Anna and Borys Mass

It’s me and my husband, Borys Mass.

We spent almost fifty years together with my husband and we lived in harmony. He really was a good man, my father was right. My intuition that he'd be my husband proved true. My husband died twelve years ago in 1993.

 met my husband in Ukraine, in 1944. At first, it was my father who met him! We spent the first summer in that kolkhoz. But soon we decided there wasn't much to do there and it was decided that my father would go to Bakhmach. He went there and at the station got all confused: where he should go, what he should do. He met a young man at the station. The man saw that my father stood helpless, so he asked him in Russian whether he was looking for something. When he heard my father's Russian, he switched to Polish. But my father's Polish wasn't much better. So they switched to Yiddish and they were home. That young man told my father where he should go, what he should arrange. Upon his return, my father told me he had met a very good man at the station, his name was Mass, and that he liked him very much for helping him. And as I have good intuition, I thought, 'That Mass will be my husband.' We moved to Bakhmach, and there was a sugar-making kolkhoz there. I knew that guy Mass worked there. And so I started meeting Mass.And then her proposed to me. And that's how I met my husband. Those features, besides the physical looks, that I had chosen at the age of 13 that my boyfriend should have, he had them all. Strong will, a sense of humor, that's very important, and a good ear, because I used to sing a lot.

In 1946  we returned home. They sent us to Lower Silesia to Rychbach…Dzierzoniow. Me and my husband got married after returning to Poland. And a daughter was already under way. I believed we should have four children. Because if my husband's sisters have no kids, I should have more, but my husband didn't want to. I had light deliveries, could go on. But my husband worked, and I didn't. He provided for us. 

In 1949, his sisters brought my husband to Warsaw and he started working in the accounting department of the Office of the Council of Ministers [URM]. In 1950, we all moved to Warsaw. My husband wasn't a party member, but he managed to get a job at the Office of the Council of Ministers. For a short time in 1968, during the anti-Semitic campaign , my husband left the URM and worked at the Measures and Weights Office on Filtrowa. He spent perhaps a year there, and then they brought him back to the URM. 

There was a time, after the war, when there was talk of us emigrating to Israel. But my husband's sisters lived with that quasi-sister-in-law of theirs and didn't want to leave her. And my husband didn't want to leave his sisters. And so we stayed in Poland. Is it good or bad? Hard to say. I manage, my daughters manage too, don't they? So I don't complain.