Anna Mass' father Jankiel Szwarc

It’s my father, Jankiel Szwarc in Miedzyzdroje, in 1952. Miedzyzdroje it’s a Polish seaside, and he is there on holiday.

In Dzierzoniow, in the 1940s, my father was a member of the Bund but when the Bund merged with the PZPR , he didn't join. In 1948, when Israel was founded, many Jews started leaving. 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, me with my daughters and then my father, we 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. We lived in the Zoliborz neighborhood. Then we moved to our second apartment, and then here. We lived all together: me, my husband, my daughters and my father.

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. My father, in turn, upon coming to Warsaw didn't have a job for a year. The doctor said it wasn't Parkinson's disease but his hands and the head slightly too were shaking. And no one wanted to give him a job, because what kind of a watchmaker are you when your hands are shaking. Eventually, a certain jeweler gave him a job as watchmaker, and he worked there almost until his death. And he was active until the very end at the TSKZ . When my father died, on 30th December 1959, and I notified them, no one came for the funeral. No one from the TSKZ was present. I felt a bit sad, I thought: he was such an activist and all…

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