approx. 400 km from Moscow]. It was winter 1943 [actually 1944]. I was not on the front line in Gorki. I was dismissed from military service for six months, I could go wherever I wanted to, but I didn't have a place to go to. My family was in Astrachan Oblast [District]. The Majaczno village, on the Caspian Sea, some 120 kilometers from Astrachan, on the seacoast. So finally I stayed in Gorki. They assigned me to a noodle factory. This factory was supposed to give us accommodation, food and we were supposed to help them the best we could.

I was young, I didn't want to stay in one place, so I volunteered for work. I wanted to carry bags, but I couldn't, because of my leg. The leg kept snapping back and forth, so they assigned me to the reception desk. There was hunger, so people from that factory, mostly women, would carry out bags of noodles, flour, we had to search them. I was young, I didn't feel comfortable searching women. The director of the factory said that there were complaints about me and suggested that I apply for a transfer. So I did and they transferred me to an oil factory.

It was possible to survive there. There were potatoes, there was oil. They later moved me to the 'Krasny Jakier' factory. It was a metallurgic factory, they made bombs there. My leg got stronger. I worked the loading ramp. We loaded up metal scraps into wagons.

It was already 1944. They sent us to Kamieniec Podolski [approx. 90 km from Lwow], to a factory. It was a metallurgical, chemical factory, a large one. But we were young, we wanted to have some fun, be free for a while. So we took some buckets and said we were going to get some water and got lost along the way. We were late for the train. We missed it. Luckily, our friends covered for us, because they could divide our food rations among themselves. That's when we found out the Polish Army 21 was getting organized in Sumy. We ran off to Poltawa [approx. 700 km from Lwow].

In Poltawa we showed up at the command post, with those buckets. We didn't let the buckets out of our hands. They assigned us to Sumy, to the Polish Army. And that's how my stint in the Russian army ended. There were ten of us there signing up for the Polish Army. But the Russians didn't want to let us go easily. At first they turned us back to Poltawa. There were more guys like me there [volunteers for the Polish Army], they were from Ukraine and there was the recruiting committee there. They told us we were in Unit 4, in the Polish Army, they took us to Sumy [approx. 150 km from Poltawa]. It was later on, when this Polish Army had been organized.

In Sumy I found out they were organizing a cavalry unit. And I had been a horseman ever since I was a kid. I went there, there was this guy in a uniform. I don't remember, I think he was a corporal, he was signing us up. And there were lots of people there. From Podole, from Wolyn, they were all cavalrymen. My turn came. He took my papers. He asked, 'Have you had lunch?'. I said, 'No.' 'Are you sure you want to be in the cavalry?' 'Yes.' I could see my friends waiting outside. He put the papers away and told me, 'Go to the kitchen, I'll let them know and they'll feed you.' I went there. And there was a sergeant there, a great guy, he was asking everyone, 'Where are you from? And you? You? Are you from those Solowiejczyks? Come here, brother!' And I recognized that he was from Dzisna.

His name was Arcimionek. He changed it to Artymowicz there. Because that's how it was with those Belarusians. If he wanted to be Polish, he'd call himself Artymowicz, if he didn't, he'd call himself Arcimionek. But I didn't mind. He was a fun guy, he used to make rafts and float down the Dzwina. He liked to drink. The Russians deported him too. He took me to the kitchen, fed me. I also told him that there was a friend with me, this Sipser from Tarnopol, a young guy too. A Jew. Arcimionek took my things and my friend's things, his documents. He said that the guy who took my documents was one of Pilsudski's settlers. He had been deported too. He knew my uncle [Abram]. Uncle used to sell horses, he'd give horses to those settlers. Because at first they didn't have anything, so he'd give them horses and they would remember it.

So he told him to take me somewhere, so I could rest, before the second recruiting committee. Arcimionek took us somewhere to the countryside. He had a fiancée there. We bathed, got some sleep. We spent some two, three weeks there. He gave me some tips: 'Don't try to act up with that accent of yours. You don't need this. Don't try to get assigned to the front, try to get accepted for courses. Petty officers, officers...' And that's what I did. I didn't need to pretend, because with that leg of mine, I wouldn't have been accepted for the front anyway.

First I went to a petty officers' course in Zytomierz [approx. 850 km from Moscow]. It was still 1944. It was like an officers' school, but you didn't get an officer's rank. It was a six-week course. There they'd say, 'Although I can't write, I can't read, I can speak.' I later learned these courses were modeled after Pilsudski's 1st Division. I graduated from the course, but didn't receive an officer's rank.

There was a political officer there, Michalak, he was from Cracow. I went to see him and told him I wasn't fit to be an officer, because of that leg and that accent. I never hid the fact that I was Jewish. Anyway, not with my accent. My name, Solowiejczyk, was well known there. Because of that uncle Abram, who used to sell horses. So I knew my place, I knew I'd finally get a disability pension anyway. Although I could have done whatever I wanted. I was held in high esteem. I was known for being able to arrange things that others weren't able to do.

They later moved us to Lublin [approx. 242 km from Lodz], to officers' training school. We were quartered in Majdanek 22. There we found corpses which were still warm. It was dangerous there. If a soldier didn't come back in the evening, we'd go looking for him. We'd find him in a ditch, undressed. The Ukrainians didn't care if you were Jewish or not, if they needed a uniform they'd undress you and kill you.

I arrived in Lodz in 1945, in February. The Russians were still quartered in the barracks on Obroncow Stalingradu Street. We later cleaned those barracks up. If we needed coal, then we'd go out onto Obroncow Stalingradu under the bridge. There were peasants passing by in wagons, we would stop them, have them unload the wagon, go to the station to get some coal, load it up and bring to the barracks.

When we needed workers for the kitchen, we'd go out on the corner of Cmentarna and Obroncow Stalingradu Streets, to the bus stop. The Germans had to wear armbands. We took those with armbands for tidying up the barracks and to the kitchen. They worked until the evening. They'd get coffee, soup, we'd feed them and give them something to drink. They'd later wait in front of our gate, volunteer, because there was nothing to eat. And the Germans felt safer with us.

I was never in the ghetto in Lodz 23. I was a soldier, so I couldn't do that. But I was in touch with the Jewish community. The head of the garrison here in Lodz was Colonel Friedman [Centropa interviewee Michal Friedman]. He is in Warsaw now. He is some 90-something years old. He was one of the first lecturers in that officers' training school in Zytomierz. He was promoted to the rank of major very quickly. He was a professor from before the war. He never hid that he was a Jew. For Easter 1945, while we were still there on Zachodnia Street, he organized a Pesach celebration. Later there was this colonel, Subicz. He almost killed me when I was working in the warehouse. He was an anti-Semite. A Jew, but an anti-Semite. He was later in Warsaw, he was said to have signed jail sentences for pre- war officers. He shot himself after Stalin's death.

I got married in 1956. My wife, Janina, nee Lesiak, was born in 1922. She was from the Kielce area [south-central Poland]. We met here in Lodz. She was also working for the army. We got married in the civil office on Kosciuszki Street. Later my friends came to my apartment, we had something to eat, to drink. There was food, there was drinking, there was a wedding. I remember I received a radio from the trade unions. We were living on the corner of Zakatna and Wieckowskiego Streets, in an old building. The room was some 40-something square meters.

My wife was a kind person. A kindred spirit, very positive. And sensitive. She was very devoted to my family. We were in love. We shared the ups and downs of life. She was the director of an officers' lounge on Tuwima Street. She was both the director and the cook, everything. We were doing well. But my wife couldn't have children. Doctors told her this and that, but nothing was working. She really took it hard, I'd tell her 'Give it a break.' She died in 1994. Of cancer.

I remarried five years later. My second wife, Danuta Truszkowska, was born in Petrykozy, in 1945. She was also a widow. She was also working in the officers' club. We met through a common acquaintance. Her husband had just died. We talked, well, we were a match and that's how we've been living until today.

I immediately found out about my parents. There was a hunchback in Lodz, he had run away from the ghetto in Glebokie, together with my cousin, Lazarz. He told us that this Lazarz was living in Oszmiana [approx. 50 km from Vilnius]. I wrote him a letter and found out that this Lazarz had a high position there, he was the director of a tannery. He was living there and that's where he got married. There was a small house near the tannery. They gave this house to him. And that's where my parents went, to Oszmiana, with my brother. They were working there, trading.

My brother was with them, but he was still a student. They later sent him [to work] to the printing house. He learned about printing, but he didn't work as a printer yet. He started dealing in trade, he was supplying goods to a restaurant. And that's how they lived. He later got married and they were quite well off. He married in Oszmiana, a woman who was born in Russia. She would tell him that the first time she had eaten so much that she felt full was after she got married. They met, because the mother-in- law was a seamstress, she would sew for women there. When she'd come, they'd give her something to eat and to drink and she'd be amazed and would say: 'You eat meat like wolves.' She wasn't used to this.

We were in touch with my parents. And after 1956 Mother came to Lodz for the first time, she brought things to sell. Later I would go there. My parents would have stayed there, in Oszmiana, but the situation at home was difficult. My brother's father-in-law moved in with them, a former 'chekista' [an activist of the internal security organization in Soviet Russia, operating in 1917-1922, responsible for repressions], mentally ill. It was impossible to live with him. We decided my parents would move in with us.

Such things could be arranged quickly then. Just one month. I wrote to Moscow, to the Polish Embassy. I attached a certificate that my room had an area of over 40 square meters, plus a 12-meter kitchen. I didn't tell them how many rooms, just the area. I signed a declaration that I would not apply for a new apartment. They sent an answer immediately, sent the papers. This was in 1967. When they were allowed to come here, we went to bring them over here. They settled here. In Lodz. My parents lived with us in this apartment on Wieckowskiego Street. Father lived there until he died [in 1970], Mother also lived with us in the new apartment on Rojna Street.

My parents, when they arrived in Lodz, had some money with them. It was some 80 million, in that currency. It wasn't much, but it was enough. I had enough money for accommodation. My wife was working too, she was resourceful, she wasn't lazy. If there were two days off from work, she could pack her bags up and go to Moscow or Vilnius, to trade.

My parents felt well here. My mother found some friends quickly. My father started going to the synagogue. I took them to the Synagogue on Rewolucji 1905 Roku Street. The synagogue is still there. And he liked going to the Jewish community. All in all, Father didn't live long here, some two years. He was 80 when he died. It was a blood clot. He never checked his blood pressure, never went to the doctor, never took any pills. He was always in good shape, healthy. When he died in hospital on the second day after he was admitted, Mother said: 'Son, you have to deserve such a death.' And she had to suffer, poor woman. She had surgery, after that she lived for a year longer. She suffered for seven months. She died in 1972.

Uncle Abram, Mother's brother, came to Lodz earlier, with his family. I helped him get set up, my wife also helped them. He was a tailor, but he didn't work as a tailor. He quickly decided to move to Israel. When Mother visited us for the first time he was already in Israel. He asked for someone to come visit him, because he wanted to pass on a present to Mother. Well, I couldn't even mention this, I was in the army after all. Abram sent a check for 200 dollars, so it would be official. My wife could go. It was in the early 1960s. She was there for two months, she later recollected that time fondly. She was well liked there. She liked the kibbutzim best. She used to say, 'What a life!' So I asked, 'So, should we go?'. She answered, 'You can't, it's not for you. I could go there.' I wouldn't have been able to switch to a new environment.

Of my two brothers only Mojzesz is alive. He lives with his family in Vilnius. I am in touch with him. We write letters, phone each other. When I fell ill, my nephew was here immediately. My brother came to Lodz for Father's funeral, for my wife's funeral. And the second brother, Izrael, died in 1945. When my parents found out about his death, they let me know. I was still in Lublin then. I couldn't go there immediately, but I finally visited his grave.

It was in the village of Celiny, in the Kielce region, near Busko, somewhere not far away from Chmielnik. I had a good description, the number of the grave, but I didn't find anything there. I found out from the local residents that the bodies buried in those graves had been exhumed and taken to Sandomierz. I went to Sandomierz where there were mass graves, each one 15 meters long, with 10 posts. Supposedly even 1,000 people could have been buried under one such post. So there could be even 10,000 in one grave. And there were three such graves, so maybe even 30,000 bodies. I went to a gardener, bought all the flowers he had and put them on all three graves. I never went there again.

This Kielerman, my guardian angel from the war, also found his way to Lodz. I met him accidentally on the street, at a cab stop, when I was coming back from drinking at the garrison canteen. It was freezing, I was walking with a female friend from the canteen. You had to wait in a long line to get a cab, but this friend of mine noticed her neighbor and he took us into his taxi. And this was Kielerman, but I didn't recognize him, I didn't know that this was his name. He didn't recognize me either, only later, by accident, he met my father at the Jewish community and he walked him home. Mother made some tea, they talked, she showed him a photo album and he recognized me. He told them what his name was and left his address.

I only found out about this after some time passed and I couldn't find him. I found out he had married some German woman and left for Germany. And disappeared without a trace. I needed him then, because I had lost some documents about how I was wounded, I could have used him as a witness. I later wrote to Bogoruslan, where there was an archive, the necessary documents were sent to Leningrad and then to me. They found them, they even gave me a Medal for the Defense of Stalingrad 24. They decorated us at the Grand Theater in Warsaw. I also have other decorations: 'Za pobiedu' [Russian: 'for victory'] and other Russian medals for my accomplishments, also a Cavalry Cross 'for outstanding service.' I was and still am a member of ZBOWiD 25. I retired in 1980.

With regards to my views, I think the best period during the PRL 26 was the time of Gierek [Edward Gierek, (1913-2001), Polish politician, socialist activist, 1970-1980 1st Secretary of the Polish United Workers' Party and the leader of the state in the 1970s]. Although later, during Gierek's later period you could see that everything was falling apart, but I didn't think that it would all end.

I was afraid of the Russians. The entire border was guarded. And I can't say anything good about Gomulka's 27 period. There was Moczar 28 there and all those anti-Semitic incidents. It was really hard on me. When the war in Israel started, Yom Kippur 29, I didn't think they could win. On the one hand, I was happy that something was happening there, but, on the other hand, I didn't like this situation with the Arabs. Because there had always been conflicts there. One day, when I met an old Jew out on Wschodnia Street, I asked him what he thought about it. And he said, 'What, you don't think that Jews can attack? After all, they've shown what they can do.' I had my doubts, I knew there were few of them and lots of Arabs.

In the unit I talked with a colonel whom I knew well and he asked me what I thought about it. I told him that I didn't know and he said, 'I'm afraid this is the beginning of something bad.' I really took it hard. I was afraid what would come out of it. And also what started going on here. At a meeting, a kind of general rally at the unit, they formed a committee, this was already in 1968 30, and you had to speak in front of the committee. They summoned me and asked me what I thought about what was happening in Israel. So I said, 'I agree with the resolution of the United Nations.' [Editor's note: The decision about the forming of the state of Israel was made by the General Assembly of the United Nations, in November 1947. The decision was made to create two states: a 'completely Jewish one' and a 'completely Arab one,' as the option which would have the highest chances of success.] I didn't say anything more. But it was hard for me. I would have liked to say that there were my relatives there and that I supported them and didn't care about you, but I wouldn't have dared.

Many of my acquaintances left then, in 1968. This friend of mine, from school, he was an officer and he lived in Warsaw. He didn't have to leave, he had a good military pension, but his two daughters, students, signed up to leave. And his wife too. So he left with them. Many people from Lodz left too. When it comes to me, everyone, all my Polish friends, knew I was a Jew, but nobody spoke out against me. If someone was such a huge enemy, I wouldn't want to have anything to do with him. And there were many who tried to help me. There was no inappropriate behavior.

I've visited Israel three times. I mean, after this thaw, after Walesa 31. Because it was impossible earlier. I was working for the army until 1980. And so I went. I met many of my friends from school there, some family members. To be honest, perhaps if I hadn't been working for the army I would have left for good. There were even some people, a family, here in Lodz who wanted to take me along with them. A friend of my father's. And he had daughters and wanted me to marry one of them. At first I thought I'd go with them, but I wanted to keep in touch with my parents. I was always very devoted to my family and I don't regret it, because they needed my help. So finally I got them to move here to Poland and be with me. And this is where they died; they are buried at the Jewish cemetery.

As soon as it became possible, I started visiting Dzisna. Dzisna today is a place like no other. The entire city hasn't changed much. There are still World War I ruins there. Our house isn't there any longer, because it was wooden, there were fires, others were pulled down for firewood. There are no synagogues either. There are two buildings left, one used to be a bakery, there are some warehouses in the second one. The rest has burned down.

I was there some two or three years ago last time. Because I made a promise to myself, there, next to those graves [of those who were murdered] that I'd go there for as long as I could. So we went there many times. The Belarusians treated us well, they walked with us. I was very touched. They take care of the graves. The schools do it, the city council too. Especially now. Earlier this help wasn't needed as much, because several Jewish families were living there. But there haven't been any Jewish families around lately, so the authorities make sure this is done. People from Israel go there as well. The mayor of Dzisna was even invited to Israel. The Belarusians know about the Jewish residents of Dzisna mostly from stories, because there aren't many left of those who remember themselves. When I go there, they always wait for me. They've never treated me badly. So I'm moved by this.

I am in touch with the [Jewish] community [in Lodz] nowadays. I go for prayers, if my health allows me to, of course. I started going there after I retired. There used to be communities before that, I used to go there for holidays, but I didn't like the atmosphere that was there. But after my wife died, the situation changed. I didn't know what to do with myself. I was all alone. At first I would go to visit my brother, then come back. My brother lives in Vilnius. And so, slowly, I got used to it. And everything started reminding me of my childhood home. It was a traditional, Jewish family. And I like this Symcha [Symcha Keller, the leader of the Jewish Religious Community in Lodz], because he's such a kind person and always tries to hold everything together. I've gotten used to it and I feel well there. It's my life now.

I can tell you one thing [about my attitude to religion]. I never used to be particularly pious, but I believe in tradition. Not just in Jewish tradition. I respect all kinds of traditions in the world. When I was in the Russian Army I used to meet the Tatars, the Kalmyks and the Kazakhs, these different nationalities. And the Polish religion, or the Eastern Orthodox one, I accepted all these traditions and I was interested in them. I always respected them. And I always lived well with people.

So I was never really religious, but if my grandparents did it and my parents did it, then why should I keep on doing it. Well, I know about it more or less. I sometimes used to call it 'stories, fairy tales.' I was interested in that. And people don't know anything about it, about the Bible and there are such wise things there.

Well, I don't really celebrate the holidays nowadays. If someone comes over to visit, then yes. I go there for Easter, bring some matzah, but we don't go through all the rituals, because it's a tough religion. For someone who had never come in contact with it, it would be something unthinkable to have three sets of pots in the kitchen. Knives, forks. And you can't eat butter in the same dish you use for meat. And then there are these 'parewe' [parve] dishes, these neutral ones.

My wife is a Catholic, but she's not too religious. I don't mind it. Well, she sets up Christmas trees for Christmas. She has granddaughters, they invited us for Christmas Eve. Why should I not go? I've come in contact with many religions, not just Catholics. So I feel well here, I can say. And, well, if you've managed to live such a long life, then you should really thank God.

Glossary:

Arkadiy Redko
Kiev
Ukraine
Interviewer: Ella Levitskaya
Date of interview: October 2003

Arkadiy Redko is a short bald-headed man. Although he is severely ill, he is still quite vivid. In 1993 Arkadiy became assistant chairman of the Association of Jewish War Veterans in Kiev. He collects memoirs of the veterans. The organization resolves everyday life issues, assists veterans with medications and food products and takes care of lonely and ill people. Arkadiy has little free time. We met in the building of the Kiev Association of Jewish War Veterans, when he managed to get an interval. Arkadiy appreciated the idea of preserving the story of his family. He lives with his wife now.

My parents' families lived in the village of Ilintsy, Vinnitsa region [285 km from Kiev]. I didn't know any of my grandmothers and grandfathers. They died long before I was born. I don't know where they were born, and never heard anything from my relatives in this regard. My paternal grandfather's name was Volko Redko. It's a Ukrainian name, but my grandfather was a Jew through and through. I don't know the origin of this name. My grandfather was born in the 1850s. I don't know what my grandfather did for a living. I don't know my grandmother's name. All I can say is that my older sisters, Mariam and Esther, were named after our grandmothers. All I know about my mother's father is that his first name was Avrum.

There were four children in my father's family: three sons and a daughter. Avrum, the oldest of the children, was born in 1880. The next was my father, Leib, born in 1885. My father's sister, whose name I don't remember, was born in 1886. My father's younger brother, whose name I don't remember either, was born in 1887.

My father never told me about his childhood and youth. I don't know anything about his life in his parents' home. His mother tongue was Yiddish. My father must have got some religious education. I don't know whether his brothers or sister went to school. When my father was old enough, he was sent to become an apprentice to a tinsmith. Later my father began to work as a tinsmith.

My mother, Pesia Redko, was born in Ilintsy in 1886. I don't know how many brothers and sisters she had. I only remember her two older brothers. One of them, whose name I don't remember, lived in Ilintsy. He was much older than my mother. He was a tall, stately man with a big black beard. My mother's brother was the chief rabbi of the synagogue in Ilintsy. Judging from my mother and her brother, my mother's family was very religious. My mother's second brother emigrated to the USA in the early 20th century. I don't remember his name. I only saw him once in July 1932, when he came on a visit. I was a child, and can hardly remember this meeting. My mother's family spoke Yiddish.

Ilintsy was a district town in the district of the same name. Before the Russian Revolution of 1917 1 this was one of many Jewish towns in Vinnitsa region. Its population was about 10,000 people, of which about 5,000 were Jews, so about 50 percent of the total population. Ilintsy was located on the bank of the Bug River. There was a market in the main square and a church nearby. There was a synagogue not far from the main street. I don't remember whether there was as shochet in Ilintsy, but I guess there must have been one, considering that there was a synagogue. In 1934 during the period of the Soviet authorities' struggle against religion 2, this synagogue was closed, and the building housed a machine and tractor yard. There was a club in Ilintsy where they showed movies and conducted meetings. There was also a cinema where we, boys, used to go, when we managed to save a few kopeck.

There was a cheder in Ilintsy before 1917, but after the Revolution it was closed. There was a seven-year Jewish school. There were no religious subjects taught after the Revolution, but teaching was in the Yiddish language. The school was near the church and the market. There was a football ground near the school. There was a big sugar factory in Ilintsy where many townspeople had seasonal jobs. Jews in Ilintsy were craftsmen and tradesmen, shoemakers, tailors and store owners. Perhaps, Jews also owned bigger stores before the Revolution, but they were dispossessed after the Revolution of 1917. There was also a very good assistant doctor in Ilintsy, a Jewish man. There was no Jewish neighborhood in Ilintsy; the majority of Jews lived in the center of town. Farmers lived on the outskirts keeping livestock and working their fields. There were district fairs in Ilintsy. There were no Jewish pogroms in Ilintsy 3, which otherwise happened frequently during the Revolution of 1917 and the Civil War 4. Jews got along well with their neighbors. People respected each other's religion and traditions.

My parents got married in the early 1900s. They had a traditional Jewish wedding. It could have been no different at that time. After the wedding the newly-weds settled down in the small wooden house on the bank of the Bug River, about 20 meters from the bank on Zemskaya Street, where our family lived till 1932. Our family occupied one half of the house, and the other half belonged to my mother's older brother Avrum, his wife and two children. There were two rooms and a kitchen in each half of the house. There was a small yard and a shed in the yard. There was a well, from where the families fetched water. For washing they heated it on the Russian stove 5.

My oldest sister was born in 1914. Her Russian name was Klara [see common name] 6, and her Jewish one Mariam after one of our grandmothers. My second-oldest sister, Esther, was born in 1916. She was named after the other grandmother. In 1918 my brother, Volko, named after my father's father, was born. I was born in 1924. My Russian name is Arkadiy, and I was given the Jewish name of Avrum after my mother's father. My youngest sister, Asia, was born in 1926.

My mother was a housewife after she got married. My father had to support the family. He traveled to neighboring villages looking for work. He mainly fixed buckets and wash tubs. He didn't earn much and we were poor. We lived from hand-to-mouth. We only had meat on holidays and our everyday food was bread and potatoes. The younger children wore the older children's clothes and shoes. However, we didn't care that much about it since the majority of the population of Ilintsy lived that way: Jews and non-Jews. Despite our poverty, my father insisted that all children had education.

We spoke Yiddish at home. We also knew Russian and Ukrainian, but our mother only spoke Yiddish. She just knew a few Russian words. My mother wore a kerchief. My father didn't wear a hat. He didn't have a beard or payes.

My mother was more religious than my father. On Friday evening the family got together for dinner. My mother started preparations for Sabbath in the morning. She made gefilte fish and potatoes and put a pot with cholent into the oven for the next day. Even when my father was away from home for a few days, he always came back before Sabbath. My mother lit candles and recited a prayer and then we sat down to dinner. The next day my mother went to the synagogue. Sometimes she took me and my younger sister with her. My father didn't work on Saturday. My older sisters and brother didn't go to the synagogue. They studied at school where religion was not appreciated. The school children weren't only raised atheists, but they were also taught to 'enlighten' their retrograde religious parents, telling them there was no God. However, my sisters and brother joined the family for celebrations on Sabbath and other Jewish holidays.

Before Pesach my mother baked matzah in the Russian stove. We, children, enjoyed preparations for holidays. We hardly ever had enough food on weekdays, but my mother tried to make as much food as possible for holidays. She saved money to have chicken, gefilte fish, and make strudels from matzah with jam, raisins and nuts for holidays. There was a general clean up of the house before Pesach. Bread crumbs were removed and fancy crockery was brought down from the attic. I don't remember any details about the celebration of Pesach in our home, or whether my father conducted the seder: it was so many years ago... I remember that we also celebrated other Jewish holidays: Chanukkah, Sukkoth, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, but no details. I was seven to eight years old then, and now I am 80.

In 1931 my father was arrested by the NKVD 7. He was kept in a cell for a month while they kept demanding silver and gold from him. My father was brutally beat, as they demanded: 'Tell us where the money is'. We didn't have any money or gold, and only when they had made sure that this was true they let my father go. I didn't recognize my father when he came home. He was 46 years old, but he looked like an old man. He was thin, couldn't walk and stayed in bed for a long time. My father didn't tell us anything, but that he was beaten terribly. My mother hardly managed to bring him to recovery. However, we didn't blame anybody thinking that it had just been a mistake. We thought that since the Soviet power had many enemies, the NKVD often had to resort to strong measures.

I went to the 1st grade of the Jewish school in 1931. My older sisters and brother also went to this school. I had all excellent marks at school and I enjoyed going to school. I had many friends. I knew many of my classmates before school. We used to swim in the river and play together.

A famine plagued Ukraine in 1932 8. It was easier to survive in towns, but in villages people died in thousands. It was a tragedy for our family. We were starving. We didn't have our own vegetable garden and had to buy all food products. My father hardly ever managed to get work. My older sisters moved to Kiev. My brother went to study in a rabfak 9 in Kharkov [430 km from Kiev]. Only Asia and I stayed with our parents. Our situation was very hard. My sisters sent us a message saying that it was possible to find a job in Kiev and thus my parents decided to move to Kiev. We left Ilintsy in December 1932. I studied in the 3rd grade at the time.

We settled down in the damp basement of a house on Artyoma Street in the city center. My parents fixed it as much as they could to bring it to a condition we could live in. I went to the 3rd grade of the Jewish school near our house. My sister Asia went to the same school a year later.

My father continued to work as a tinsmith in Kiev. He left home early in the morning to work in the streets fixing casseroles and wash tubs that housewives brought him. He earned very little, but at least we could survive.

My oldest sister, Klara, went to study in the Kiev College of Food Industry. At first she studied in the preparatory department called rabfak; then she became a student at the college. She was accommodated in the dormitory. In 1937, my sister Esther married Yuzia Orlovski, a Jewish man from Ilintsy, whom we knew well. He finished a military school and became a professional military. They didn't have a Jewish wedding, considering the political and economic hardships of the time. They registered their marriage in a registry office, and in the evening there was a wedding dinner with the family in our damp basement on Artyoma Street.

I liked studying at school. I became a pioneer and then joined the Komsomol 10. We were raised patriots of the USSR and had unconditional faith in Stalin and the Communist Party. We learned patriotic poems and sang Soviet songs in Yiddish and Russian. They were popular Soviet songs by Soviet composers, such as the 'March of the Pioneers': 'Dark blue nights will burst in fires, We are pioneers - the children of workers, A fair era will come soon The pioneer motto is 'always be ready', or: 'My homeland is vast There are many fields and rivers in it, I don't know another country Where an individual can breathe so freely'

We sang songs about friendship and the Komsomol; I don't remember their titles. There was a melodious song in Yiddish about the happy life of various nations in the Soviet Union building a happy life for future generations.

The arrests that started in 1936 and lasted till the beginning of World War II [during the so-called Great Terror] 11 didn't have any impact on our family. They mainly arrested high officials, party activists and the military that were declared 'enemies of the people' 12. Almost every day there were announcements about new arrests in the newspapers and on the radio. We believed that there were true reasons behind it. Stalin was our idol.

My mother couldn't correspond with her brother in the USA. Soviet authorities cut off any contacts with foreigners. [It was forbidden to keep in touch with relatives abroad.] 13 People were arrested and sent to the Gulag 14 for having relatives abroad, or could be executed on charges of espionage.

After World War II, when I visited Ilintsy, I was told that the director of the Jewish school in Ilintsy had been arrested in 1936. He was captured when he was getting off a bus. They said he was an enemy of the people. I knew this man well and understood that he was innocent. But at that time, before the war, I had no doubts that he was guilty; I was just a boy then. However, at that time the majority of adults believed everything the newspapers wrote.

My older brother, Volko, moved to Moscow after finishing Industrial School in Kharkov. He had been reading a lot since his childhood and started to write poems in Yiddish at the age of 16. He was going to enter the Jewish department of Moscow Pedagogical College. He traveled by train, where his documents were stolen. Upon his arrival in Moscow my brother arranged a meeting with Kalinin 15. Kalinin had duplicates of all documents issued, and my brother managed to enter college. He lived in the dormitory where he met many activists of the Jewish culture. He shared his room with Aron Vergelis who was chief editor of 'Sovyetishe Gaymland', 'Soviet Motherland', the only magazine in the USSR published in Yiddish.

My father fell severely ill in 1939. There was something wrong with his legs: he couldn't walk and became an invalid. He couldn't work any longer. His doctor, a surgeon, told him there was no cure. My younger sister and I studied at school. My mother didn't work. My brother switched to the extramural department in his college and moved to Kiev. He went to work in the editor's office of 'Der Shtern', 'The Star' newspaper, published in Yiddish. There was a big team of Jewish writers and journalists. My brother's poems and articles were published in 'Der Shtern', and the Kiev newspapers 'Komunist' [Communist] and 'Pravda Ukrainy' [The Truth of Ukraine], published in Russian and Ukrainian. Volko also wrote reviews on Jewish literature. Sometimes he took me with him to meetings of Jewish poets. Volko believed that whatever I was going to do in life, I had to know the Jewish literature. Volko finished college in 1940 and received a diploma with honors. My brother was the pride of our family and my idol.

In 1939 the government issued an order to close Jewish schools in the USSR. I had finished eight grades before then and continued my studies in a Russian school. There was no anti-Semitism in this new school. I also had all excellent marks there.

My older sister, Klara, finished college in 1939 and received a [mandatory] job assignment 16: she was sent to the town of Stanislav, present-day Ivano-Frankovsk [490 km from Kiev]. She rented a room from a local Polish family. They treated her like one of their own.

On 20th June 1941 I finished the 9th grade. There was another year left at school, but I was already thinking of where to continue my studies. On the morning of 22nd June we got to know that German planes bombed Kiev and that the Great Patriotic War 17 had begun. At noon Molotov 18 spoke on the radio announcing that Hitler had breached the Non-Aggression Pact [Molotov- Ribbentrop Pact] 19, attacking the USSR without announcing war. Then Stalin spoke: he said we would win.

The following day my brother Volko, my brother-in-law, Yuzia Orlovski, and I went to the district registry office to volunteer for the front. We were sure that the war was to be over soon and rushed to take part in it. The military commander told me I was too young to go to the front and that they would call for me, if necessary. Since my brother-in-law was a professional military, he was recruited to go to the front. My brother and other recruits took a course of training in the military registry office before they went to the front. My sister went to see Volko. She came one hour before he was to depart for the front. Volko gave her a notebook with his poems, 67 of his poems which he had written from 1937 to 1941 and which had never been published. My brother went to the front, joining Regiment 148 of the Kiev Proletariat division defending Kiev.

Evacuation began in Kiev. Everyone believed our troops would stop the Germans before they could invade Kiev, but my parents decided to leave anyway. We left Kiev on 7th July. There were my parents, Asia and I, my older sister, Esther, and her twins: her daughter Sophia and her son Herman, born in 1939. Herman was called Izia in the family. We headed for Chkalov, present-day Orenburg, in Russia. It took us almost eight days to get to the town of Sol-Iletsk in Chkalov region. We found shelter with an old couple. Their sons were at the front and they treated us like their own.

My older sister, Klara, was in Stanislav when the war began. Her landlords were nice people and meant well for Klara. They told her to stay with them and that Germans were civilized and cultured people and weren't going to do any harm. My sister agreed to stay. On 28th June a lieutenant whom she knew came to tell her that the last train was leaving and if she didn't take it, she would be killed by the Germans. My sister decided to come to us in Kiev. On the way the train was bombed and only moved very slowly. The trip lasted twelve days. There was a long stop in Poltava. My sister took her luggage to her acquaintance and left it with her. She was so sure that the war was to be over in no time that she only took her documents with her. Klara arrived in Kiev on 11th July and began to look for us. Fortunately, there was an evacuation information agency in Buguruslan that helped her to find us. She joined us in Sol-Iletsk four months later, in October 1941. The Germans exterminated all the Jews of Stanislav on the first days of the occupation.

The locals and the administration of Sol-Iletsk were kind and sympathetic. They understood how hard it was for the people who had left their homes. This was a small town and the people living there were poor. They never reproached us with coming to their town. We heard the words: 'Why did you come here, did anybody call for you?' when we returned to Kiev from the evacuation. There was no anti-Semitism in Sol-Iletsk. The locals didn't even know who Jews were.

I had to go to work to support the family. My father could barely walk, but he still tried to go out to find some work. It took a long time before he finally got a job as water carrier in the school of assistant doctors. It was too hard for him to work alone there and I helped him. My father didn't get money for this work, but received food cards [see card system] 20. I went to work at the Ministry of Defense storage facility. I was the only young employee there - the rest were 20-30 years older than me. We worked three shifts. I came home and went straight to sleep.

My sister Esther went to work at the railway station. When her husband, who was at the front, found her, she began to receive certificates for money allowances. My mother stayed at home and looked after Esther's twins. There was a ration of 400 grams per person. My younger sister, Asia, had to stand in line the whole day to receive bread for the family. In Sol-Iletsk Asia went to work at the school of assistant doctors.

We never missed the news from the front. There was a map of the USSR where employees marked the positions of the Soviet troops in every organization. Each town or village left to the enemy was pain for us, but we believed in what Stalin said: that we would win. We were full of patriotism and hatred for the enemy. Boys were impatient about going to the front and I was no exception. There was less than a year for me to wait till I would go to the front.

We didn't have many clothes with us. When the manager of the storage facility saw what I wore to work, he gave me a pair of trousers. I wore them twice and then gave them to my father - his clothes were even more miserable than mine. Our landlords helped us a lot, giving us their sons' clothes. We kept in touch with those people after the war and corresponded with them till 1967, when the old couple died. No one of the family was left: both their sons had perished at the front.

In September 1941 we received a notification saying that my brother Volko was missing in action. We wrote to the military units and registry offices searching for him. His comrades, writers and journalists, also tried to help us, but in vain. We didn't have any information till 1976. In my despair I wrote to the 'Pravda Ukrainy' newspaper, which published my article, 'Looking for my brother' in 1975. My brother's former fellow comrade called me. This was Yakov Ziskind, a Jewish man. He met with me and told me about my brother.

Volko perished on 7th August 1941 in the battle near the village of Stepantsy, Kanev district, Cherkasy region [100 km from Kiev]. During a counterattack he threw himself with a bunch of grenades under a German tank. Yakov Ziskind took my brother's passport and diploma to give them to us after the war, but on the next day there was an air raid and Yakov lost his leg. He was evacuated to a rear hospital at Zolotonosha station [140 km from Kiev]. The following day this station was captured by the fascists. All warriors of regiment 148 defending the station perished. Yakov was in hospital for a long time. Later he tried to find us, but failed. The newspaper article helped him to find me.

I went to Stepantsy where I met with the former director of the local school, Ivan Skoropud. He promised me to try to find my brother's grave. In 1980 the district newspaper 'Dneprovskaya Zvesda' [The Dnieper Star] published an article about Volko, entitled 'On a field near Stepantsy'. All school children were looking for Volko's grave, and, finally, they found it. His comrades had buried him in the field... I visited my brother's grave near Stepantsy.

I joined the army in June 1942. All new recruits were sent to the Reserve Regiment 61 near Chkalov where we were trained in hand-to-hand combat, shooting, the basics of military training. From there we went to the front in early 1943. The first stage of the war in 1941-42, when our troops were retreating and suffering great losses, was over. Those were the hardest years of the war. In early 1943 there was a turning point in the war. Our armies were attacking on all fronts. We sensed that we were on the way to victory. We became stronger. There were better provisions to the army and we also began to receive assistance from the US: vehicles for the front and food products. However, the Americans didn't open the second front before June 1944, when the US saw that our armies were on the threshold to Germany and knew that we might manage without their help.

I was sent to regiment 125 of the rifle unit of the 3rd Ukrainian Front. My first battles were for the liberation of Donetsk region, the town of Konstantinovka [610 km from Kiev]. Our troops were advancing promptly. Our artillery regiment started artillery preparations and then the infantry went into action. When we incurred big losses, we were sent to the rear for several days or months. At that time we could lead a normal life where there was no war. Then we returned to the same front or a different one at times.

So I started my front experience in the 3rd Ukrainian Front and ended in the 1st Belarussian Front under the command of Marshal Zhukov [Editor's note: Georgy Konstantinovich Zhukov was born in 1896 in Kaluga province, Russia, and died in Moscow, in 1974. He was a marshal of the Soviet Union, and the most important Soviet military commander during World War II.]. After Konstantinovka we liberated Artyomovsk [610 km from Kiev] and on 17th October 1943 we came to Zaporozhiye [400 km from Kiev]. Then, in 1944, we relocated to Manevichi station [400 km from Kiev] in Western Ukraine and liberated other towns and villages there. This was when I received my first combat award: the medal 'For Valor'. Military units were continuously relocating. At times we moved to new locations by train and when there weren't enough vehicles we walked. The Americans supplied their first vehicles in 1944, but we still had to cover vast distances on foot.

There were three Jews in our company and two in the platoon. Vinnitskiy from Leningrad had a squad under his command. He was a good man. We didn't pay attention to each other's nationality. We were about the same age and were raised patriots. We cherished human values. It was important at the front line what kind of a person was beside you. At times your life depended on your comrades. There was no anti-Semitism at the front. There was a common enemy, and a common goal: victory.

We usually pitched tents and sometimes stayed in local houses, when there was a village nearby. We had food supplies every day and the people in the field kitchen cooked for us. We also received mail from our families, and newspapers. There were central, front line and division newspapers. I liked to read articles by Erenburg 21 published in 'Krasnaya Zvesda' and 'Pravda'. These newspapers were read aloud and then we shared them with one another. I corresponded with my family.

We were young and during intervals tried to forget about the war. We had musical instruments in our military unit and arranged concerts, singing and dancing along to the music. When we stopped in a village, we went for walks and to dances.

In 1943 I submitted my application to the Party. The procedure was no different from the one in peaceful times. I needed two recommendations. I had a recommendation from the Komsomol and two recommendations from party members. The only difference was that if someone submitted an application before a combat action you added the following words: 'If I perish, please consider me a communist'. The candidateship lasted a year. I joined the Party on 9th May 1945, on the day, when the complete and final capitulation of fascist Germany was announced [see Victory Day] 22.

I was very fortunate: I wasn't wounded once the whole time I was at the front line. Once I was shell-shocked and my commandment wanted to send me to hospital, but I refused because I didn't want to be in hospital when the war was over. I always thought the end of the war was near.

There were also penal battalions at the front. I only heard about them. They consisted of former prisoners. I guess, they were sent to the front from 1942 to 1944. There were many military who failed to follow their commanders' orders, and even if it was impossible to follow them, they were sent to the tribunal anyway. They were sent to the most dangerous locations. They completed their task. They had to serve there till they 'tasted blood'. If they got wounded, they were sent to hospital and once recovered, they joined ordinary military troops.

We began to meet partisans in 1944 and talked to them. In 1944, during the liberation campaign in Lutsk region, we struggled with partisans for some time. One of them told the story of how they had shot one of the partisans, a Jew. He stood sentinel over other partisans, when he fell asleep. The partisan military tribunal sentenced him to death. I asked the partisan how it happened that he had fallen asleep. Could he not just have been exhausted? And this partisan just replied that if there had been an attack and the guard had been asleep they would have been eliminated. That's how it was: the laws of the wartime were not to be discussed. In Volyn region the commanding officer of my company met his friend, a partisan. They were in encirclement in 1941. Kovtun fought his way into a military unit, and his friend stayed in the woods. Kovtun gave him his horse. In late 1944, when the war was coming to an end, the partisan units were disbanded, and the partisans were assigned to military units.

There were representatives of SMERSH [special secret military unit for the elimination of spies; lit. translation 'death to spies'] in each squad in the army. SMERSH actually belonged to the NKVD and was responsible for fighting spies, but of course, there were many more SMERSH representatives than spies. Those people were to identify people who expressed their concerns about so many unjustified losses or their discontent with the commandment, etc. They had their informers, whom they called 'volunteer assistants'. After the war SMERSH operated in our regiment in Germany.

We were advancing fast. In late 1944 we came to Poland. Some Polish people were glad the Soviet army was there, others hated us. Before attacking Warsaw we stayed in a village. This was in January 1945. I made friends with a Polish man; he was a nice person. I knew Russian and Ukrainian and thus had no problem understanding Polish. He told me about his life and country, and sang Polish songs. He told me that there were people who hated communist ideas and didn't like us to be there. I was 19 years old and this seemed weird to me; I didn't understand.

I remember the following episode from our attack on Warsaw: One soldier discovered a group of Germans in a forest. One of them left the group running from one tree to the next and looking back. I followed him. He saw that I was coming closer and threw a grenade. I threw myself to the ground before the grenade exploded. Then I rose to my feet and shot at him using my machine gun. He fell. When I came closer, he was still alive. He was holding a grenade. He probably wanted to blast himself and me, but it was too late. He turned out to be a corporal, who had been awarded three crosses. He was a sniper and had killed many soldiers during the war. We got to know this after we studied his documents. Our front newspaper wrote about it and published my photograph. I was awarded the 'Order of the Great Patriotic War, 2nd class'.

I faced fascists for the second time in April 1945, when the column of vehicles of our regiment moving in the direction of Berlin, was fired at in the woods. A shell hit a vehicle of our squad and many perished. When this kind of attack had happened at the beginning of the war, we tried to pass the dangerous location as soon as possible. At the end of the war, however, we didn't just flee. A group of soldiers of our regiment including me ran in the direction from where we heard the shooting. I ran to the nearest blindage. There were seven Germans, one of them an officer. They were caught unawares. I yelled, 'Haende hoch!' and they raised their hands obediently. I took the captives to our commanding officer and went back to my unit. Our army newspaper also wrote about this incident.

In April 1945 the central newspaper published an article by Alexandrov, chief of the department of propaganda and agitation of the Central Committee, in which he criticized Erenburg for his appeal to exterminate all Germans. Alexandrov wrote that we, Soviet soldiers, had to clearly understand the difference between fascists and peaceful people and be loyal to peaceful Germans. I felt the same way. Germans were different, just like all other people. Some Germans hated Hitler, but there were too few of them to raise arms against him. I hated fascists, but when they surrendered, I could shoot at them, or even hit them. When we arrived in Germany, the local population fled, thinking that we were going to kill them, but we didn't. However many towns, villages and plants they had destroyed, however many Jews and people of other nations they had killed, I was loyal to them: I respected kind people and treated German fascists like defeated enemies. We were also raised in the spirit of respect of German workers and German communists. We were sure that the Germans would kill all Soviet people forcibly taken to Germany, but we met girls and women working for German families and we were happy to see them and so were they.

The attack on Berlin began in April 1945. Those were horrific battles. The commander of the 1st Belarussian Front, Marshal Georgiy Zhukov, came there to take command in person. Our troops were in the hollow, and the Germans had more beneficial positions than us. We couldn't see the German tanks - they were camouflaged. Our attack lasted several days and we incurred great losses. However, this was all we could do - and we won. This was the last big battle. I was near Berlin, when the war came to an end. On the early morning of 9th May we heard about the victory on the radio. This was such a holiday! There was a festive meeting in the regiment. Everyone, even strangers, kissed each other, talked about the end of the war and the life at the front. We went to Berlin, and I and my fellow comrades signed the wall of the Reichstag. Our peaceful life began.

Of course, the joy of the victory was saddened by the memory of those who had perished in this war: our fellow comrades, families and peaceful people. The Germans came to Ilintsy three weeks after the war had begun. Many Jews failed or didn't want to evacuate. My father's brother Avrum and his family perished during a mass shooting of Jews in Ilintsy. My mother's older brother, the rabbi of the synagogue in Ilintsy, and his family were shot. We don't know the exact date, but this was one of the first mass shootings. On 17th January 1943 the family of my brother-in-law, Yuzia Orlovski, was killed during a mass shooting of Jews in Ilintsy; there were seven of them: his father, mother, two brothers and a sister and her two children. They were buried in a common grave. Yuzia survived at the front. He was severely wounded during the defense of Leningrad [see Blockade of Leningrad] 23 and became a war invalid. When he heard about his family, he went to their grave, and there witnesses told him how it had happened. This was a tragedy. Yuzia lived his short life after the war in poverty and hardships. He died in 1963. He was buried in the Jewish section of the cemetery in Berkovets, Kiev. My father's younger brother died in evacuation in Tashkent [Uzbekistan] in 1942. His older son perished at the front in 1941. The younger son survived, finished a medical college after the war and became a doctor. I didn't have contact with him. He died in 1996. My father's sister stayed to live in Tashkent where she had been in evacuation. She died shortly after the war.

In 1945 I got a leave and went to Kiev to visit my family. They were in the same basement apartment where we had lived before the war. My older sister, Klara, and my parents returned to Kiev. My father was very ill and could hardly walk. My sister worked and helped my mother to take care of the father. My sister Esther, her husband and children also lived in Kiev, but not with my parents. My younger sister, Asia, finished the school of assistant doctors in evacuation and worked as an assistant doctor in a polyclinic. She fell ill with tuberculosis in evacuation. There was no medication and life was full of hardships and her disease progressed. My parents couldn't work and didn't receive any pension. Fortunately, Volko's friends did what they could to help my parents to get a pension of 200 rubles for their lost son, my brother.

Unfortunately, I only visited Ilintsy twice after the war. Once I went there after demobilization in 1950 and the second time with my wife in 1973. She wanted to visit my homeland. Hardly anyone of all ´the Jewish families living there before the war survived. They were hoping for a miracle, but it didn't happen. My friends who stayed in Ilintsy also perished.

Of course, many nations and many countries suffered in this war, but I think that the heaviest hardships fell on our people. Would any other country have endured this? Not one army or state. I think any other country would have had to surrender, sign an agreement and stop its existence at this. Germans were merciless to many peoples and particularly so to Jewish people. Only the Soviet people serried by the party and Stalin could win after suffering such great losses. According to the most recent data we lost 24 million people to the war. Who made a decisive contribution to the victory? The Soviet Union and the Soviet army, of course. And those Jews who were at the front and perished fighting for the Motherland, did not give their lives for nothing. I can say the same about my brother, who perished young, having seen or done nothing in his life. We, the living, must feel this. That's all.

After the war I served in Germany for five years. My year of recruitment to the army, 1942, meant that I was subject to demobilization in 1950. Berlin was divided into four zones. Our regiment was to prepare territories for the arrival of English, French and American troops. Besides, in 1946, we were involved in preparing German specialists for their departure to the USSR. The government didn't want them to work for the occupational armies. They weren't forcibly taken to camps, they volunteered to go to the USSR. They were selected by representatives from the USSR - directors and human resource managers of big plants that were in need of qualified personnel since most of our specialists had perished at the front. There were announcements on the radio for qualified personnel willing to work in Soviet plants to make their appearance at certain locations. Those people had contracts and willingly went to work at enterprises.

The population of Germany suffered from hunger in the postwar years. And those, who went to the USSR, were provided with food and clothes and had normal living conditions. The majority of them worked at plants in various towns of the USSR, helping to restore the industries and install new production lines. They weren't involved in the military production, of course. I remember us sending a train with Germans to Kuibyshev, where they were accommodated in dormitories with everything necessary for a living. They could take their belongings with them and were allowed to correspond with their families. They wished to go to the USSR and were glad to have this opportunity. I don't know exactly what happened to these people then since I never met any of them, but I believe they returned home. I know for sure that they weren't forced to stay.

In the Soviet sector we helped the local population. I served in Kustrinchen on the border of Poland and Germany, and, later, in Frankfurt an der Oder. In 1945-46 we often went to the camp for prisoners-of-war, German officers. They talked to us and answered our questions. When the subdivision of the town into sectors was over, so was the arrangement of the Soviet sector. I was sent to serve in Berlin. I spent the last two years of my service in Dresden. Half of the town was in ruins from bombings. We stayed in the barracks of the former military academy in Dresden. We communicated with Germans. There were very good people among them. We did our ordinary military service and had trainings. There were SMERSH representatives in our regiment, but we didn't know their mission. We were far from them. The SMERSH representatives sometimes arrested the military. Once in 1947 our soldier guarding a German prisoner began to help him: he went to addresses that this German told him to deliver messages to. This German was arrested for his ties with intelligence and the soldier was arrested for assisting him. I don't know what happened to him.

During my service in Germany I was aware of the events in the USSR from magazines, newspapers and the radio. In 1948 the campaign against 'cosmopolitans' 24 began in the USSR. I knew about this from newspapers. Almost every issue of the newspaper published an article about Jewish scientists, artists, writers or poets accused of incredible things, even of their efforts to destroy the USSR. I couldn't believe those people were against the Soviet power and Stalin. Sometimes I bumped into names I knew, like Lev Kvitko 25, a Jewish writer, and others. I was sure they were innocent and couldn't understand why they were referred to as cosmopolitans. It wasn't just me, a 24-year old guy, but also older people who had no doubts about the truthfulness of what the papers published. I had an ambiguous attitude to this: I could not believe that the people whom I had known and respected were guilty and I couldn't distrust Stalin. Jews were blamed for everything; it was like there was an entire Jewish conspiracy. I didn't experience any change in attitude towards me in my regiment, but I sensed that the attitude towards Jews on the whole had changed.

When I read in newspapers about the establishment of Israel in 1948 [see Balfour Declaration] 26, I was happy. Finally the wanderings and persecution of the Jewish people were over and we had our own state.

In 1950 I demobilized and returned to my family in Kiev. I had to work and study. I had finished nine grades before the war. I went to work as a receptionist at the mixed fodder factory. In 1952 I went to the 10th grade of an evening school. I attended school after work, came home very late and still had to do my homework. It was very hard, but I was eager to get education. My family supported me as best they could.

I met my future wife, Tamara Shkuro, in the evening school. She and I shared a desk. I liked this sweet humble girl. We became friends first and then began to see each other. Tamara is Ukrainian. She was born in Poltava [315 km from Kiev] in 1922. Her mother, Tatiana Shkuro, was a housewife, and her father, Timofey Shkuro, was a cashier at the railroad. Tamara's younger sister, Yevgenia, was born in 1924. During the Great Patriotic War the family was in evacuation. After the war they moved to Kiev. Tamara's father was an invalid; he was bedridden for ten years. My wife's mother died in 1959, her father in 1963. Yevgenia got married. Her family name was Gorova. She was a cashier. Yevgenia had two sons. We were always close with her. Yevgenia died in February 2004.

In January 1953 the 'Doctors' Plot' 27 started. A group of Jewish doctors was accused of trying to poison Stalin. I simply couldn't believe it. I thought that Doctor Timoschuk, who disclosed them, was fulfilling someone's order. Somebody wanted to instigate anti-Semitism and they didn't disdain to use any means. This was a horrific time. I didn't believe what the newspapers published. I couldn't believe that there were Jewish people speaking against Stalin. Stalin was an idol in my family. Only my mother was against Stalin. Of course, this caused arguments. We argued with Mama and she kept saying, 'You will know who Stalin is, time will show'. I guess, she thought that Stalin was a tyrant and to blame for anti-Semitism and the arrests of innocent people, including my father's arrest and the resulting impact on his health condition. She never believed this could have been happening without Stalin's knowledge while my father and I thought this happened because of local officials, and Stalin had no hand in it.

On 5th March 1953 Stalin died. It was a grief to me like to the majority of the Soviet people. I was crying like people cry after their close ones. We were thinking what was going to happen to us and to our country. I still think that if it hadn't been for Stalin, we wouldn't have won the war. He solidified the people and taught us courage acting as an example himself. When fascist troops were close to Moscow, Stalin didn't evacuate, but continued to rule the country from Moscow. Yes, Stalin was a rough man, but he was as rough with his family as with his comrades. During the war we all knew the story of his son from the first marriage, Yakov Dzhugashvili [Stalin's family name was Dzhugashvili; Stalin was his revolutionary pseudonym.], whom Germans captured at the front. They offered Stalin to exchange his son for the German Field Marshal Paulus who was in Soviet captivity, but Stalin refused saying that they wouldn't exchange a private for a Field Marshal. This was the kind of man he was.

I didn't quite believe what Nikita Khrushchev 28 said about Stalin at the Twentieth Party Congress 29. I think, Khrushchev was wrong with regard to the evaluation of Stalin's personality and deeds. There are many books now representing Stalin as a bloodthirsty monster. Well, they can say what they want, but one needs to know the history. Everybody must know what Stalin accomplished. He was so far-seeing that back in 1939 he expanded the Soviet borders shifting them to the west. Who, if not Stalin, won the war? Who stopped the advance of the Germans? Of course, Stalin had his shortcomings. He exterminated the members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee 30, and he was killing Jews and other nations, but we need to pay tributes to him: Stalin rescued the Soviet Union and the whole civilized world from the fascist threat. This is my personal point of view and I shall not give it up. Time will show who is right.

In 1954 I finished school with a gold medal. I had all excellent marks in my certificate. That same year I entered the Sanitary Technical Faculty of Kiev Engineering Construction College. I didn't have to take any entrance exams having finished school with a gold medal. I had to pass an entrance interview 31. I never faced any anti-Semitic attitudes. Perhaps, the fact that I had been at the front, played a role. I studied well. I was one of the few communists in the course. I was appointed senior man of the group. My co-students and lecturers respected me. I had many Jewish and non-Jewish friends in college, and we still keep in touch. In all the years of my studies I only had three 'good' marks, the rest were 'excellent'.

My wife, Tamara, entered the Geodesic Faculty of the Land Reclamation College. We got married after finishing the second year in college, in 1955. My mother had died in 1954. We buried her in the Jewish cemetery in Kiev according to the Jewish ritual. Later this cemetery was closed since there were no more places for burials. My father didn't worry about my marrying a non-Jewish woman. What mattered to him was that we loved each other. He helped us with preparations to the wedding. We registered our marriage in the registry office, and in the evening we had a wedding dinner with our closest friends. We stayed to live with my father.

In 1956 a tragedy struck our family: my younger sister Asia died from tuberculosis. She was only 30 years old. We buried Asia in the Jewish section of the Berkovets town cemetery in Kiev.

I finished college in 1959 and got a job assignment to work at a construction and assembly agency. I worked as a foreman, an expert in sanitary engineering, on construction sites in Kiev. I was involved in the construction of all the major facilities in Kiev: hotels, colleges, the buildings of the Verkhovna Rada [Ukrainian Parlament] and the Cabinet of Ministers. My management thought highly of me. I worked there 33 years and had nothing to complain about. I retired in 1992, but I keep in touch with my organization. Tamara didn't finish college - it happened so. She worked as a geodesist. My wife retired in 1990.

My wife and I didn't celebrate Jewish or Christian holidays. We always celebrated Soviet holidays: 1st May, 7th November [October Revolution Day] 32, Victory Day, Soviet Army Day 33, 8th March [International Women's Day], New Year's. We also celebrated birthdays. Our friends and relatives visited us. On Victory Day we went to the Grave of the Unknown Soldier. Veterans of the war got together there to share their memories. Children brought us flowers. On this day I always recall those who didn't live to see the victory, and of course, my brother Volko is the first whom I recall.

In 1960 we received our first apartment. It was a communal apartment 34 and we had several neighbors. In 1968 my wife and I received a separate apartment in Rusanovka, which was a new district in Kiev then. Now it is a well established district on the bank of the Dnieper. We have no children. My father lived with us. He died in 1973. He was buried in the Jewish section of the Berkovets cemetery in Kiev.

My niece Sophia, Esther's daughter, married Boris Lifshitz, a Jewish man. Her only daughter, Zhanna, was born in 1959. Sophia was a housewife. Her mother, my sister Esther, was severely ill and bedridden. Sophia tended to her. Her twin brother Herman worked at the pram factory after finishing school. He was married and had a daughter. Herman fell ill with anemia and died in 1986. His daughter finished the national Polytechnic University. She works as an engineer.

When Jews began to move to Israel in the 1970s, I didn't even consider departure. My wife is Russian, she wouldn't go and I couldn't leave her. But first of all, I was a patriot and I could have never left my motherland for good. I was confused about my friends and acquaintances who decided to leave their motherland. I couldn't understand how they brought themselves to leaving their country, though I understood that anti-Semitism was dispiriting and it was hard for people to endure it. I never faced anti- Semitism, but I knew it existed.

In 1979 Zhanna, Sophia's daughter and granddaughter of my sister Esther, left the country. Her parents stayed in Kiev. Sophia had to take care of Esther. We were against Zhanna's departure, but now I understand that she did the right thing. We correspond with her. Zhanna lives in New York. She is doing well. She is married and has two children: her daughter was born in 1992 and her son in 1997. My sister Esther died in 1990, Klara died in 1991. They were buried in the Jewish section of the Berkovets cemetery, near Esther's husband and my father's graves.

In 1976 I got an unexpected gift from life. Volko had left his scrapbook of poems with Esther before he went to the front. These poems were published in Yiddish in 1976; the book was entitled 'The Lyre'. Besides, this same year my brother's friend and co-student, Aron Vergelis, chief editor of the 'Sovyetishe Gaymland', published these poems in Yiddish in ten issues of the magazine. Vitaliy Zaslavskiy, a Ukrainian poet, translated almost all the poems by my brother into Russian. He published six volumes of Volko's poems in Russian. The most recent one, 'Premonition', was issued by the Kiev publishing house 'Rainbow' in 2001, shortly before Zaslavskiy's sudden death. Besides, Zaslavskiy sent Volko's poems to Israel. In 2003 Volko was awarded the Literature Award of Israel posthumously. They now prepare a volume of poems by my brother in Ivrit for publication.

When the general secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU [Communist Party of the Soviet Union], Mikhail Gorbachev 35, started perestroika 36, it first seemed a turn to a better life to me. We were interested, but he didn't give us anything real. I thought Gorbachev made too many mistakes. They became fatal and led to the breakup of the USSR [Yeltsin in 1991 signed a deal with Russia's neighbors that formalized the break up of the Soviet Union. The USSR was replaced by the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS)]. They say Gorbachev gave us freedom. Yes, one can go out into the street and shout that the president is bad, but it will not change anything. Yelling, making noise and going to parades will not make anything happen. I think perestroika didn't give us anything, but took away our past, our life and, finally, the USSR. I believe, this was an American plot. Gorbachev followed directions; he didn't have his own opinion.

I've taken interest in the life in Israel since it was established. I've never been there. I've had many invitations, but I refused. I've only traveled to Leningrad, Moscow and the Crimea with my wife. I read about Israel though. The situation is very hard now. I think their Prime Minister, Sharon, conducts the right policy making no mistakes. There is no other way out. It's hard to fight with Arabs. They surrounded Israel on all sides. The Jewish nation struggles for survival. The nation has lived in this hostile environment for 2000 years. I believe Israel must win. And it will.

I retired in 1992, but I've still been working since. In 1993 I became deputy chairman of the organization of Kiev Jewish veterans of the war. I was elected secretary of the all-Ukrainian organization of veterans of the war in the Jewish Council of Ukraine. I am a member of the military commission in the Jewish Council of Ukraine. For eight years I've been a member of the council of the Kiev Jewish community, a representative of the Jewish Council of Ukraine in the Sohnut 37 and Joint 38, and a member of the Association of Jewish War Veterans in Kiev.

As for the Jewish life in Ukraine after the breakup of the USSR, I think there are more Jewish leaders in Kiev and Ukraine than there is a Jewish life. There are many Jewish centers: 10-15 make a Jewish center, but they don't want to unite for the sake of the common goal, but want to take command. Over ten Jewish newspapers are published in Kiev and more than 47 in Ukraine. And they compete with one another. I think there will never be a Jewish life in Ukraine because people live very different lives. Ukraine will never get out of this state: it's necessary to replace the political elite. The only Jewish organization really beneficial for the people is Hesed 39. Hesed helps old people by providing food and medications; they also celebrate birthdays in Hesed. It's very important for old people to know that they are remembered. There are often meetings with delegations. And of course, Kiev's Hesed supports Jewish organizations. We need to render justice to them - they accomplish a lot.

I am an atheist; the majority of Jews are atheists. I think that any religion is anti-scientific. An intelligent person who knows about history would never agree to believe all those fables about the existence of God. Every nation has a religion believing that it descends from God. But in reality, people do not believe in gods or idols, they believe in real life. Real life is what is important.

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